See How NASA Helped An Artist Create Stunning Drawings of Glaciers | Short Film Showcase

[Music] I wear any brand. I wear glasses like wear nostril filters or not breathing. I mean, not when there's a camera on me. [Music] I'm an artist. I draw large-scale landscape drawings that document Earth's changing climate. I'm so moved personally by these places. There are those moments when you're looking out at beautiful landscapes, and you just... oh, I don't know. For me, that's one of the most intense emotional experiences I think I ever feel in my life. I'm trying to recreate that so that when viewers stand in front of the work, they can feel enveloped by that landscape. I always wanted my work to be a part of a bigger picture, to be more important than just a pretty picture for somebody's wall.

[Music] The lead navigator for NASA's Airborne Terrestrial Exploration is the one that invited me to come fly with Operation IceBridge. I'm really, really excited to get to see this country from a whole new perspective. I've been there a couple of times, but I've never gotten to see the glaciers from above, so I'm very excited to get to see the texture of the ice. My next body of work will be aerial views of the ice at both poles. We're trying to look at the top of the ice, inside the internal structure of the ice, and also all the way onto the bedrock to fill in knowledge about the Earth's cryosphere, the Earth's ice cover, that would have otherwise been lost between the demise of the IceSat-1 spacecraft in 2009 and the launch of the IceSat-2 spacecraft in 2018. It's called IceBridge because we're bridging the gap between those two spacecraft.

I think it's fair to say the most important people on the aircraft are the pilots. We generally carry three pilots and also a couple of flight engineers, and those men and women work together to keep us all safe. Now, in addition to that, of course, we the flight crew, we have the maintenance crew, we also have the science crew. The science crew, of course, are mainly responsible for operating the science instruments that gather this data, that goes out to inform the world about the state of the polar ice sheets. And those instruments are laser altimeters, which measure the changing volume of the ice sheet, a whole suite of radars that look all the way from the top of the ice sheet through its internal structure and all the way into the bedrock.

We also have several cameras on board that work at a variety of wavelengths including infrared that tell us a lot about the temperature structure of the ice. We also have a number of visual cameras, and those are important things that tell us not only how the ice sheets are changing now but how they will change in the future. They're collecting extremely valuable data of our changing climate, which we need not only to figure out how Earth's climate was in the past but also it'll help us learn more about the ice itself and how it melts so that we can prepare for what's to come. Our number one goal every single day we go out there and fly is to make sure we gather the truest, most accurate data that we can gather about the planet, about the cryosphere, with no agenda at all. And that's a key point: no agenda at all. We are not politicians here. If we're about facts, we're about measuring facts and putting it out there for the world to interpret.

[Music] It's a really valuable collaboration to figure out how science and art can intersect and how one can inform the other. Overall for this particular season, is there anything that you found severely interesting or startling? So we designed the lower grid on this mission, the inner part, in 22 here back in 1997 when we first started noticing how the glacier was beginning to draw down. So pleasure was brought back. We're not talking a couple hundred feet; it's prospect miles and miles just for the last 20 years. Jakobshavn Glacier is one of the largest in Greenland, and it dispenses 6% of Greenland's ice sheet. That's a lot of icebergs. The one that sunk the Titanic likely came from Jakobshavn Glacier.

I've been working with Operation IceBridge since it started in 2009. When we first started measuring ice back in the early 1990s, nobody knew what Greenland was doing: was it getting bigger or getting smaller? That was a total unknown because at the time we didn't have the means, the human race didn't have the means to measure that, to understand that. In 2000, we published our first results, and what that showed us was that the thickening in the middle, even back in the 90s, did not offset thinning on the outside. In other words, the ice sheet was not in balance; it was delivering ice into the oceans and raising sea level, and that process has accelerated since the 1990s. There's really only one place for that ice to go: it has to go into the oceans and raise sea level, and that's fundamentally the societal interest in those rising sea levels will affect everybody.

And that could be due to population displacement, that could be due to weather pattern changes, that can be due to shipping constraints that might arise because of climate change and sea level rise. All these things affect everybody, not just people who live on the coast, but because so much of the human race does live near the coast, it's going to affect them the most and soonest. Not only did I want to focus on the climate crisis and my drawings, but it was also: how can you not? When you're making work about a place, you have to address what is the most important thing that's happening there, and that's the climate changing.

This whole trip, I just... I keep thinking of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. Her compositions were very simple; she would find a detail, and it looks abstract so you're not necessarily sure what you're actually looking at. I'm really finding myself interested in that kind of imagery with the ice. I think that's gonna change the style of my drawings drastically. I mean, the perspective is totally thrown off when you're looking at the ice from above. It could be kingdoms with just jagged pointy shards of ice popping up out of the glacier, to raw muscle without skin on it, alligator skin, elephant skin. I just want to play a part in helping to communicate not only the importance of what these scientists are doing, but also translate the scientific data into a more accessible medium, one that's more digestible maybe and one that is a little bit more emotional.

I hope that I am rendering the feelings that I have when I'm witnessing the ice at first hand because I want viewers to be able to have as much of the same experience that I had as I can give them. [Music] [Music] [Music] Sure [Music] [Music]