Bridge to a Bright Future

On a sunny, windy morning 10 UC Santa Barbara undergraduate students peer over the edge of the Long Valley Caldera, the remnant of a supervolcano that erupted 760,000 years ago. From their vantage point, on the side of Mammoth Mountain in California's Eastern Sierra, they take selfies with the 20-mile-long, 11-mile-wide crater - ephemeral humans against a landscape forged by magma and sculpted by glaciers.

Only a few steps away is one of the world's premiere snow labs, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, also known as CUES. From the partially buried bunker and surrounded by supplies and equipment, climate scientist Ned Bair talks about a life spent studying snow: the cold, the rigor, the danger