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Sound of wind and musicDr. Bob Bindschadler: The world is changing, the world's climate is changing, global warming is real.
Dr. Waleed Abdalati: The polar regions matter and they matter a lot.
Dr. James Garvin: Big changes that happen due to natural consequences as well as human caused ones can be reflected in the polar regions much more quickly than they would, say, in the bread basket of the United States.
Dr. Bob Bindschadler: Glaciers are retreating, sea ice is shrinking, and perma frost is melting.
Dr. James Garvin: The polar regions of earth are kind of like the canary in the coal mine of what's happening to our planet.
Mysterious music.
Dr. James Garvin: It takes a catalyst, an impetus sometimes, to organize all the ideas together and link things. And those linkages are where we make the bold, if you will, paradigm-busting discoveries.
Dr. Waleed Abdalati: You need to look at the macro-scale. You need perspective. You need context. You need to look at the ice in its entirety, and the only way you can do that is from space, with satellites.
Dr. Bob Bindschadler: When you look at a satellite data set, and you see something. You see the ice streams, which are these large rivers of ice in satellite imagery, but see it in a way that nobody else has ever recognized before, that's just a crystallizing moment.
Dr. Waleed Abdalati: Well we've revolutionized our understanding of how ice sheets behave for instance. The conventional thinking was, well, ice sheets are big and thick and it takes centuries, thousands of years even for changes in today's climate to affect ice sheets.
But change today is showing up in ice sheets almost immediately. We're seeing, from space, glaciers accelerating, we're seeing rapid an catastrophic break up of large ice shelves that have been there for thousands, almost ten thousand years. Just instant, almost, responses to changes in today's climate.
Dr. Bob Bindschadler: I think during IPY it gives us an opportunity to explain to people why those changes matter to them. It's not just a signal that the climate is changing, but the fact that those things are happening affect them directly.
Dr. Bob Bindschadler: And NASA isn't going to confine itself to exploring the polar regions of just this planet.
Dr. James Garvin: In 2008 during IPY NASA will land the Phoenix Mars polar lander, right near edge of the ice sheet that makes up the northern ice cap of Mars. And Phoenix will be the first ever lander on Mars that will actually investigate what's in the water, frozen as ice, up in these regions.
Dr. James Garvin: In 2008, during IPY, NASA will launch the lunar reconnaissance orbiter.
This vehicle will explore in earnest, using remote sensing, the poles of the moon, relate them back to our Earth's poles, even to the poles of Mars and open that frontier, we hope, for human presence, and eventually sustained human presence.
Dr. Bob Bindschadler: My hope is that during IPY people will recognize their stewardship role as inhabitants of this planet.
Dr. James Garvin: Climate change, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere. It's all about these things working together to solve problems.
How does our Earth work? How can we predict what's going to happen to it? How can we understand the forcings that people cause?
Dr. Bob Bindschadler: And so I think polar science will be more valued after IPY.
Dr. Waleed Abdalati: We've got lots of ideas to carry us far into the future.
Calm music.