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Here at the end of the Earth

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it still feels like a place for raw exploration and adventure.

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It’s vast in all directions and ground zero for some of the

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biggest questions we have about the climate.

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But when we decided to make a series about the frozen places on Earth,

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we knew there would be one hurdle we’d need to jump over first:

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What is the cryosphere?

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The what?

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Ummm

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Oooh

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I don't know - I have no idea

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While I'm aware of the cryosphere, I don't actually know what it is

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It has something to do with ice

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Alright, that's all I got

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How do you get people acquainted with the cryosphere

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when most of us don’t know what it is?

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NASA Explorers

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Introducing Season One

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CRYOSPHERE

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The Big Thaw

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Episode One

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Washington, D.C.

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Hey, so here we are in Washington, D.C standing on the roof of NASA Headquarters.

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That’s the capitol building right behind me and what Headquarters does

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is kinda serve as the focal point to connect the dots.

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That’s Dr. Tom Wagner- NASA’s Cryospheric Program Scientist at Headquarters.

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In short – Tom is responsible for making sure NASA knows what the current status of the cryosphere is.

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The cryosphere is everything from the snow that falls by your house

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to the icy reaches of the Himalayas to the big, big, big ice sheets of Antarctica

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all the way at the south pole and also the frozen ground of the Arctic,

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and even some of that frozen ground that’s currently under the ocean.

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If you had to break it down, you’d have a mix of

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Sea ice

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Snow cover

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Permafrost

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Ice sheets

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and Glaciers

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Right now, our best predictions are that sea levels

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will rise anywhere from one to three feet in the next hundred years.

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Three feet of sea level rise has the potential to displace about a hundred million people,

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which is a lot of people that need to find new homes.

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Our current reality places us at a near tipping point.

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And the cryosphere is playing a huge part in that delicate balance.

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So, one of the things people don’t know about NASA is that we study the Earth

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and we’ve been doing that since NASA’s inception back in the 1950s.

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And we study the frozen part of the Earth in a variety of ways.

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Missions like SnowEx,

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Airborne Snow Observatory

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Oceans Meting Greenland

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Operation IceBridge

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Arctic – Boreal Vulnerability Experiment

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and countless other labs and individual researchers

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stand at the forefront of monitoring the cryosphere.

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But this year was a particularly big year.

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3...2...1...and liftoff

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of GRACE Follow On continuing the legacy of the GRACE mission

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of tracking the movement of water across our planet.

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Two state-of-the-art satellite missions are being launched in a single year

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as part of a major attempt to understand Earth’s frozen places.

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Our scientists are answering hard questions

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sharing stories from the field,

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and giving their best predictions for what we can expect of a warming world.

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We’re taking you with us as we follow NASA explorers

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on their journey to the frozen ends of the Earth

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as they study our rapidly changing world from satellites, planes and boots on the ground.

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CRYOSPHERE

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What we can do really well from orbit is

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we can tell when a surface of land is covered in snow

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What's tricky is though, how thick is that snow