By: Aastha Sethi, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

N.W.T. (LJI) – Three Northwest Territories residents had the opportunity to see the territory from a NASA climate science jet on Thursday.

“It was interesting. I’ve never been on a plane like that before. I’ve done different kinds of flights, but never one where they’re collecting data like that,” said Hannah Ascough, who boarded the flight on behalf of the northern environmental advocacy group Ecology North.

During the roughly four-hour flight, Ascough said NASA scientists discussed some of the “drastic changes” the land has experienced as a result of climate change.

While flying over Kakisa Lake, the scene of an active wildfire and an area affected by previous fires, Ascough said a map showed passengers the location of fire burn scars.

She said the trip showed her “different ways of looking at land and understanding it,” and gave her knowledge she can share in climate change education programming for youth.

Tanisha Beaverho, a land use planning intern at the Tłı̨chǫ Government, said she enjoyed being able to learn about research carried out through NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, which has spent almost a decade measuring changes to the land using a radar pod mounted beneath the Gulfstream jet.

“How they work around climate change, data collecting and seeing from a bird’s point of view, it’s good to see it from eye to eye, and actually be present,” Beaverho said. “The reason I came was just to be more educated, see how these people do their work.”

The aircraft has tracked changes in permafrost, post-fire degradation and boreal forest structure across the same regions over the 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022 years – a timeline briefly disrupted by the pandemic. 

Key sites over which the jet passes each year include the Peace-Athabasca Delta, Yellowknife, Inuvik, a stretch of land near Hay River and Enterprise, and parts of Alaska and the Yukon.

Ultimately, the research aims to assess the “vulnerability and resilience of ecosystems and societies in the face of these changes” over a period of up to a decade.

Sean Erasmus, a regulatory trainee at the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, was interested in how the radar pod provided data to the team.

Erasmus said passengers got to see “lots of lakes along the way” as they flew above the Nunavut border, Fort Providence and Kakisa, among other places. He said he noticed the low water made it appear as though there were “more islands popping up.”

“They showed us some of their computer programs. It was pretty cool,” he added. “Really cool, actually.”