CNN's Frederick Pleitgen traveled to Greenland with a team of climate scientists who are gathering up-to-date data on the island's vast ice sheet to guage how much and how fast it is melting. As one scientist on the mission says: "This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to studying climate change."
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Research Aircraft POLAR 6 being outfitted with scientific antennas and computers at the Alfred-Wegener-Institutes hangar in Bremerhaven, Germany. The plane is a totally rebuilt DC-3 Dakota from World War II.
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Geophysicist Daniel Steinhage, the head of the mission to Greenland, and his crew outfit the plane with state of the art computers. CNN camera woman Claudia Otto films the scientists.
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Captain Erik Bengtsson flies Polar 6 on a test flight over Bremerhaven before deployment to Greenland.
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POLAR 6 banking over a glacier near Kangerlussuaq in Greenland en route to a radar survey flight over Greenland's inland ice.
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Meltwater ponds below indicate surface melt during the arctic summer.
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A massive meltwater pool en route to the radar survey area. Nasa images showed unprecedented surface melt in the arctic this year.
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The crew at an ice core drill site after landing safely on the ice. The drilling has to be performed at night because the surface is so slushy from ice melt during daylight that the plane would sink in and get stuck.
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Scientists work the ice core drill in the middle of the inland ice.
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Ice core drilling crew with CNN correspondent Fred Pleitgen. Glaciologist Sepp Kipfstuhl standing in a hole for fun!
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POLAR 6 takes off from the Greenland ice shield after a successful ice-core drilling mission.
