The Arctic sea ice cap is a large area of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding seas and straits. For polar bears, the sea ice is a crucial platform for life. They ...

The pilot not flying on mission day is called the “mobile” and helps with the flight planning, checks weather, sets up the ER-2 cockpit, does the walkaround and also drives a radio-equipped car behind ...

Melissa Omand, interdisciplinary physical oceanographer from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, was confronted with a conflict: it was time for an upgrade to her phone, ...

As I said back in my first blog entry, one of the key objectives of the expedition was to produce an up-to-date assessment of the freshwater content of the Beaufort Gyre. Based on a preliminary ...

Winter in the Dasht-e-Lut Desert, Eastern Iran An International Space Station crew member took this striking photograph one evening in late February, 2006. The image takes advantage of the Sun’s low ...

The big day had arrived. We were due to fly to our tiltmeters to collect the data that they had been gathering for two weeks. once this was the first time we had ever set these instruments up in the ...

As astronomers, the work we do is literally detached from the world. To be clear, there are material benefits – if you have a phone with a camera on it, the detector technology was developed ...

We are now well on our way back home again, with our GPS stations dutifully recording ice motion in our absence. Several of the stations will be visited again this summer, and all will have a visit ...

Ernie Hilsenrath spent more than 40 years working for NASA, and though he officially retired a few years ago, he is still a great advocate for his employer and for science. The longtime atmospheric ...

To improve our understanding of how large stores of soil carbon and Arctic vegetation are responding to climate change, a team of scientists participating in the NASA Arctic Boreal Vulnerability ...

Today we were able to finish our first official station of NAAMES 3! Our group, the UCSB Optics team, saw a whirlwind of activity as we deployed half a dozen different instruments to begin to ...

After five days of cruising through open water, it was clear we had to change course and venture further north to find ice. The satellite imagery was showing ice above 76-77 degrees North (we were ...