#i dont use the name Sage like anywhere else

[pigeonsage]

Btw does anyone know if theres an active vrains community on somewhere like discord? or anywhere other than here really🤔

[dickwheelie]

I dont know if you're still doing requests but.., space pirates or just pirates au jmart 👉👈 i lov ur writing i think i might melt every time i read you

ohhh this was a fun prompt! it ended up being a little more space than pirates, but at least the jmart is there! thank you for the kind words and I hope you enjoy :))

___________

Jon didn't consider himself much of a hero. He had none of the necessary prerequisites, such as physical prowess, quick thinking under pressure, bravery, or a charming personality. He didn't even have the functionally useless but favorable bonus of dashing good looks. He may have been the captain on board a stolen spaceship, but that didn't mean he was particularly pirate-like himself. He entrusted the majority of the pirating to his small crew, who he privately considered much more capable than he was.

Tim and Sasha, he thought, now those two were hero types. They had the charisma, the skill, the bravery--they even had the good looks. Jon was perfectly fine with letting them take the wheel, as it were, in a crisis situation.

Such as the situation they were in right now.

The SS Magnus had been tearing across space, scanning for large, cushy vessels to pillage, when the mayday alert had sounded. Sasha, who worked communications, said that the mayday had come from an even smaller ship that was hurtling, out of control, through open space. The Magnus was the nearest vessel.

Tim took the pilot's seat and rushed to follow the downed ship's signal, but by the time he'd reached it, the ship had broken itself apart, leaving nothing but shredded metal in its wake. There were no signs of survivors in the wreckage.

Jon, Tim and Sasha shared a collective sigh of regret. They all knew the risks of space travel when they'd decided to become pirates, but it was never pleasant to be reminded of what could happen if a certain combination of things went wrong. Jon stared bleakly out of the cockpit window, then told Tim and Sasha that they might as well start scanning the wreckage for what they could find.

And then something bounced off the cockpit window.

"Was that--?" Jon said, dumbfounded.

"I think so," said Tim.

"Someone in a suit," Sasha said. "From the crash!"

And suddenly, Jon was the captain of a rescue mission.

Jon rushed towards the airlock at the aft of the ship, Tim and Sasha close behind him. When he reached it he could see outside the window the lone survivor, in their spacesuit, clinging for dear life to a handle on the side of the ship's hull.

Jon didn't pause to think. By the time Tim and Sasha arrived at the airlock, Jon was already suited up, and was about to open the innermost door.

"Jon!" Sasha called. "What are you doing?"

"They can't hold on forever," Jon said, "I have to grab them now!"

Once more he looked out the window at the survivor, trying to see beyond their blacked out visor, and caught a glimpse of a pair of wide, frightened eyes.

"It's okay!" Jon said, knowing the survivor couldn't hear him, but hoping they could read his lips. "I'm coming to rescue you! Don't, er, go anywhere!"

Jon put on his helmet and stepped into the airlock, hooking a long tether to his spacesuit. He let the airlock depressurize before opening the outermost door, floating out into the vacuum of space. Holding fast to the tether, he dragged himself out onto the hull, and found himself practically visor-to-visor with the lone astronaut.

Jon reached out his hand, and hoping they could see through his visor, said, "Take my hand! It'll be okay, I'm tethered to the ship!"

He couldn't be sure if the survivor had understood, but they did reach out their free hand, and for a moment their gloves strained towards one another until finally Jon caught hold of theirs, gripping it securely across the palm and wrist. He used the tether to pull them both backwards, towards the open airlock, and after a moment the survivor let go of the hull and clasped their other hand onto Jon's, letting him guide them safely back into the ship.

As soon as they were both inside and the airlock had pressurized again, Jon removed his helmet, breathing heavily with adrenaline, and watched as the survivor did the same.

Their hands moved shakily to detach their helmet, revealing dark curls and a brown face, covered in freckles and with a flushed, elated expression. The survivor looked to be a man, and a handsome one at that, though Jon refused to linger on that particular thought. At once he was at the survivor's side, checking for injuries, though with his suit on there wasn't much to see.

"Are you alright?" Jon asked him, though the question seemed silly considering how the man's day had been going so far.

"You . . . you saved me," the lone survivor said breathlessly, his eyes landing on Jon's. He had a nice voice, Jon thought absentmindedly.

"Yes," Jon said, not knowing what else to say.

The survivor gave Jon a beaming smile. "My hero."

"Um," said Jon. His stomach did something weird, and fluttery.

"I thought for sure I was dead. I'm pretty strong, but I wasn't sure how long I'd be able to hold on before spinning off into empty space. But you rescued me. Just like you said you would."

"I . . . try to keep my promises, yes," Jon said, hoping he wasn't blushing. "Who are you? What happened to your ship? Could there be anyone else alive out there?"

"Oh, right, of course. Sorry, my manners are a little rusty," said the survivor, with an awkward little laugh. "My name's Martin. Martin K Blackwood. It was just me on the ship. I was on a solo delivery run. The company I work for, Solus, they've been cutting down on personnel lately, so most shipping runs are solo now. Which means twenty-four-hour shifts at the wheel, minimum. It sucks, but it pays the bills. Or . . . it did." The survivor--Martin--stared out the window at the remains of his ship. "I'm still not sure what caused the engine to overheat and blow like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Solus weren't up to date on their safety checks. I managed to get my suit on and eject just in time, but then I was sure I was just gonna drift through space forever and die alone anyway."

Martin looked back at Jon, gratitude in his eyes. "But then you rescued me."

Jon wasn't going to be able to keep withstanding Martin's adoring looks if he kept this up. "I'm Jon," he said, trying to change the subject. "Captain of the SS Magnus. Illicit captain, rather. We're pirates."

"Pirates?" Martin's eyebrows shot up, and he looked Jon up and down. "You don't . . . seem like a pirate to me."

"We're basically only pirates by a technicality," Jon said. "We pillage the ships of the rich to give to those in need. Food, medical supplies, power sources, anything useful, really. Occasionally we'll steal a vessel, like this one, but that doesn't happen very often. There's only three of us, at the moment, so we make do however we can."

"Wow," Martin said. "So you're telling me--"

"I know," said Jon, "it's not all that impressive when you--"

"--I was rescued by actual pirates? And their swashbuckling captain is my hero?"

"O-Oh, well, um, that's not--" Jon was definitely blushing now.

Martin laughed. "Do you know how many romance novels I've read the back covers of that I'm putting to shame right now? Twenty-year-old me would be so jealous."

"I--I am not swashbuckling," Jon said, at a loss for anything else to say.

"Of course not." Martin grinned at him before his expression grew more somber. "Seriously, though, thank you. For saving me. I really had given up hope, for a moment there."

Jon nodded. "Of course. You're, ah, very welcome."

They shook hands, and Jon turned to the inner airlock door. "My crew are in there, waiting for us. Tim and Sasha. They're very good. We wouldn't have even found you and your ship without them."

"Then I'd better thank them, too," said Martin. "And--you said it was just the three of you right now, yeah?"

Jon tilted his head at him, unsure where Martin was going with this. "Yes, it is. But I assure you, we're a good team, we'll get you back to your home, or anywhere you'd like to go, safe and sound."

"That's sort of the problem," Martin said. "I . . . don't really have anywhere to go back to. If I go back to the company, they'll find out their ship was destroyed, and my insurance definitely doesn't cover that. If I go home, they'll find me just as easily and chase me down until I've paid. So . . ." Martin gave Jon a meaningful look. "Right about now would be a pretty good time for a career change."

Something clicked in Jon's head. He smiled at Martin, nodding sagely. "Yes, I see. I think we may be able to help you out with that, Martin." He thought for a moment. "You said you flew deliveries for Solus . . . how are you as a pilot?"

Martin grinned at him. "Good. Very good."

"Any moral qualms about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor?"

"None whatsoever."

"Then I don't see why we shouldn't bring you on board," Jon said, returning Martin's smile. "The SS Magnus has been looking for a new pirate to join her crew, and I think you'd fit right in."

Jon might not have been much of a hero, but he had managed to pull a man out of the way of certain death that day, and then bring him onto his crew, which had to count for something. At the very least, Jon thought as he introduced Tim and Sasha to their new pilot, the way Martin looked at him made him feel like the sort of person who really had done something extraordinary.

[feisty-fae]

If you still do the flower ask thingys.. 👉👈 𝘼𝙡𝙡 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢 𝙜𝙤 :)

HoooH boY hEre we gO-

Alisons: Sexuality?

I sexually identify as a can of beans

Amaranth: Pronouns/Gender?

Cis female she/her

Amaryllis: Birthday?

27 September

Anemone: Favorite flower?

All flowers pretty,, but stargazer lily, rose, dahlia and cherry blossoms

Angelonia: Favorite t.v. show?

I don't watch tv but I'll list some other stuff i like to watch:mha, beastars and aggretsuko

Arum-Lily: What’s the farthest you’d go for a stranger?

Idk depends on scenario??

Aster: What’s one of your favorite quotes?

"Kanye West he likes, fingers in his ass."

Aubrieta: Favorite drink?

Any Milkshakes or smoothies (mostly banana and strawberry for milkshake and p much anything for smoothie)

Baby’s Breath: Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?

I've never had kith

Balsam Fir: Have you ever been in love?

Well you see yes but actually no

Baneberries: Favorite song?

I listen to a lot but to keep it short:baby in the kitchen, in my mouth and friends slowed (chase atlantic)

Basket of Gold: Describe your family.

We p chill fam

Beebalm: Do you have a best friend? Who is it?

Irl bestie,, shes not on tumblr lol

Begonia: Favorite color?

PinKKK

But i like most colours

Bellflower: Favorite animal?

Cats,,,,

FoxES,

ANYTHING CUDDLY AND CUTE

Bergenia: Are you a morning or night person?

Night

Black-Eyed Susan: If you could be any animal for a day, what would it be?

I'd be like a doggo bc it would be the most fun i think-

Bloodroots: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a vet but then when my granny asked me "but whos gonna clean up the animal poop?" I was like "eWW pO0pP!" and then decided that mayb i shouldn't be a vet

Bluemink: What are your thoughts on children?

They're either really kind and sweet

Or literal demons from hell

Legit no inbetween

Blazing Stars: What are you afraid of? Is there a reason why?

I'm afraid of lot of things-

Borage: Give a random fact about your childhood.

I was one dumbass bitcg-

Bugleherb: How would you spend your last day on Earth?

Idk eat pizza and cry or smth ajakamkw

Buttercup: Relationship Status?

Single

Camelia: If you could visit anywhere, where would you want to go?

NEW YORKKK, CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OFFF THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN'T DO NOW YOU'RE IN NEW YOOORKKK

Candytufts: When do you feel most loved?

When someone hugs me or just generally spends time with me

Canna: Do you have any tattoos?

Nop

Canterbury Bells: Do you have any piercings?

I used to have piercings when i was a bab but eHh haven't worn them since and i dont think my ear holes are big enough now-

California Poppy: Height?

4'10 grrr I'm the omega midget and I'll devour ur ankles

Cardinal Flower: Do you believe in ghosts?

Nop

Carnation: What are you currently wearing?

Pant, pink top and black hoodie

Catnip: Have you ever slept with a nightlight?

I think i have??

Chives: Who was the last person you hugged?

My mom and my dad

Chrysanthemum: Who’s the last person you kissed?

I never kith

Cock’s Comb: Favorite font?

I dont have one so imma say sans bc it always looks out of place and makes me laugh-

Columbine: Are you tired?

No

I feel like screaming and jumping around my room like a crackhead

Common Boneset: What are you looking forward to?

Nothing in particular ig

Coneflower: Dream job?

Smth kinda fun and art or design related hopefully,,,,

Crane’s-Bill: Introvert or extrovert?

Introvert but i also get lonley easily

Crocus: Have you ever been in love?

Nop,,,,

Crown Imperial: What’s the farthest you would go for someone you care about?

I would get run over by 5 monster trucks, jump off a plane, get mauled by 10 bears, get trampled on by a stampede, get brutally tortured for 12 hours straight, yeet myself into the Grand Canyon and then break all my bones with my bare hands if they weren't broken already

Ok basically i care a lot

Cyclamen: Did you have a favorite stuffed animal as a child? What was it?

I had this st bernard plush called Sparky and this lion named Sammy,,

Daffodil: What’s your zodiac sign?

Libra

Dahlia: Have you done anything worth remembering?

My memory is legit so bad it's probably concerning uHHH

Daisy: What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment?

Mayb art??

Daylily: What would you do if your parents didn’t like your partner(s)?

Ehhh i might reason with them and then if they still disagreed I'd just keep the relationship a secret

Dendrobium: Who is the last person that you said “I love you” to?

My parents

False Goat’s Beard: What is something you are good at?

Ehhh arT

Foxgloves: What’s something you’re bad at?

EhhHh everything that isn't art-

Freesia: What are three good things that have happened in the past month?

Oh boy here comes my shitty memory-

Hmmm

Idk but I'm mostly happy that I've been more social and stuff and i feel like im kinda coming out of my shell a bit

Not sure what to say for other 2 bc nothing in particular has really happend?

Garden Cosmos: How was your day today?

Ehhh oK??

Gardenia: Are you happy with where you’re at in your life?

Mayhapsn't

Gladiolus: What is something you hope to do in the next year or two?

I hope to pass all my exams and get an okish job mayb

Glory-of-the-Snow: What are ten things that make you happy/you’re grateful to have in your life?

1.fRIENBS ILY MY HABIBIS

2. Fammm

3. eHhh yummy food,,

4. Drawing and uhhh art

5. EPIC MUTUALS

6. Ok idk what else aside from like serious stuff like house and etc.-

Heliotropium: What helps you calm down when you feel stressed?

Drawing, crying, venting to a friend/parent

Hellebore: How do you show affection?

Hugssss,kith,cuddle, *draws u stuff*

Hoary Stock: What are you proudest of?

MmmmmMy aRRt?

Hollyhock: Describe your ideal day.

Wake up

Don't go to school

Vibe with friends

Sleeb

Hyacinth: What do you like to do in your free time?

MmMmMM aRT-

Hydrangea: How long have you known your best friend? How did you meet them?

Ehh 8yrs? We met in hell school

Irises: Who can you talk to about (almost) everything?

Friendos

Mom

Laceleaf: How many friends do you have?

6..?? Aa idk theres some people that idk if they'd consider me a friend or not,,

Lantanas: What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?

Idk any compliment is best compliment for me,,

Larkspur: What do you think of yourself?

Ew yucky gröss

Lavender: What’s your favorite thing about yourself?

m y a r t

Also my hair bc its soft and wavy,,

Leather Flower: What’s your least favorite thing about yourself?

Everything else-

Lilac: What’s something you liked to do as a child?

Climb trees and do dumb shit

Lily: Who was your best friend when you were a kid?

Same irl bestie i mentioned before

Lily of the Incas: What is something you still feel guilty for?

MmmmmmMMM,,,

Lily of the Nile: What is something you feel guilty for that you shouldn’t feel guilty about?

MMMmMMmMMMMmmmMMm,,,,,,

Lupine: What does your name mean? Why is that your name?

Well I chose Fae bc i thought it sounded pretty

Marigold: Where did you grow up? Tell us about it.

Idk what to rlly say lmao

Morning Glory: What was your bedroom like growing up?

Kinda the same but i had toys everywhere-

Also when i was like 5 i had this legit fucking cursed thomas the tank engine shaped bed that i actually found a pic of but it's FUCKING HORRIFYING SO I PROBS WONT SHOW HERE-

Mugworts: What was it like for you as a teenager? Did you enjoy your teenage years?

EW BEING A TEENAGER SUCKS ASS HOW DO I UNDO????

Norwegian Angelica: Tell us about your mom.

Hi mom ily ur epic

Onions: Tell about your dad.

Hi dad ily ur epic

Orchid: Tell about your grandparents.

Omg i miss my grannies sm bc i couldn't see em this year bc nasty pandemic

Pansy: What was your most memorable birthday? What made it be so memorable?

Haha shit memory gor brrRR-

I don't really remember too many specific parties but when i was like 7-10 i had these epic parties in those birthday places with the giant play areas

I kinda wish i wasn't too old to go to them sobs

Peony: What was your first job?

I haven't had a job yet

Petunia: If you’re in a relationship, how did you meet your partner(s)? If you’re not in a relationship, how did you meet your crush/how do you hope to meet your future partner(s), if you want any?

Hmmmm idk? I haven't really thought abt that but i don't really mind i just wanna find someone to vibe with,,

Pincushion: How do you deal with pain?

I cri

Pink: Where is home?

Home is home home

Plantain Lilies: If you could go back in time, what is one thing you would stop/change?

Now where do i start...

Prairie Gentian: Who is someone you look up to? Describe them.

I look up to people that are kind, caring, brave, funny, cool or stronger than me ig?

Primrose: Describe your ideal life.

Basically my current life minus school, stress,pandemic and responsibilities lmao

Rhodendron: What is something you used to believe in as a child?

I used to believe in ghosts after i thought i encountered one

Ricinus: Who’s the most important in your life?

Hermmmst

Rose: What’s your favorite sound?

Peoples laughsss also music

Rosemallows: What’s your favorite memory?

Bro i dont have one,, my aphantasia makes it hard for me to remember stuff-

Sage: What’s your least favorite memory?

A

Snapdragon: At this moment, what do you want?

I wantttt better chargersss thattt donttt telll meee thatt myyy tablett will finishh chargingg innn 1 dayy andd 7 hoursss

St. John’s Wort: Is it easy or difficult for you to express how you feel about things?

Kinda difficult but im opening up more

Sunflower: What is something you don’t want to imagine life without?

fRIENDS,,,,,wAh

Sweet Pea: How much sleep did you get last night?

8 hrs

Tickseed: What’s your main reason to get up every morning?

Idk ig i kinda have to go to school and do stuff

Touch-Me-Not: How do you feel about your current job?

Non existant

Transvaal Daisy: What’s your favorite item of clothing?

My black and white stripy top, and all my hoodiess

Tropical White Morning Glory: Describe your aesthetic.

I don't think i have just one aesthetic bc im drawn to so many different aesthetics at the same time-

Like vintage, neon, dark, spoopy, pastel, cute, etc etc

Tulip: What would be the best present to get you?

OMG I LEGIT JUST SCREAM AT ANYTHING ANYONE GIVES ME-

IF SOMEONE GOES OUT OF THEIR WAY TO MAKE ME SMTH I CRY,,

Vervain: What’s stressing you out most right now?

🤏

Wisteria: How many books have you read in the past few months? What were they called?

I haven't been reading anythinggg

But i should really finish reading Percy Jackson bc it do be picking up dust-

Wolf’s Bane: Where do you want to be in life this time next year?

Everywhere

Yarrow: Do you know what vore is?

Mmm yummy 👅

Zinnia: Give a random fact about yourself.

I am currently living and breathing yes

[gaylortruther]

(many) tag games

saw someone else do this so i figured i’d go through all my tag games in one looong post instead of spamming you all with a bunch of separate posts!

i’m gonna tag everyone now and yall can choose which tag games you want to do or whether you want to do them all (or whether you want to do any)!!

thanks to everyone who tagged me in all of these! i LOVE being tagged in tag games and i am always up for more! <3

tagging THE SANCTION (including ppl that i haven’t gotten up on the page yet im sorry abfjffsdhsjbjsdf it will happen SOON):  @newdivinities @wolvesofarcadia @maskedlady @victoiirres @sancta-silje @bumblebeesonpaper @wasting-ink-not-youth @horrorspell @ya-lady-tauriel @awritinglen @purpleshadows1989 @ivonoris @theforgottencoolkid @the-ichor-of-ruination @grotesqu-e @lucacangettathisass @tea-ndi @hazeywrites @lunar895 @thewordsinthesky-andstars

[LAST LINE TAG]

TAGGED BY  @melwrotethat AND @hazeywrites

thank you both for the tags! these are the last few lines of the prologue-excerpt-thing i wrote for the page i’m working on for WHERE THE CELLAR MEETS THE SKY

Somehow, Collin hears them. Silently, she rolls up her sleeve, and Rowan feels the Collin Sutherland they knew is somewhere far, far away. The tattoos are black, geometric in design, two on each arm, and eerily similar to the ones Rowan has just discovered on their own left arm. They're sure if they were to roll up their right sleeve, they would find more.

"I should have told you a long time ago," Collin whispers. "I didn't know you were a part of it, but I should have guessed. I didn't want to put you in danger."

"I'm not- I don't- in danger of what?"

The waves crash onto the shore, and in the distance, a seagull cries, sending Collin into action. She grabs Rowan's hand and starts pulling, dragging them back behind the house.

"Come on. We don't have a lot of time, we have to get going. I can tell you everything on the way. I don't know why he brought me here instead of straight to the veil, damn it-,"

"Wait!," they say, wrenching their hand out of her grasp. "Just- stop! Where are we going?!"

Collin's eyes flash bright, despite the lack of sunlight. "Home."

yeah, a bit long, a bit unedited, but *shrugs*

[SPELL OUT UR URL USING SONG TITLES]

TAGGED BY @tea-ndi

thank you sage!!! <3

hard feelings/loveless | lorde

another one of those days | cavetown

let’s fall in love for the night | FINNEAS

ocean eyes | billie eilish

honey and milk | flower face

i know | king princess ft fiona apple

dreamz | sara king

iloveyou | BETWEEN FRIENDS

nobody’s home | gnash

greek god | conan gray

sycamore girl | rex orange county 

and there you have a small sample of my music taste! add in literally every taylor swift song (dont judge me), some lo-fi tunes without ANY words whatsoever, and the occasional fall out boy or panic at the disco goddamn absolute banger, and you have my XANDERS JAMS playlist on spotify. ENJOY

[11/11/11 TAG]

TAGGED BY @awritinglen <333333333333333333333333

thank you for tagging me len!!! your questions were so fun!! i’m doing this for WHERE THE CELLAR MEETS THE SKY

Name all OCs in your WIP

OMFG okay,,, wait do you mean full names?? POV characters as of rn are Collin Aisling Sutherland, Rowan Tilley (doesn’t have a middle name) and Avery Bristol Charter. then the next most important one is Isaac Michael Rosewell, even though he’s the antagonist. then the side characters that are still very featured are Noah Rosalyn Pratten, Reese Iseul Radley, and Sage Emarosa Delgado. THEN we get into the very very side characters, Willa Robinson and her son August Robinson. then we have Avery’s parents, Alaric and the late Octavia Charter. and thennnnn we have Beldane Moreno, Avery’s uncle and Collin’s grandfather (undecided abt that last name but going w it for now). i promise it all makes sense. i promise anfnfsjnfdjsfd

Name at least one hobby your Main character love

i’ll give this one to Collin, she is a musician! Avery’s mother always taught her music before The Accident (dun dun dunnn) and after Collin was abandoned in the Nigh she threw herself into music. she plays guitar mostly, but she secretly loves piano the best out of every instrument she knows

3 sentences about your current WIP

OOF. im so bad at summaries why would you do this to meee abfhshjbsbshfjsbf. “A determined believer wants to return to a home that never wanted her. Almost 4000 miles away, an incisive, intellectual outcast of a dreamer muses over getting out of their hometown. And infinities away from them both, a teenage revolutionary disappears into thin air, on his way to bring back his past and fix his (and everyone’s) future.”

Is there a romance in your WIP and did you plan it from the beginning?

yes! there are three! they are definitely a main focus of the plot, but not THE main focus. Reese and Rowan were definitely planned from the beginning. Collin and Noah were, too, but they weren’t originally enemies to lovers, and they are now (hehehehehe). and Isaac and Avery were DEFINITELY not planned from the beginning. in fact, Avery was originally paired up with Sage, but it’s literally so much better this way and i’m so glad it’s been changed. Isaac and Avery has been planned since about when Isaac’s character was thought up, one year into planning WTCMTS.

What genre(s) is it?

a mix of dystopia and urban fantasy. and it’s YA, borderline NA because some of the characters are 19-20, but i still think YA is appropriate because of the style of writing.

What’s the aesthetic of two of your characters?

fun question! Collin’s aesthetic is very emo-punk, with a splash of yellow towards the end of the series. piercings, blue hair, rips on clothing, dirty converse, smudged eyeliner, safety pins. the yellow comes in as part of her character arc, as she learns to accept that her childhood memories are tainted and not actually perfect utopia. Rowan is way more minimalist (sometimes). they’re into the bookstagram type aesthetic, and mom jeans with sneakers, jean jackets, plants against a white wall, colorblocked windbreakers, rain against a car window.

When did you start your current WIP?

WTCMTS was started in august of 2017 

How far along are you in the process (i.e 1st/2nd/3rd draft, worldbuilding)

still worldbuilding, unfortunately, for personal reasons

Who’s the hardest character for you to write?

OOOOOOF. sage or rowan?

What music genre best decribes your main character(s) and whats their favorite?

Collin - alternative (favorite band would be like twenty one pilots, p!atd) 

Rowan - ichillwave (clario, rex orange county)

Avery - emo (fall out boy, all time low)

Isaac - indie alternative OR instrumental lofi (jaymes young, birdy)

Noah - electropop (lorde, halsey, charlie xcx)

Reese - folk rock (the head and the heart, of monsters and men)

Sage - indie pop (lana del ray, florence + the machine)

Are you working on more than one WIP?

yes! i have four currently but only two are important lol, ILLUNIUS and WHERE THE CELLAR MEETS THE SKY (this one). WIP PAGE

MY QUESTIONS

how did you come up with the title for your WIP?

is there anything you want to change about your WIP but you are hesitating on?

do you have a favorite character? a character that is your baby?

write a tinder bio for one of your characters.

how do you feel about epilogues? does your wip include an epilogue?

what changes does your MC go through over the course of the story?

what is the most significant insignificant thing that happens in your story? don’t explain why it is significant if it spoils things ;)

do you know what will happen after the ending of your wip, or would you rather not picture it?

how long does your wip span? is it a novel? a series? does it have prequels or spin-off wips?

what is a major internal conflict for your MC? 

do you include flashbacks in your wip? do you like writing flashbacks?

[HOW TO KNOW YOU’RE IN A ______ NOVEL TAG]

TAGGED BY @writevevo​ AND @wolvesofarcadia​

thank you both for this tag! it’s so much fun and both of your novels sound like novels that would be very interesting to be stuck in :D

inspired by this post

HOW TO KNOW YOU’RE IN A HALOHIDINGS NOVEL

you’re an older sibling and you have a younger sibling. you’re extremely bitter towards your younger sibling for stealing opportunities from you, damning you to a life you never truly wanted. your younger sibling adores you and just wants to please you. they never meant to do it. 

you’re stuck in constant, wistful wanderlust, never feeling like you truly belong, never fitting in anywhere, not with friends, not with family, and when you finally find the place you’ve been looking for, you realize it’s nothing like you dreamed or remembered.

you’re not heterosexual. no one around you is. no one is cisgender either. where are they? no one knows. 

you have a peculiar capability dancing under your skin. it trickles from your pores and muddles with your mind. maybe you asked for it, maybe it was predestined, maybe you never wanted anything to do with it. whatever the reason, it’s there, and you don’t know what’s you and what’s it. maybe you’re not meant to ask. maybe you’re meant to succumb. 

your memories are as fickle as the rain, coming and going and breaking through the clouds, shattering the fog and disappearing with the sun. you can’t recall what you’re doing here, or where you’re meant to be instead. what’s your name?, they ask. you don’t know.

there are two worlds. one world is blissfully unaware of this, or at least, as unaware as any world of millions and millions of people can be. no secret can be kept forever, they tell you. you are desperately trying to keep the secret.

the one closest to you, despite your abhorrent denial of this fact, the one you would trust with your life, will betray you. because of their decision, their selfishness, you will either lose them, or lose yourself.

THOSE WERE SO FUN OMG. they all mostly apply to both of my major wips, which is probably bad. oh well LMAO

SORRY THAT WAS SOOOOOOOO LONG hope at least someone does one of these tag games lol <3 

xander out

[ernstin]

Stackin’ Stickers: Snowboard Agents

As published in King Snow - 11.2 - October 1st, 2019

This article’s first priority is to try and explain the world of snowboard sponsorship and the agent’s role within it. This will be done by exploring what an agent is, who needs an agent, and how agents might be changing snowboarding. I’ll also discuss the wealth gap between top-tier pros and the average sponsored snowboarder, and how professional snowboard sponsorship has changed over the years. In order to understand all of this, I first approached Superheroes Management, i.e., an agency, interviewing Jaimeson Keegan. Jaimeson is the owner of Superheroes and former head of sports, entertainment, and marketing for Red Bull. Jamieson is currently the agent for Devun Walsh, Darcy Sharpe, Mikey Rencz, Seb Toots, Maria Thompson, Tyler Nicholson, Mons Røisland, Zoi Sadowski Synnott, and many others. We also chatted with Jake Kuzyk, who has had a great career despite never having an agent represent him.

What is an agent?

An agent is someone who speaks on your behalf. They’ll go out and get you those sponsors you don't have, or they’ll maximise the support you’re currently getting. An agent sets up contracts, keep you informed, and talks business with the business people. They cross the T’s and dot the I’s. But not only that, an agent will act as the middle person between you and your sponsors. They will negotiate money and travel budgets for you. They will make sure that you are being compensated fairly, and that your interests are being heard. In return, however, an agent takes a cut, maybe 10% or 15%, whatever was negotiated before the agent started working for you. That percent keeps the agent working for you. His or her salary is dependent on yours. And, in the best situations, it’s a symbiotic relationship where both parties are benefiting. 

Having an agent seems like a pretty awesome thing. The general consensus is that having an agent helps you focus on snowboarding, and not business. When talking with Mikey Rencz he said, “I was getting to a point where the business side was getting overwhelming and I was kinda young, and didn’t wanna deal with it.” Seb and Darcy said something similar. 

Darcy said, “I could focus on snowboarding and being myself and not jammin up any creativity I got going on.” And Mr. Toutant said, “I think it is really important because at some point you are focusing on your snowboarding and people wanna sign you up, and you dont wanna get to stressed out by all that bullshit. You wanna focus on your riding.”

Having an agent allows you to narrow your focus and not get lost in the numbers and the search for sponsors. An agent can also help you determine your monetary value, as Devun Walsh said, in a very earnest way, “sometimes I feel like you don't know your full worth, so it’s better to have someone else tell the company what you’re worth.” Asking for money is hard, especially when it’s for doing something as fun as snowboarding. It’s weird to think that slapping some petex to your feet and burning down a hill can be profitable. When thinking about this, Darcy said he thought getting an agent was great because he never really knew how to say, “hey, I’m worth money in snowboarding. That was a ridiculous idea to me as a kid.” 

Apart from this, an agent is someone who can also translate your value to sponsors. Mikey gave me an example where he said, “Imagine if someone approached me for a commercial or something, and said we’re gunna give you $5000 for the day.” That sounds like a great deal, right? And Mikey would have accepted it too. But, Rencz explained that that’s where Jaimeson steps in, “Jamison would then ask ‘what’s it for?’ and ‘what’s the reach?’ and after that he’d be like, no you’re gunna give him $20,000 for the day.” That’s a huge boost in salary, all because someone knew what the ask was worth. The price a rider is willing to do something for isn’t always the right price. An agent can bridge the gap between rider and businesses making sure the rider does not get taken advantage of, or, isn't mistakenly undervalued. During our interview, Jaimeson disclosed that the first goal that is set after signing with Superheroes agency is to get that rider 100k a year in sponsorship dollars, “a living wage,” as he put it.

However, there is also Jake Kuzyk, an all-star rail rider, who has never had an agent in his corner, which, given what I just said, you might think is kinda nuts. But, Jake views it differently. Jake said that he believes that an agent could actually hurt his career. He says, “Based on what [I] do and who [I am], it’s almost not smart to have an agent. I think having an agent would hurt me. All the sponsors that I have, it’s like a friendship. It’s a real connection. I think I’d be in a worse spot financially and with longevity as far as my brands go.” A justifiable concern for anyone who has spent a lot of time building relationships with his or her brands. 

Who is an Agent for? 

If not all riders feel like an agent is good for them and their career, then who is an agent for? According to Jake, “I think unless there is high demand and you are one of those people who are willing to run on high expectation, and do well under pressure, then an agent is kinda good. But for me, I’ve always wanted to do things at my own pace and in my own way.” A valid point. If you’re that type A personality who works well under pressure, all the power to you to meet those demands put on you. Money can dictate expectations, creating performance goals and obligations that are not for everyone. But, there are still guys like Rencz who have agents, and are not running on that type A personality. So what’s different about Mikey? When asked, he said, “there used to be a lot more interest in the filming side, and also there was a lot more going on for people who filmed for videos and shot for magazines, even three years ago.” I interpret this as Mikey saying that these days there is not as much money for people who film video parts, and that maybe the need for the average video part guy to have an agent isn’t as big as it once was. However, that’s not what Seb thinks. Seb said that, “when I hear people say that an agent is only good for people who make a lot of money, I think that’s wrong. Agents are there to help you sign a bigger deal and get more opportunities.” So, Seb thinks that you should have an agent if you are good enough to have one, which makes sense. Why wouldn’t you like a little extra coin? However, Rencz also speculates that some “team managers don't really wanna deal with [an] agent,” meaning that some TMs want to deal directly with the rider, not the middle man. This could be for two reasons. The first being that maybe the TM does not want to be pressured into paying his or her athletes more when times are tight, even though the athlete deserves it - which is a sad reality. Or, two, it could be because some TMs also value the relationship with the rider, and don't want a middle man to answer to. Either way, we’re kinda back at the point that Jake made about an agent potentially hurting the career he wants. So, maybe an agent isn't for everyone, especially if you film video parts and want a relationship with your sponsor? Well, that’s not entirely true either. When talking to Jamieson about this, he said that he thinks “there is actually a big appetite out there specifically for riders that do not compete. I know brands that when I call them and go, ‘hey, I got someone you’d be interested in,’ they say, ‘oh yeah, we would be, but call us when he or she stops competing.’” 

So, who is an agent for? I don’t entirely know. But I can ambiguously say that an agent works best when there is a symbiotic relationship, a win-win, between rider and agent.

That said, there is one obvious group of snowboarders that an agent seems uncontroversially good for, and that is the all-stars. Or, as Jaimeson calls them, “the A listers.” He says, “If you're a true A lister, your earning potential is, I dunno, anywhere between $500,000 and up. The most bad ass [riders] in our spaces earn a tremendous amount. Those are the one percenters, if you will.” These are the snowboarders who come to people’s minds first, guys like Mark McMorris, Seb Toots, Sage Kotsenburg, Ståle Sandbech, Torstein Horgmo, and others. You can probably imagine the others. These people just have too many other things going on to worry about dealing with contract renewals and bonuses and their financials in general. Their priority is performing, performing for themselves and performing for the stickers on their board, that’s it. They’ve got big goals and big money to answer to. When you’ve struck the perfect marketable mixture of talent, personality, and fan following, the sky's the limit. 

How might agents be changing the industry?

Agents are great at getting riders non-endemic sponsorships, sponsors like BMW, Virgin Wireless, Audi, and other brands who have nothing to do with snowboarding, but want to be associated with snowboarders. These brands know that there is a market value attached to the top names in snowboarding, and that putting money into that athlete could yield a return for them in brand association and logo recognition. So they do it, they invest. Which is okay to some degree, I think. Non-endemic support allows boarders to put more money into what they love doing. These brands allow riders to travel, get proper physio, feed themselves, save for the future, etc.. They also put money into the sport, giving snowboarding events the means to be broadcast around the globe, gaining exposure for snowboarding and bringing in money. This money can then be put back into the endemic industry through brands, resorts, and media outlets, benefiting everyone.

However, it is also possible to see how this could change snowboarding in a negative way. As Rencz said, “if you look at the contest riders with really weird sponsors, you’re like, ‘OoOoOo, that guys got an agent for sure,’ because [the rider] is not finding those sponsors, and the [sponsors] aren't hitting them up. You know? It’s like specifically sought out through an agency...” So the “snowboarder” doesn’t have any sponsors from a snowboard company. And while that’s more common place within mainstream professional sport, it’s a weird phenomenon in life-style snowboarding, which maybe shouldn’t happening. But why does it? Well, probably because of the money. And if that is the case, what does that mean? In other words, what does it mean when riders start having more non-endemic sponsors than endemic sponsors? Does it mean that non-endemic brands could start having more influence over the direction of snowboarding than snowboard companies? Has this already been happening? I honestly don't know the answers to these questions. But, I think questions like this are important to think about. Not thinking about them gets us to the premise for the movie Idiocracy, which is a movie set in the future where brands and big money dictate everything. It’s a future where Gatorade-esque drinks water farmers fields because Gatorade is, quote-unquote, “better than water.” 

The Wealth Gap.

As many of the riders interviewed in this article have said, one interesting phenomena of contemporary snowboarding is that the wealth gap is growing. That is, there are a few athletes making a lot of money and many athletes making less. The group of riders making more money are the group of A listers that Jamieson brought up earlier. They are akin to the 1%. And then there's everyone else. A big middle class of boarders who are really good, but only receive a pair of pants and some beanies at the start of the year. This growing wealth gap is interesting because it mimics our current economy, but maybe it’s not unexpected, considering that the snowboard world is just a microcosm of the world at large. When talking about this with Jamieson, he said, “I don't think action sports are insulated from what is happening in society. I think a lot of people are disappointed. They feel confident in what they are achieving, and it’s more difficult for them to get rewarded for it.” I guess it isn’t a coincidence that the “glory days” of the prosperous professional snowboarder happened when North America was financially stable, with a strong middle class economy. Devun also expressed his amazement for what snowboarders will do for such little money, saying, “I feel like there are kids who are willing to kill themselves on rails for like 30-grand a year. There is no way, back in the day, that people would be willing to risk their neck for that.”

Being a Professional Snowboarder

There is no doubt that being a professional snowboarder has changed in the last 10 years, especially within contest riding. The amount of pressure and obligation has increased, everyone in this article agreed with that, to some degree. Devun did say that “before you had to kill yourself all year to make [a] video part and now it just kinda comes out when they feel like it . . . apart from some of the videos.” But other than that, everyone agreed that being a pro is difficult. Seb said, “[what I would say] has really changed is snowboarding became so much harder to make it at a pro level, if you're getting drunk all the time and not really taking care of your body, it is definitely harder to keep up.” Darcy acknowledged that there are so many good snowboarders on Instagram that you need to stay on top of your game, whereas before, if you were a part of the chosen few, everyone waited for your part, and whoever else was good was rarely seen. 

In the past, the lack of accessibility also allowed for us to know who was pro and who wasn’t. We knew pros had promodels, whether it was a piece of outerwear or a board. That just doesn't seem to happen as much. The lines are blurred because the money is limited and the talent pool is limitless. Even companies don't really seem too concerned about the pro label. If you go to Rome’s website, LNP is still listed as one of their pros. But he barely snowboards anymore and has a full time career as a heavy-duty mechanic. 

While interviewing Seb, this was one of the reasons he thinks there is less money in the industry. He said, “for snowboarding you don't always know who is a pro and who is an amateur, which is something huge and something we need to change. . . When it is built properly, it’s easier for a big company to invest in the sport.” He went on to explain that if you want to be a certain type of rider, there should be a clear way to achieve that. 

His points are good, they absolutely make sense as far as growth and money goes. I mean, making it clear to people how snowboarding works is great for sponsors. It allows sponsors outside of snowboarding to know who they are getting behind. It can provide an objective value for a snowboarder. But what about for guys like Jake who aren't into that structure? When talking about structure, Jake said that it’s one of the reasons he does not have an agent. He said that, “I just always wanted to have control over what I did. I’ve always wanted to be very involved with all the projects I’ve worked on. . . “I don’t ‘yes man’ things, and do random stuff that I don’t really believe in.” With more structure, you can lose diversity, you can lose guys like Jake, making pro status only attainable to a certain type of person, which is an issue snowboarding is already dealing with, considering how it is generally dominated by wealthy, white males. So, it’s hard. Snowboarding sponsorship is a unique and ever evolving place that can be difficult for professionals, AMs, industry folk, and everyone to exist within, happily. It’s a complex matrix with many parts, understanding it is hard. I tried to show you a little of the objective and the subject side of it, but when it comes down to it, there is no right information or algorithm when trying to understand it, and maybe there shouldn't be.

[ohnohetaliasues]

Zila Umbra (Fairy Tail)

 (Kat)

I'm not sure if I've reviewed this before, but I don't think I have. Let's begin.

I was asked to delete the art by the artist, so I have. It was very well done, though.

i haven’t written her complete background yet but i have it written in my minD

This is off to a rocky start...

I’m curious about the issue with putting the ideas down on the profile, but I’m not here to nitpick.

Hello, yes, this is my blog, where I nitpick things. Enjoy your stay!

sOOSOoo her name is Zila Umbra and shes a lil bae and im still kinda n the process of designing her character so yee

Don't describe your OC as a 'bae' or I will kill you violently.

Also, 'bae' means 'poop' in Danish...

ok so when she was younger she found out that she could talk to the dead,

Okay, no. We haven't seen any ghosts in Fairy Tail other than Mavis, but she's only there because of her residual magic and the guild seal that acts as an extension. This is not Supernatural, contrary to the gif I just used.

and it completely paranoid her and her parents.

That's kind of mild....?

Just paranoid?

Her parents where completely religion based and basically thought she was the spawn of satan or something

The only church I can think of in Fairy Tail is the Church of Zentopia, and that was a filler arc. So please explain why her parents are Fairy Tail puritans.

and sent her off to a mental hospital that completely isolated her from others besides her ghosts

And they didn't just say 'Oh, that's your magic'? No, they just jumped to "SATAN!"

and thats really not something a little girl should have to deal with sOOOO she made friends with one specific ghost who actually turned out to be her mentor in magic.

That's... convenient.

She taught her that the reason she hears all the ghosts and voices is because of the eye she was born with is basically the sorce of most her magical energy so she started covering it up and her everlasting headache went away.

...No. Just no. That is not a thing. WHEN DID THE HEADACHE THING COME IN? Body parts are never magic in Fairy Tail, other than Erza's artificial eye. 

She was also taught that if she wore sage it would ward off bad spirits, so she put some sage in a small vile and put that on necklace and put the necklace around her neck and she wears it to this day uwu.

THIS IS NOT SUPERNATURAL.

she still could talk to ghosts and stuff though.

Oh yes, all benefits and no cons. She can still use her magic usually even though she covered up her eye?

Her mentor ( her name is darcy) taught her all the basics of magic and such as she lived in her little cell.

This is too dark for Fairy Tail.

Darcy though specialized in shadow magic, so she passed it on to zila (along with some knowlege on spells that let you use ghosts as your allies and stuff).

This is not okay. 

once zila had been taught all she could darcy taught her how escape and about a guild called fairy tail she could go to for help

Why wasn't she like 'Go to a soup kitchen' or a homeless shelter, but nooo, let's go to a MAGIC GUILD.

Also, Darcy is a ghost. Of course she's an expert at escaping. She can WALK THROUGH WALLS.

Zila made it out succsesfully after 3 years of being isolated ( and thus began her fear of being alone uwu)

i don't think she'd be able to function properly in society after being isolated for three freaking years.

once she made it to the guild she was let in and made friends quickly ( which really suprised her because she haddnt interacted with real people in like forever eheh)

Like I said, she wouldn't be able to function properly. She'd be quiet and reserved.

This is so improbable I CANNOT EVEN.

out of the children in the group

She is a CHILD WHO WAS IN ASYLUM FOR THREE YEARS WITH NOBODY BUT GHOSTS. ERZA WAS TRAUMATIZED WHEN SHE JOINED THE GUILD AFTER THE TOWER OF HEAVEN DEBACLE. SHE HAD TROUBLE MAKING FRIENDS. SHE TOOK A VERY LONG TIME TO ADJUST. THAT'S JUST BEING HUMAN. THIS GIRL IS DEFYING LOGIC. BEING ALONE FOR SO LONG WOULD HAVE A SUBSTANTIAL IMPACT ON HER PSYCHE. 

and was usually the peace maker between gray and natsu bUT ITS ONLY BECUASE SHE LOVES THem,

She literally just stole Erza's job.

once erza came she was always trying to talk to her and make sure she wasnt sad because she felt sorry for her and knew that if she was going to be alone that it would be sad

It feels like this OC is ripping of Erza's struggle. 

anddddddd yeAH THATS A WHOLE NOTHER STORY BUT THEYRE BASICALLY BEST BUDS KINDA ANd they go on jobs together a lot ( like i imagine her being with erza when they came into the story line )

If she's S Class, I will scream.

shes such a little sweatheart too.

I am suffering.

Vehemently. 

She hums when she fights easy battles 

That... makes her sound insane. Nobody does that in Fairy Tail.

and will only cry if someone tells her its okay  

That is not good for your mental health.

Personality wise shes veRY VERY VERY VERY LOYAL AND PROTECTIVE OF HER FRIENDS

Oh gee, I didn't see this cliché coming.

LIke if she let a friend get hurt when she couldve prevented it she would be so dispointed.

Of freaking course.

Like every OC ever.

She DOSENT like seeing a people she cares about in pain

Nobody does, sweetheart.

so she’ll do her best to prevent it like rub natsus back while they’re on a train or in a car or somethin u kno.

Not even Lucy does that. Nobody wants him to puke on them. 

Shes pretty caring and forgiving unless you break a promise or betray the guild or somethin, but shes not overly forgiving of people who used to be bad and are now good unless shes had time to understand them and stuff idk. ALSO PLS DONT TrY TO HURT JUST HER FRIENDS IN FRONT OF HER BECAUSE SHES GOING TO tRY AND KILL U NO MERCy.

Wow, I so haven't seen that before in my three years of reviewing OCs.

ALSO she’ll straight up be like “I love you” if she loves you bUT JUST AS A FRIEND OK if she loves u romantically shes gonna hide it a bunch or iF SHE FInds out that you like her shes gonna blush all the time around you

Please no.

You know, for someone who was stuck in an asylum, alone, for three years, she sure acts like a normal teenage girl.

and just omg i love her.

You don't put that on an OCs profile.

You just don't.

She’s also pretty comfortable around people she knows so like if she’s on a train or somethin she will use grays shoulder as a pillow because iTS COLD AND SHES TIRED AND NOBODY CARES BECause it’s her and it’s completely normal for her.

Juvia would mind. Juvia would mind a lot. And so would Gray, to be honest. 

OveRALL SHES NICE AND FRIENDly and shes a pretty strong fighter and stuff and shes calm and optimistic and encouraging even though when shes fighting shes scaRY

There are no flaws anywhere.

a babe ok shes just a babe 

The more you say that, the more I want to kill her.

negative characteristic wise shes really paranoid still due to all the ghosts and shit,

Wouldn't she be used to that? Also, can't she keep away the bad ghosts?

SHE HAS THAT BIG FEAR OF BEING ALONE LIke she will stay by whoever shes with and usually they make sure they stay by her too because they kNOW SHES SCARED AS FRICK OF BEING ALONe.

The creator is trying to make a flaw. But these will not effect the OC in critical moments. 

but if shes confined in a place and has no idea if people are near her or not shes rEALLY SCARED EVEN THOUGH SHES A TOUGH MOMMA SHES SCAREd.

You are running in circles here. What is her weakness? The situation you provided would scare anyone! 

shes forgetfull but wont ever forget things really important eheh,

Yay, another weakness that isn't a weakness. 

I do this all the time. Many people do. You aren't a special snowflake.

she can get really anxious and worried for others, and when you upset her in a fight she might get upset and start being reckless but yOU REALLY GOTTA TUG ON THOSE HEART STRINGS (unless ur like ’ ima kill ur bud’ then its really easy for her to go cray on you, but usually

Okay, no. That is literally Natsu. This person is ripping other characters off.

Also, that was a run on sentence. It stars at "She's forgetful" and ends at "when that happens uwu." USE PUNCTUATION.

if the person being threatened is with her they’ll calm her down and she’ll be able to fight in a less reckless way), but once you do she goes a little insane and is more powerfull but gets hurt eaiser and dosent even care just as long as she fucks the other person up aND SHELL TELL EM TOO idk shes really violent/crazy/scary/blood-thirsty when that happens uwu.

What happened to "She's such a lovable sweetheart?"

Shes super ’ no mercy’ in fights too, mainly because thats what darcy taught her,

Was Darcy evil? Because in Fairy Tail, mercy is a virtue. Lucy would hate her if she showed no mercy. Even Natsu shows mercy, though he goes kind of ballistic if someone threatens his friends (especially Lucy). How did she get in if she shows no mercy? How did she even make friends?

and because she has no trust in the enemy to not hurt her after shes won. 

That doesn't justify that.

She has a bad sense of humor too ok shes a cutie

OH YES, SHE'S STILL A CUTIE.

Zila also has a little ghost friend named Boo ( it’s cliche but idec) who wears a bow with a spell that let’s other people see her on it.

Is Boo more powerful than Mavis now? Because Mavis's residual energy let the members of the guild with a mark see her, but that was the only reason. Nobody else could. But apparently, Boo is so powerful everyone can see her. 

Boo would have to be god-like in terms of power.

I call nonsense on that.

Boo is only with Zila when theyre ina care-free environment but Boo can’t talk and can only use facial expressions. Boo is bae too

If you call something 'bae' one more time, I am going to lose it.

Also, what sense does that make?

None.

(also heres what her eyes look like without her eye patch uwu)

That is such a generic thing to do with an OC.

Literally, just no.

Overall, this OC was terrible. She had no flaws, no weaknesses, and her ghost friend had god-like powers. I cannot even. I'll see you guys later.

~Kat

[hansmannette]

Every question with 1 for Cala and 2 for Angelika (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

JESUS

1. What’s their full name? Why was that chosen? Does it mean anything?her full name is calamondin but she never tells anyone bc she thinks being named after oranges is embarrassing....shes right

10. Do they like children? Do children like them? Do they have or want any children? What would they be like as a parent? Or as a godparent/babysitter/ect?cala is nervous around children since she doesnt really know how to entertain them but the young witches and even some sages really like her and will come to her after their studies to show her whatever they learned that day... she thinks its adorable...  i dont think she will want to have children bc of the uncertain future for the umbra BUT if she had children she would sacrifice anything for them and try to be the mom possible

11. Do they have any special diet requirements? Are they a vegetarian? Vegan? Have any allergies?calas diet consists of meat and cake.... tbh...... ironically shes allergic to citrus fruits....and plants...most plants really

12. What is their favourite food?MEAT AND UH her favorite sweet dish is gaz

13. What is their least favourite food?fruit in general especially the sour apples angelika usually makes her eat

14. Do they have any specific memories of food/a restaurant/meal?she remembers the times her mom would make gaz fondly but its been a long time

15. Are they good at cooking? Do they enjoy it? What do others think of their cooking?absolute disaster, she can bake tho

16. Do they collect anything? What do they do with it? Where do they keep it? cala collects flowers and dries them, especially lavender to put it around her room

17. Do they like to take photos? What do they like to take photos of? Selfies? What do they do with their photos?she doesnt have any photos, she likes to look at pictures of other cities in the library books tho

18. What’s their favourite genre of: books, music, tv shows, films, video games and anything elseshe doesnt spend much time with any of those

19. What’s their least favourite genres?i....dont know..........

21. Do they have a temper? Are they patient? What are they like when they do lose their temper?cala can be extremely hurtful when shes mad at someone or just overwhelmed by something and that happens a lot...

31. Do they drink? What are they like drunk? What are they like hungover? How do they act when other people are drunk or hungover? Kind or teasing?shes drunk whenever theres alcohol anywhere and it doesnt take her much to get drunk tbh... shes a drinking master tho so she never has a hangover and is usually the first one up in the morning to take care of everyone who wasnt as lucky

41. What’s their sexuality? What do they find attractive? Physically and mentally? What do they like/need in a relationship?cala is pan i think.... she hasnt thought much about it. she likes people who are broken but also smart, vain and well... physically attractive... tho she will find pretty much anyone attractive if she likes them enough 

ok....now angi

2. Do they have any titles? How did they get them?idk if thats a real title but... she summons iustitia so.... the sage of justice idk whatever

12. What is their favourite food? pie...any pie...really....maybe apple pie

20. Do they like musicals? Music in general? What do they do when they’re favourite song comes?yea she likes whatever the fuck the affinities are screaming and the sound of witches in pain

21. Do they have a temper? Are they patient? What are they like when they do lose their temper?no matter what happens angelika is.... uncomfortably calm.... she doesnt snap at you she just lets you know you fucked up for several weeks

22. What are their favourite insults to use? What do they insult people for? Or do they prefer to bitch behind someone’s back?shes never vocal about that and thinks insults are vulgar so.... she probably just thinks about it

23. Do they have a good memory? Short term or long term? Are they good with names? Or faces?very good, never forgets anything tbh, could be the keeper of lumen memories since she looks like shes been around for at least 5 million years and probably still remembers what the lumen elder from 400 years ago wore for his coronation ceremony

24. What is their sleeping pattern like? Do they snore? What do they like to sleep on? A soft or hard mattress?angelika never sleeps... ever... no one really knows what shes doing at night but shes definitely not sleeping

25. What do they find funny? Do they have a good sense of humour? Are they funny themselves?she will laugh when one of her students makes a clever comment and they think shes hilarous too but no one else has really seen her laugh... except for the one time cala saw a decoration for the first time and angelika almost choked

26. How do they act when they’re happy? Do they sing? Dance? Hum? Or do they hide their emotions? she just smiles... its kinda cute actually, when shes smiling really wide you can see her gold tooth

27. What makes them sad? Do they cry regularly? Do they cry openly or hide it? What are they like when they are sad?her past makes her sad but she never cries

28. What is their biggest fear? What in general scares them? How do they act when they’re scared?she used to be really afraid of not being able to control a summon during her lessons fearing she might put her students in danger but lately shes way more afraid that cala might find out about her past doings

29. What do they do when they find out someone else’s fear? Do they tease them? Or get very over protective? she doesnt really care about and doesnt want to know in the first place, but if they tell her anyway she wont say anything about it

32. What do they dress like? What sorta shops do they buy clothes from? Do they wear the fashion that they like? What do they wear to sleep? Do they wear makeup? What’s their hair like?YALL KNOW...... yea she like white feathery gowns with gold embroidery bc shes.... such a tiny woman.... it makes her appear more impressive... also when she was younger her hair was brown, longer and a bit wavy

42. What are their goals? What would they sacrifice anything for? What is their secret ambition?her goal is to live in fucking peace and shes a damn cowards so she wouldnt risk anything for anyone

[topsolarpanels]

Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, seeming down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to find why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humen moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is met up in simply the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, virtually four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and rapidly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would stimulate the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips-off scarcely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this sum of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is vanishing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as weather permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly changing ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that aimed its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launching next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I insured there were specialists who have, over the course of nearly 10 years on this mission, mastered the arts and science of polar data hunting while, at the same day, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has disintegrated in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding aircraft, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa technologists sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to see what they were assuring, to see the facts. What they told me revealed something about what it means to be a US federally money climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a weather meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy climate office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag explained to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can produce unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the last decade of his life( Im away from home so much its likely why Im not married ). But at pre-flight weather meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight hour. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight time is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers money, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric conditions. He checks the climate the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With weather, there is no is. Whats required is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had made the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the climate meeting, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photograph: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blob dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I fulfilled Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What stimulates this real to you? The topic had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I honestly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece coat and baseball cap, and his exuberances and mellowed ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that topic was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What attains it real ? I mean, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gas turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, directly on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US situateds the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at the construction and installing of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter probably had something else in intellect. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what builds that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal regions. A conservative estimation holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen repository of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto track Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by technologists sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and valleys, and also a clear opinion of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa repeats its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The path of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish glee( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for instance, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing corpuscles of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what builds this real for him. Behind even well-meaning topics is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has stimulated it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate arrangement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related funds from the federal budget this year. When the White House recently proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media has enabled them along by interring the story under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budgetary support deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dog on Mars.

The US built Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still maintain a small airbase there. In 1951, America constructed a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly kept armed atomic weapon. In one of naval history more ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, generated a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland gives the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice tunnels nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the high levels of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed quickly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere find work. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial airplane at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our pouches still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the bags hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually merely one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the route, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres only ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles airplane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butt. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astound and hugs, because the last time they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I ultimately got my container, I stimulated my way down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was remain. But before I met the crew, I fulfilled the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant aroma of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and fragrance it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any route of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is determining cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew “was talkin about a” their P-3 they sometimes voiced as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is astonishingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark humour, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was staring at a photo of his children on his phone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually hollered Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, courtesy of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several each member of Congress. As one engineer put it to me, We just get nervous, honestly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the government shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the governmental forces in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant truly talking here that without feeling those feelings again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in anxiety of a shutdown of their work by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of change workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you assure people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure engineers asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were blithely collecting data. For some stretchings, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or simply flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This permeating somnolence the hypnotic hum of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which devoted them the appear of sons in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, devoted the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier widens across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a being on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photograph: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a very different view from that assured by novelists in past centuries, who saw this scenery, if at all, by boat or, more likely, from a depict. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of demise and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snows a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old narratives discontinued. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar decideds spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, die gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so frightened Melville and Poe, who objective his Antarctic tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep globes climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more hot is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other routes, including moderating climate patterns, the ice helps makes life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling dread in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be seen even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripples of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flow, I considered the same strong hand that profoundly etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were made by shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low mounds smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice gave shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the lives of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this scenery, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulp of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same day that were getting better at assembling this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the witticism floating around the crew. I heard one engineer joke that it might be easier to merely rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do upkeep on that, he pointed out.

In another conversation, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would greet a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, assuring the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: merely stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already steeped in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing reply. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, a specialist in ice, got pedantic, telling me that there existed others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the confidence of a leading expert in the field. The off-the-record view expressed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all assured the graphs !

The tonal discrepancies between this off-the-record answer and the taped answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I believed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red record sunlight. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher chuckled a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the present US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest question was only met with silence and a few jokes. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talking here trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science meeting, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont seem to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing answer: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising impact. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling stories. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped drone, and had attained spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they gathered around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something moving in considering these people who had spend all day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now expending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon snuck into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage recently shot at the Thule base. The video indicated some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted cement bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft rockets. Today its simply an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, only a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the wreckings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the day before. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and said: Well anyway, maybe thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because that approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Maybe its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and only do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chatter stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets run. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

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Where global warming get real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, appearing down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to ensure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a one-quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and meeting to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is gathered up in only the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, nearly four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid stream, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and quickly. In hypothesi, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would build the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips barely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this quantity of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would flood the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for almost a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document , among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as climate permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight schemes prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly shifting ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that objective its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launch next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS technologists, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I assured there were specialists who have, over the course of almost 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same hour, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has crumbled in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding airplane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to find what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me uncovered even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a climate meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy weather office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its probably why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is largely of fear to him for the quirky style it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight day. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight hour is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the weather and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight time, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric condition. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With climate, “were not receiving” is. Whats required is the ability to comprehend constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he said, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had stimulated the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his reads in order to better navigate his expeditions shifting conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the weather session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photo: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blobs dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What builds this real to you? The question had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I frankly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece jacket and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellow ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that question was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What constructs it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gasolines turned solid, almost sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US situates the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at its design and installation of the scientific instruments, and he is the person in the field responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for making sure that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in mind. The melting of ice, the rising water, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise approximately 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen archive of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First built during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us find the specific characteristics in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulsings through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has also helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa recurs its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to devise a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish mirth( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant canyon system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flow behind them, have decreased and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers situate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an epoch when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what attains this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has made it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media helped them along by interring the narrative under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dogs on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America built a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys most ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland dedicates the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear rockets. In 1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A fire, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapon hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed promptly through passport control, but our pouches were nowhere to be found. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our containers still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the pouches hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my embarrassment, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, the man told me, was actually simply one guy, who had a propensity to mysteriously disappear.

By the style, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres merely ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butts. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting one another with astonish and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photo: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I finally got my purse, I built my style down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was staying. But before I fulfilled the crew, I met the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low humming, like a shamen chant, was accompanied by the pleasant odor of gently cooking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily rite of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and odor it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, dressed in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any style of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is observing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard breaches in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew talked about their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his telephone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually screamed Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sat there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one technologist put it to me, We simply get nervous, frankly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed border wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was en route to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant genuinely talking here that without feeling those emotions again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of the performance of their duties by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The impression in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launch, was of shift workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least concerned with gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you assure people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, ensure technologists asleep at their stations meant international instruments below their feet were merrily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were spent flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or merely flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic humming of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which gave them the looking of boys in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier extends across the land. The eye immediately grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively exploding ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photo: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a most varied opinion from that considered by writers in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by barge or, more likely, from a describe. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of death and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old tales terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar puts spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Deem that whiteness, which so terrified Melville and Poe, who aims his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep earths climate cool; the loss of all this white material entails more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating weather patterns, the ice helps induces life on globe more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling fear in 19 th-century readers, actually stimulate the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of praise for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is intimately connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flowing, I ensure the same strong hand that deep etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of shifting ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have expended the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low hills smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice devoted shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the well-being of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is merely our ignorance that attains us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear express of nervousnes from the data hunters. At the same period that were getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the humor floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to simply rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do maintenance on that, he pointed out.

In another dialogue, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would welcome a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, utterly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing up there. I believe sitting on this plane, considering the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it said over and over again: simply stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already immersed in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing respond. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfy chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, functional specialists in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea level. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a resulting expert in the field. The off-the-record opinion conveyed wasnt simply one of sober arrangements with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal difference between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, looking down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I entail, if Nixon

The researcher laughed a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the days headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the procession?

But the earnest topic was only met with silence and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the plan was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed relieved that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science session, beers in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont appears to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the day before. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about persons under the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing reply: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the sung Angie over and over again, creating a pleasantly mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of killer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had assured a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew spent his off-days on excursions with a camera-equipped droning, and had constructed spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they collected around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something are moving forward watching these people who had spend the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now spending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon crept into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video presented some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted concrete bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft weapons. Today its only an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, merely a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the ruinings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the day before. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and said: Well anyway, perhaps thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which inspired one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because such an approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched under a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Perhaps its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets go. Its is high time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

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Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole

The long read: For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care?

From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, seeming down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, its easy to assure why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres( 1,500 ft) high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass is nearly impossible to fathom when you arent sitting at that particular vantage point.

But its different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasas monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real day dramatising, in a sense the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions.

Imagine a thousand centuries of heavy snowfall, piled up and compacted into stone-like ice atop the bedrock of Greenland, an Arctic island almost a quarter the size of the US. Imagine all of modern human history, from the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago when humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from there, eventually, to urban societies until today. All of the snow that fell on the Arctic during that entire history is collected up in just the top layers of the ice sheet.

Imagine the dimensions of that ice: 1.71 m sq km( 656,000 sq miles ), three times the size of Texas. At its belly from the top layer, yesterdays snowfall, to the bottom layer, which is made of snow that fell out of the sky 115,000 -1 30,000 years ago it reaches 3,200 metres( 10,500 ft) thick, virtually four times taller than the worlds highest skyscraper.

Imagine the weight of this thing: at the centre of Greenland, the ice is so heavy that it warps the land itself, pushing bedrock 359 metres( 1,180 ft) below sea level. Under its own immense weight, the ice comes alive, folding and rolling in solid river, in glaciers that slowly push outward. This is a head-spinningly dynamic system that we still dont fully understand and that we really ought to learn far more about, and rapidly. In theory, if this massive thing were fully drained, and melted into the sea, the water contained in it would stimulate the worlds oceans rise by 7 metres( 23 ft ).

When you fly over entire mountain ranges whose tips-off scarcely peek out from under the ice and these are just the visible ones its possible to imagine what would happen if even a fraction of this sum of pent-up freshwater were unleashed. You can plainly see how this thing would inundate the coasts of the world, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh.

The crew of Nasas Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable slant. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document, among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is vanishing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.

Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12 -hour daily flights, as often as weather permits. This past spring season, when I joined them in the Arctic, they launched 40 flights, but had 63 detailed flight plans prepared. Operation IceBridge seeks to create a continuous data record of the constantly changing ice by bridging hence the name data retrieved from a Nasa satellite that ended its service in 2009, called ICESat, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is due to launching next year. The Nasa dataset, which offers a broad overview of the state of polar ice, is publicly available to any researcher anywhere in the world.

In April, I travelled to Kangerlussuaq, in south-west Greenland, and joined the IceBridge field crew a group of about 30 laser, radar, digital mapping, IT and GPS engineers, glaciologists, pilots and mechanics. What I saw there were specialists who have, over the course of virtually 10 years on this mission, mastered the art and science of polar data hunting while, at the same period, watching as the very concept of data, of fact-based discourse, has disintegrated in their culture at home.

On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding aircraft, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to watch what they were ensure, to see the facts. What they told me uncovered something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 and what they didnt, or couldnt, tell me revealed even more.

On my first morning in Greenland, I dropped in on a weather meeting with John Sonntag, mission scientist and de facto field captain for Nasas Operation IceBridge. I stood inside the cosy climate office at Kangerlussuaq airport, surrounded by old Danish-language topographical maps of Greenland, as Sonntag to present to me that the ice sheet, because of its shape, can make unique weather patterns( the ice isnt flat, its curved, he said, making a little knoll shape with his hands ).

The fate of the polar ice has occupied the past decades of their own lives( Im away from home so much its likely why Im not married ). But at pre-flight climate meetings, polar ice is mostly of fear to him for the quirky route it might affect that days weather. The figure in Sonntags mind this morning isnt metres of sea rise, but dollars in flight period. The estimated price tag for a flight on Operation IceBridge is about $100,000; a single hour of flight time is said to cost $10 -1 5,000. If Sonntag misreads the climate and the plane has to turn back, he loses flight period, a lot of taxpayers fund, and precious data.

I would come to view Sonntag as something of a Zen sage of atmospheric conditions. He checks the weather the moment he wakes in the morning, before he eats or even uses the bathroom. He told me that it wasnt simply about knowing what the weather is. With weather, there is no is. Whats needed is the ability to grasp constant dynamic change.

What Im doing, he told, is correcting my current reading against my previous one which he had constructed the last possible moment the night before, just before falling asleep. Basically, Im calibrating. The machine that he is calibrating, of course, is himself. This, as I would learn, was a pretty good summary of Sonntags modus operandi as a leader: constantly and carefully adjusting his readings in order to better navigate his expeditions changing conditions.

Nevertheless, despite the metaphorical implications of his weather-watching, Sonntag was ever focused on the literal. At the climate session, I asked him about his concern over some low cloud cover that was developing a situation that could result in scrubbing the flight. Was his concern for the functionality of the aircrafts science equipment, its ice-penetrating radars, its lasers and cameras?

John Sonntag on board Nasas Operation IceBridge research aircraft at Thule airbase, Greenland. Photograph: Mario Tama/ Getty Images

On that day, as it turned out, Sonntag was more worried about pilot visibility. You know, so we dont fly into a mountain, he explained, without taking his eyes off the blobs dancing across the monitors. That kind of thing.

A few weeks before I met Sonntag, a reporter had asked him: What makes this real to you? The topic had startled him, and he was evidently still thinking about it. I candidly didnt know what to say, he told me.

Sonntag cuts a trim, understated figure in his olive green Nasa flight suit, fleece coat and baseball cap, and his enthusiasms and mellowed ironies tend to soften his slow-burn, man-on-a-literal-mission intensity. I could imagine how a reporter might miss the underlying zeal; but get to know Sonntag and youll learn why, even three weeks later, that topic was still rattling around his head.

Im still kind of at a loss, to be honest, he told me. What makes it real ? I entail, wow, where do I start?

It is indeed a strange question to ask someone who was once on a high-altitude flight when temperatures fell so low that the planes gas turned solid, nearly sending it straight down into Antarctica, immediately on to the ice, in the middle of the darkest of nights. Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A squad of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in co-operation with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Sonntag is there at all phases, including at the construction and installing of the scientific tools, and he is the person in the fields responsible for executing the mission. He is supposed to have a plan for every contingency: if the plane goes down on the ice, hes get plans for that, too. He is responsible for inducing assured that his crew have adequately backed up and stored many terabytes of data, and that their own creature comforts are taken care of. On days off, he cooks gumbo for them.

The reporter likely had something else in intellect. The melting of ice, the rising waters, and all the boring-seeming charts that document the connections between the two what stimulates that real? To Sonntag and his crew, it is as real as the data that they have personally helped fish out of the ice.

Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of approximately 1.7 mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4 mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal regions. A conservative estimation holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres( 3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.

Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we dont know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen repository of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it.

First constructed during the cold warto way Russian submarines, the P-3 Orion aircraft, a four-engine turboprop, is designed for long, low-flying surveillance missions. IceBridges P-3, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, is armed with a suite of instruments mounted under the plane and operated by engineers sitting at stations in the cabin. A laser altimetry system which bounces laser beams from the bottom of the aircraft to the top of the ice and back determines the height and topography of the uppermost layer of ice; a digital mapping system takes high-resolution photos of the ice, helping us ensure the patterns in which it is changing shape; and a radar system sends electromagnetic pulses through the ice, thousands of feet and a hundred thousand years to the land beneath.

This data shows us where the ice is growing and where it is shrinking, and helps researchers ascertain its current mass. The IceBridge data has furthermore helped create a 3D map of an ice-locked land that no human eyes have ever seen: the territory of Greenland, its mountains, valleys, plains and canyons, and also a clear position of the layers of ice that have grown above it. Nasa repeats its IceBridge flights annually, to chart how the ice changes from year to year, and, by comparison with earlier satellite data, from decade to decade. For the integrity of the data, it is best to repeat the flights over exactly the same terrain. The track of each IceBridge flight must adhere to a line so narrow that they had to invent a new flight navigation system, which Sonntag cannot help but describe with boyish hilarity( We basically trick the plane into thinking its landing !).

In trying to grasp how the ice runs, its necessary to know the shape of the underlying terrain: in places where the land slopes up, for example, we know that ice will flow slower. IceBridge data helped discover and chart a canyon in northern Greenland the size of the Grand Canyon. In addition to being a wondrous discovery in its own right, this was useful in understanding where, and how, the ice is moving. One effect of this giant valley system can be seen at the coast, where sea water can seep into cavities, potentially melting lower layers of ice. Other aerial data has shown how glacier fronts, which served as corks holding back the ice flowing behind them, have lessened and unleashed the flow, causing more ice to flush into the sea at increasingly rapid paces.

Fantastic 3D maps of the ice sheet created with IceBridge data have also helped researchers locate rare, invaluable Eemian ice, from more than 100,000 years ago. This was an era when the Earth was warm similar to today and in which the seas were many feet higher, which resembles the world to which we are headed. By drilling deep into the ice, glaciologists can excavate ice cores containing tinges of materials such as volcanic ash, or frozen bubbles that preserve precious pockets of ancient air that hold chemical samples of long-departed climates. Because of IceBridge data, researchers know where to look for these data-rich ice layers.

These are among the reasons that John Sonntags head hurts, and why he doesnt know where to begin or what to think when people ask him what constructs this real for him. Behind even well-meaning questions is a culture of ignorance, or self-interested indifference, that has constructed it easy for a Republican-led, corporation-owned US government to renege on the Paris climate agreement, to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, and to slash billions of dollars of climate change-related monies from the federal budget this year. When the White House lately proposed cuts to Nasas climate-change research divisions, the media has enabled them along by interring the story under speciously positive headlines: Trumps Nasa budget supports deep space travel, crowed CBS News. The worlds coasts are facing catastrophic sea rise, but at the least Americans can look forward to watching their countrymen grill hot dog on Mars.

The US constructed Kangerlussuaqs airfield in the early 1940 s, and they still preserve a small airbase there. In 1951, America constructed a giant fortress on the ice, Thule Air Base, in north-west Greenland strategically equidistant from Russia and the US where it secretly maintained armed atomic weapon. In one of naval historys more ambitious armadas, the Americans cut through the ice, made a port, and effected a conquest second in scope merely to the D-day invasion. And all they had to do was uproot an Inuit settlement.

The USs history in Greenland devotes the lie to the notion that ice research is inherently peaceful, much less apolitical. Glaciology advanced as a field partly through the work of US scientists serving the needs of their countrys rapidly growing nuclear war machine in the 1960 s, helping to build Camp Century, a fabled city under ice in northern Greenland and designing Project Iceworm, a top-secret system of under-ice passageways nearby, which was intended as a launch site for concealed nuclear missiles. In 1968, at the high levels of the war in Vietnam, a nuclear-armed B-5 2 crashed near Thule. A flame, started when a crewman left a pillow over a heating ventilate, resulted in four atomic weapons hydrogen bombs plunging into the ice, and releasing plutonium into the environment.

When our flight landed in Kangerlussuaq, we passed rapidly through passport control, but our bags were nowhere find work. For 40 minutes we could see the one and only commercial aircraft at this airfields one and only gate simply sitting on the tarmac, with our purses still in it. This wasnt a serious problem Kangerlussuaqs one hotel was just up a short flight of steps from the gate but it did seem odd that the purses hadnt come through customs. Another passenger, sensing my confusion, approached me.

Yankee? he asked.

Yankee, I replied.

Customs, “the mens” told me, was actually only one guy, who had a tendency to mysteriously disappear.

By the route, he added conspiratorially. You know customs here has a special arrangement with the Americans. The customs guy, the stranger told me, turns a blind eye to liquor headed to the US Air Force bar on the other side of the airfield.

Kangerlussuaq( population 500 ), or as the Yanks prefer to call it, Kanger, still feels like a frontier station. Most locals run either at the airport or at the hotel. Next to the airfields main hangar, local people house the huskies that pull their sledges. The roads of Kangerlussuaq can be dicey; there are no sidewalks. Once you leave the tiny settlement, there arent roads at all; and if you go north or east, of course, theres only ice. Decommissioned US air force Jato bottles plane boosters that, to the untrained eye, resemble small warheads are ubiquitous around Kangerlussuaq, usually as receptacles for discarded cigarette butt. In the hotel cafeteria you can see American and European glaciologists, greeting each other with astound and hugs, because the last period they met was a year or two ago, when they ran into each other at the other pole.

Kangerlussuaq in Greenland. Photograph: Arterra/ UIG/ Getty

When I ultimately got my bag, I constructed my route down to the 664 barracks, where the crew was bide. But before I fulfilled the crew, I fulfilled the data itself. In a small, slouchy barracks bedroom, near the front doorway, I encountered two Nasa servers. IT engineers could, and often would, sit on the bed as they worked.

The window was cracked open, to cool the room and soothe the crackling servers, whose constant low hum, like a shamans chant, was accompanied by the pleasant fragrance of gently baking wires one of the more visceral stages of the daily ritual of storing, transferring, copying and processing data captured on the most recent flight. After years of listening to Americans debate the existence of data demonstrating climate change, it was comforting to come in here and reek it.

When I first arrived, I found one of the IT crew, garmented in jeans, T-shirt and slippers, and with big, sad, sleepy, beagle eyes, reclining next to the server, his feet up on a desk, chowing on a Nutella snack pack. He explained the irony of his struggle to keep the servers happy in the far north. A week earlier, when IceBridge was operating its northern flights from Thule Air Base, they couldnt seem to find any route of get the server rooms temperature down: Were in the Arctic, but our problem is seeing cold air.

For a moment he paused to consider the sheer oddness of life, but then he shrugged, and polished off his Nutella snack. But we just chug on, you know? he said.

This attitude captured something essential about IceBridge: its scrappy. Its the kind of operation in which the engineers are expected to bring their own off-the-shelf hardware back-ups from home.( As one radar tech told me: if your keyboard violates in the Arctic, you cant just go to Walmart and buy a new one .) More than one crew member described IceBridges major piece of hardware, its P-3 aircraft, as a hand-me-down. When the Nasa crew “was talkin about a” their P-3 they sometimes sounded as though they were talking about a beloved, oversized, elderly pet dog, who can act dopey but, when pressed, is amazingly agile. IceBridges P-3 is 50 years old, but as one of the navy pilots told me, they baby the hell out of it. It just got a new pair of wings. I got the strong sense that this climate data gathering operation was something of an underdog enterprise the moodier sibling of Nasas more celebrated deep-space projects.

But these unsung flights are not without their own brand of Nasa drama. The IceBridge crew would tell me, with dark witticism, the story of the time a plane was in such dire straits that everyone aboard was panicking. One man was look at this place a photo of his children on his phone, and in his other hand, was clutching a crucifix. Another man was pinned to the ceiling. Someone actually hollered Were gonna die !, like in the movies. John Sonntag, on the other hand, sit there, serenely assessing the situation.

During my time in Greenland in April this year, I didnt witness Sonntag manage a distressed aircraft, but I did watch him carefully navigate a Nasa crew through a turbulent political season. In the week I was there, the group was preparing for two anxiety-provoking scenarios, politenes of Washington, DC. One was an imminent visit from several members of Congress. As one engineer put it to me, We just get nervous, candidly, because we dont know what these politicians agenda is: are they friend or foe?

The other was an impending shutdown of the entire US federal government: if Congress didnt make a decision about the budget by Friday that week, the government would close all operations indefinitely.( The sticking point was budgetary questions related to Trumps proposed perimeter wall .) If the governmental forces shut down, Operation IceBridge was done for the season; the Nasa crew would be sent home that day.

This had happened before, in 2013, just as IceBridge was on the way to Antarctica. Congressional Republican shut down the government in their effort to thwart Obamas diabolical plot to offer medical care to millions of uninsured Americans. Much of the 2013 mission was cancelled, with millions of dollars, many hundreds of hours of preparation, and, most importantly, critical data, lost.

I still cant actually talk about that without feeling those feelings again, Sonntag told me. It was kind of traumatic for us.

The crew of IceBridge was facing an absurd scenario: living in dread of a shutdown of their work by Congress one day and, shortly thereafter, having to smile and impress members of that same Congress.

Conditioned by the tribulationsof modern commercial airline travel, I was unprepared for the casualness of my first Nasa launch. The feeling in the hangar before the flight, and as the crew prepared to launching, was of shifting workers who are hyper-attentive to their particular tasks and not the least pay particular attention to gratuitous formalities. The flights were long and the deployments were long; the key to not burning out was to pace oneself and to not linger over anything that wasnt essential. Everyone was a trusted pro and nobody was out to prove anything to anyone else.

Shortly before our 9am takeoff, I asked Sonntag what the plane should feel like when everything was going well what should I be looking for? He smiled sheepishly. To be honest, if you consider people sleeping, thats a good sign.

On the eight-hour flights, seeing engineers asleep at their stations entail international instruments below their feet were happily collecting data. For some stretches, there wasnt even data to collect: hours were expended flying between data target sites.( Over the intercom, a pilot would occasionally ask, Hey, we sciencing now or simply flying ?) Flight crew, who attend to the plane but are not directly connected to the data operation, occupied the cabin like cats, curled up proprietarily, high up on fluffy, folded-up engine covers.

This pervasive somnolence the hypnotic hum of the propellers, the occasional scene of crewmen horsing around in their flight suits, which devoted them the look of sons in pajamas coupled with the low-altitude sweeps through fantastic mountains of ice, dedicated the whole situation a dreamlike quality.

From the windows of the P-3, at 450 metres, you dont need to have read anything about glaciers to know what they are. At that low altitude, you can see the deep textures and the crevasses of the ice, and just how far the glacier widens across the land. The eye instantly grasps that the ice is a animal on the move, positively bursting ahead, while also not appearing to move at all, like a still photo of a rushing river.

A rift across Antarcticas Larsen C ice shelf, seen from an IceBridge flight. Photograph: UPI/ Barcroft Images

Seeing the polar ice from above, you get a very different view from that seen by novelists in past centuries, who saw this landscape, if at all, by boat or, more likely, from a depict. But the vision, to them, was clear enough: it was the Objective, the annihilating whiteness of demise and extinction. Herman Melville described this colour as the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide scenery of snowfalls a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink. This is where so many of those old stories terminated. The Arctic is where the ogre in Frankenstein leaps off a ship on to the ice, never to be seen again. Polar defines spell doom for Poes sailors, and Captain Nemo, who are pulled into the icy maelstrom. And celebrated real-life travellers did, in fact, succumb gruesomely on the ice, in search of the Northwest Passage, or the north pole.

But, from the window of Nasas P-3, that old narrative seems inaccurate. Consider that whiteness, which so scared Melville and Poe, who objective his Antarctic saga The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with a horrifying italicised refrain on the word white. But polar snowfall and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep grounds climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more heat is absorb and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating climate patterns, the ice helps constructs life on earth more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling anxiety in 19 th-century readers, actually induce the world more habitable.

Our bias against the poles can be detected even in that typical term of kudo for this icy scenery, otherworldly. This description is precisely incorrect: the Arctic is closely connected with every other part of the planet.

This, too, is something you can see. Flying over it, at a low altitude, I was struck by the familiarity of the thing, how much of Greenland was a visual echo of my northern homelands. In the muscular frozen ripplings of its glaciers, created by an intensely pressured flow, I saw the same strong hand that deeply etched those giant scratchings into the big boulders of Central Park in New York City. This isnt an analogy: those marks in Manhattan were make use of changing ice, the very same ice layers that still have a foothold in Greenland. I grew up, and have spent the majority of members of my life, in Ohio and New England, places that were carved out by that ice: ponds originally made of meltwater from the last great ice age, low mounds smoothed over by retreating glaciers. That old ice dedicated shape and signature to almost every important place in my life, and in the lives of so many others. And, in the future, this ice will continue to shape the places were from, right before our eyes. It is only our ignorance that stimulates us call it otherworldly.

But even as we passed through this scenery, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. At the same hour that were getting better at meeting this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate the great importance to the public, one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers.

You can hear this anxiety surface in the witticism floating around the crew. I heard one engineer gag that it might be easier to just rig up a data randomising machine, since many people out there seem to think thats what their data is anyway.

I mean, itd be much easier, and cheaper, to do upkeep on that, he pointed out.

In another conversation, about how to increase public awareness about climate change in the US, I asked one of the senior crew members whether they would greet a novelist from Breitbart aboard one of these flights.

Oh, perfectly, he said. Id love for them to see what were doing here. I suppose sitting on this plane, watching the ice, and watching the data come in would be incredibly eye-opening for them.

His optimism was inspiring and worrisome to me.

The mantra of the crew is no politics. I heard it told over and over again: just stick to the job, dont speak above your pay grade. But, of course, you dont need to have a no-politics policy unless your work is already steeped in politics.

Glaciers on the Greenland ice sheet, observed by the IceBridge crew. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/ Icebridge/ NASA

Speaking with one of the scientific researchers mid-flight, I got a very revealing answer. When I asked this researcher about the anthropogenesis of climate change, the tone changed. What had been a comfortable chat became stilted and deliberate. There was a little eye-roll toward my audio recorder. Abruptly my interlocutor, a specialist in ice, get pedantic, telling me that there were others more qualified to speak about rising sea levels. I offered to turn off my recorder. As soon as it was off, the researcher spoke freely and with the trust of a leading expert in the field. The off-the-record position expressed wasnt simply one of sober agreement with the scientific consensus, but of passionate outrage. Of course climate change is related to human activity! Weve all insured the graphs !

The tonal discrepancies between this off-the-record answer and the videotapeed answer that I should consult someone else told me all I needed to know. Or so I supposed the researcher then asked me to turn my recorder back on: there was one addendum, for the record.

Richard Nixon, the researcher said, seeming down at the red recording illumination. Nixon established some good climate policy. Theres a tradition in both parties of doing this work. And, I mean, if Nixon

The researcher giggled a bit, realising how this was sounding. Well, thats what Im hanging my hopes on, anyway.

Over the planes open intercom, there was abruptly, and uncharacteristically, talk of the working day headlines. While we were in flight, people around the world were marking Earth Day by demonstrating in support of climate rationality and against the current US regime. On Twitter, #MarchForScience was trending at the exact moment Nasas P-3 was out flying for science. There was even a local protest: American and European scientists took to the street of Kangerlussuaq for a small but high-profile demo. While it was happening, one of the engineers piped up on the P-3s intercom.

Anyone else sorry to be missing the march?

But the earnest question was merely met with stillnes and a few gags. Among the Nasa crew, there had been some talk about trying to do a flyover of the Kangerlussuaq march, to take an aerial photo of it, but the scheme was nixed for logistical reasons. The timing was off. The senior crew seemed alleviated that it was out of the question.

Later that week, after my second and final flight making a total of 16 hours in the air with Nasa the crew retreated to the barracks for a quick science meeting, brews in hand, followed by a family-style dinner. We dont seem to get enough of each other here, one of the engineers told me, as he poured a glass of wine over ice that the crew had harvested from the front of a glacier the previous day. One of the engineers asked a glaciologist about the age of this block of ice, and frowned at the disappointing respond: it probably wasnt more than a few hundred years old.

Well, thats still older than America, right? he said.

Outside, the sky wasnt dark, though it was past 10 pm. In a couple of months, there would be sunlight all night. After dinner, one of the crews laser technicians lounged on a couch, playing an acoustic version of the song Angie over and over again, creating a agreeably mesmerising effect. Two crew members talked of murderer methane gas. But most sat around, drinking and telling tales. One of the pilots tried to convince someone he had find a polar bear from the cockpit that day. These deployments are tiring, someone told me. Bullshitting is critical.

One of the crew expended his off-days on outings with a camera-equipped droning, and had attained spectacular videos of his explorations, which he edited and set to moody Bush tunes. I joined the crew as they gathered around his laptop to watch his latest. There was something moving in insuring these people who had expended the working day, and indeed many months and years, flying over ice and obsessing over ice-related data now expending their free time relaxing by watching videos of yet more ice.

As usual, politics soon snuck into the picture. The next video that popped up was footage lately shot at the Thule base. The video showed some of this same Nasa crew hiking through an deserted cement bunker, a former storage site for US Nike anti-aircraft missiles. Today its merely an eerie, rusted, shadow-filled underground space, its floor covered in thick ice. When these images came on the screen, the crew fell quiet, watching themselves, only a week ago, putting on ice skates and doing figure-eights over the wreckings of their countrys cold war weapons systems.

An engineer chipped a shard off the frozen block harvested the previous day. Perhaps sensing my mood, he dropped it into a glass and poured me some whiskey over ice older than America and told: Well anyway, perhaps thisll cheer you up.

Early the next morning, before the crew boarded the P-3 for another eight-hour flight over polar ice, a rare political debate broke out. Four of the crew were discussing the imminent Congressional visit, which prompted one of the veteran pilots to recite, once again, the mission mantra: Stick to science: no politics. But because that approach felt increasingly less plausible in 2017, one of the ice specialists, feeling frustrated, launched into a small speech about how Americans dont take data seriously, and how its going to kill us all. Nobody disagreed. Someone jokingly said: Maybe its best if you dont fly today. To which another added, Yeah, you should stay on the ground and just do push-ups all day.

Finally, John Sonntag who had been too busy reviewing flight plans to hear the chattering stood up and tapped his watch. OK guys, he said. Lets run. Its time to fly.

Main image: Nasa/ Joe MacGregor

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Read more: www.theguardian.com

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