Outside magazine has done a short piece on the rapidly upcoming DarkSnowProject mission to Greenland. We are still in fundraising mode – although Dr. Jason Box assures me we have enough that we won’t have to swim home, every bit of additional funding means more flight-time, and ice-time, for the scientific team – so if you haven’t jumped in yet, check the button below…

Outside Online:

Everything is connected; a catastrophic weather event in one hemisphere can have ripple effects on the other side of the globe. That is no news to climate scientists. But last summer, as the United States was in the throes of one of its worst wildfire seasons on record, climate scientist Jason Box, who studies Greenland’s ice sheet, wondered about a direct link between those fires and the frightening speed at which the ice sheet was melting.

Among the fires last summer were large tundra blazes in Alaska and Canada. Box used weather analysis and computer models to show that smoke from those fires later passed over the Greenland ice sheet. Last summer also marked a catastrophic, unprecedented milestone in the loss of that ice sheet: 90 percent of the world’s largest island was thawing in July.

Did the wildfires exacerbate that massive thaw? Box thinks they did, and now he’s leading a fundraising effort to find out.

SCIENCE-STARTER

Is this the new reality? Will more and more scientists need to turn to the masses and to platforms like Kickstarter to get their funding? “Some funders say they’re outraged that the government doesn’t support us, but the reality is that we are trying to get ahead of that,” Box explains.

The quick “no” he received from the NSF to his initial request didn’t surprise Box, because he’d been seeking money from the rapid funding program, which is generally used to fund research in the wake of a volcano or a similar event that requires a quick response. Plus, Box had recently received a rapid funding grant for another project. He says he could have held off and applied for government funding through other avenues, but that process would have taken at least a year and he wants to strike while the memory of last summer’s fire season is still hot, so to speak.

“The 2012 wildfires captured the attention of the American public,” he says. “Not just in Colorado but elsewhere, so the timing is good. Let’s get there this summer.”

Besides, Box likes to try new things. “It’s like an experiment. I’m learning a ton about marketing and what motivates people and how to use the media to engage in citizen science,” he says.

(Box) says he’s yet to find any animosity from the scientific community, either. “I spoke with program managers from NASA and NSF…. I was kind of apologizing to them. I don’t want to alienate them [by crowdfunding]. But they were like, ‘No, no, this is exciting.'”

Still, the crowdfunding model does raise some concerns. With so much attention for the project coming from Slate, Box worries about uneven support. “Citizen science is attractive but not without a potential political bias when climate change is concerned. I doubt many donors are from the political right—their opinion leaders are messaging them away from climate change science support.”

If it takes off, crowdfunded science could create a platform for more nimble, fast-paced research that isn’t bogged down by bureaucracy.