The RV Polarstern during the MOSAiC expedition. Photo Credit: Janek Uin

In an August 2024 podcast interview, the past and present President of the United States said that “when these poor fools talk about global warming, they don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because, you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and some are warming.”

Today, two very famous parts of the planet are definitely on a warming trend. The North and South Poles have been kingdoms of ice and snow for 30 million years. Today, average temperatures in the Antarctic are rising twice as fast as those in the rest of the world, and Arctic temperatures are rising even faster.

It is in these places that the future is taking shape. The best science predicts a future of rising sea levels, worsening weather and big shifts in where agriculture, animal life and human beings can thrive. On a day when an icy wind whips tears from our eyes, it’s easy to joke about global warming. But if we’re playing the odds, the smart money is on a rate of change that is hard to envision.

Racing Against Time

Envisioning it, however, is the job of a scientific community that is racing against time to understand what is happening at the poles, so they can better chart the future and help the rest of us to deal with it.

Starting in 2019, the crew of an icebreaker called Polarstern (“North Star” in English), trapped their ship in Arctic ice for an entire year. One hundred researchers from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute labored through the cold and darkness, tracking changes in the ice, ocean and atmosphere.

At the other end of the Earth, researchers for the Australian Antarctic Program sail aboard an icebreaker and floating laboratory called Nuyina. Their work is critical in a place where massive shelves of ice grow weaker by the year, raising the risk they will plunge into the ocean and free the glaciers behind them to flow even faster into the sea.

The Data Deluge

Visiting the ends of the Earth is all about gathering data. The Polarstern’s year in the ice produced more than 90,000 data points. A single voyage of the Nuyina creates 160 trillion bytes of data. In the race against time, however, no one can afford to wait months for ships to return to port with information. They need it now.

And that’s where satellite innovation is coming to the rescue. High latitudes have always challenged GEO connectivity because the Earth’s curvature imposes punishing look angles. Passing through so much of Earth’s atmosphere weakens the signal, and a hill or iceberg in the wrong place blocks it completely. The new global constellations of Starlink and OneWeb serve the poles, but the high frequencies they use are vulnerable to rain fade in the kind of ferocious weather found at the ends of the Earth.

The answer lies in the latest generation of multi-orbit, multi-path networks. These research organizations both contract with Speedcast, a communications and IT services provider, for connectivity to their vessels. Speedcast uses its unique SIGMA network management platform to seamlessly blend Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), Geostationary Orbit (GEO), L-band, and cellular services to provide automated route diversity and the very high uptime it supports.

For the Australian Antarctic Survey, the company moves 1,700 gigabytes of data a day from the Antarctic to Australia during research expeditions. In 2023, the Polarstern ploughed through thin ice all the way to the North Pole, where the captain announced their arrival by email over OneWeb service. It was the ship’s seventh visit to the Pole, he wrote – but the first one where he could tell the world about it as it happened.

The pandemic of 2019-2022 brought great suffering to billions. But it also demonstrated the incredible speed at which revolutionary vaccines could come to market. That speed was due, not merely to political will in the face of crisis, but to the patient, unheralded work of scientists and companies, which spent decades developing the knowledge and tools that made those vaccines possible. The work taking place at the ends of the Earth, delivered to the world by satellite, holds the same promise: that when we face the climate crisis so many of us fear, we will have the knowledge and tools to find solutions.

Robert Bell is executive director of Space & Satellite Professionals International.  SSPI produces the Better Satellite World campaign, which dramatizes the immense contributions of space and satellite to life on Earth.  More at www.bettersateliteworld.com.