Field Notes: Grand Mesa, Colorado

01Snowmobile rides, deep sea dives, forest hikes.

02NASA experts travel to some amazing places to learn more about our planet.

03In this bonus episode, join Jessica Mersdorf, science writer, on her journey to Grand Mesa, Colorado.

04When you step off the snowmobile and you're looking around you, you are in a flat, vast expanse of white.

05Small clumps of trees here and there, but your first sensation is of this giant tabletop of perfect, pure white snow.

06My name is Jessica Mersdorf.

07I am an earth science writer, and I just spent three days out in the field.

08A field campaign is when scientists are measuring something in the earth environment typically, where they have to physically go and be there and take those measurements themselves.

09A field campaign can take place on an island or by the ocean or in the snow or on a mountain.

10And NASA scientists go all over the world and to all sorts of different environments from the very hot to the very cold.

11I went to Grand Mesa, Colorado with the SnowX 2020 team.

12SnowX is a project that is researching snow properties.

13So depth and density, particle size, that sort of thing, using a variety of different instruments on the ground and from the air.

14NASA's interested in snow for a couple different reasons.

15It's really important to the earth's ecosystem.

16It regulates temperature and climate because it reflects sunlight back out of the atmosphere.

17And it's also important from a water perspective.

18If you live in an area where you get a lot of snow, you may rely on snow for your drinking water during the spring and summer and fall.

19When solar energy comes in, the snow reflects some of it back out.

20It also absorbs some.

21And the amount of snow and how reflectant it is plays an important role in regulating earth's global temperature.

22My job on the campaign was to simply record what the scientists were doing.

23What are the scientists doing in the morning?

24What does the sky look like today?

25What is the weather?

26Every day or almost every day, I tried to record an audio diary.

27My name is Jessica Merzdorf.

28It is very late at night and I traveled for 12 hours today.

29I'm very excited.

30I'm excited to tell the story of our NASA field campaigns because science, really, it's a dynamic process.

31It's a living process with real people.

32This was my first field campaign and I wanted to capture as many of those memories as I could.

33I wanted to remember what I was feeling like on each day.

34What was I nervous about going into it?

35What was unexpected?

36Tomorrow night, I will be up at Grand Mesa.

37So looking forward to checking in then.

38The scientists' daily field locations could only be accessed by snowmobile.

39The morning that we were supposed to take the snowmobile ride happened to be the morning that we were recovering from altitude sickness.

40So I came down to the lodge that morning, very nervous about getting onto a snowmobile.

41In order to cover as much ground as possible, the team drove very quickly.

42So we got on the snowmobile.

43We went up very steep hills.

44We went around very sharp curves.

45We would hit bumps that would throw you up and down.

46When you get off the snowmobile and you're standing near the field site, you really have a sense of standing on this giant white tabletop where there are no other humans in the world except for the people you have around you.

47SnowX has two components.

48There's the airborne component and the ground component.

49In the air, our primary instrument is called SWISAR.

50Snow-water equivalent, synthetic aperture, radar, and radiometer.

51On the ground, the measurements that are taken by SWISAR are also taken by scientists on snowmobiles.

52Scientists are driving in very tight clockwise spirals in the snow.

53And they wind up with these giant crop circle-looking things.

54The pits are often dug in the center of the spiral.

55And then they would sit in the snow pits and take the rest of these measurements by hand.

56The SnowX team had 146 planned snow pits and they wound up with 153.

57You'll see scientists around the pit who are on skis or on snowshoes.

58They're taking additional measurements of snow depth, snow particles, and so forth that you can't take down in the pit.

59The snow pits are important because some of the scientists' measurements have to do with the layers in the snow and how it changes from the surface down to the ground.

60The snow that's up on top is very light and fluffy.

61It's fresh, it's new, it's just fallen within the last couple of days.

62If you go down a little bit, there's a layer where it's been packed tightly by the wind.

63Further down, it's even more dense and there's more water in the snow that's closer to the ground.

64When I was up there, I felt a lot of conflicting feelings about the landscape.

65This is Jessica.

66I think it's around 11 o'clock Thursday morning.

67It's been...

68I don't even know how to describe how this experience has been.

69It's been harder than many things I've ever done in my life.

70Adjusting to the altitude, adjusting to the temperatures.

71It is a very harsh environment up here.

72It is cold.

73The wind blows.

74Part of me was very cold, put off by how isolated it felt, by how there were so few people up there.

75The people that you're out there with really do feel like your lifeline.

76I've never been in a place where everywhere you look is just as beautiful as what you saw a moment before.

77It's been so beautiful and rewarding.

78And getting to just see the energy of these scientists who are out here in these conditions for a week, two weeks, three weeks, collecting this data.

79It's just...

80it's mind-blowing.

81I'm really proud of myself.

82I'm really proud of the way that I've adjusted and adapted and stuck it out and tried new things and gone new places.

83And, you know, part of me is really excited to get home to the warmer temperatures and back to sea level elevation.

84And another part of me is really sad to leave because there is something magical up here that I have never found anywhere else.

85This is NASA's Curious Universe.

86And you're listening to our Field Notes series, where we send scientists and science communicators into the field with a recorder.

87If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving a review, tweeting about it at NASA, and sharing it with a friend.