Until recently, most migrants setting out for Italy made the crossing on small vessels. But, in a new twist, Italian authorities at the beginning of this year rescued hundreds of migrants, including pregnant women and dozens of children, aboard an aging steel hulled freighter.

But the fortress has merely rechanneled, rather than stemmed, the flow of people, forcing migrants and refugees to attempt dangerous sea crossings even as search and rescue operations are being scaled back. The only beneficiaries are the human traffickers that charge Syrian refugees some 6,000 for space in a dangerous boat or freighter.

The 109th Air National Guard flew the most recent shipment of ice back to the coast of Antarctica, where it was boarded onto a freighter, shipped across the tropics to California, unloaded, put on a truck, driven across the desert to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, where, as we speak, scientists are now slicing this material up for samples, for analysis, to be distributed to the laboratories around the country and in Europe.