Imagine, for a moment, that you’re about to fly a drone in Antarctica.

Standing on a small boat as it bobs up and down in the icy water, remove the eight-pound aircraft from the protection of its custom pelican case. At this point, you’ve already gone through a rigorous checklist — ensuring the batteries and controller are charged, the SD cards are clear, and the entire system is properly calibrated.

No detail is overlooked — you even put hand warmers in the pelican case to keep the batteries warm until it’s time to fly.

After passing the drone to Dave Johnston, your hands move to the controller, thumbing the small metal knobs to power up the motors. With the air temperature hovering around 25 degrees Fahrenheit, you should be wearing gloves, but dexterity and precision in your fingers is crucial right now so you ignore the cold. Your mind is focused entirely on the task at hand.

With the motors on, increase the throttle and check that everything is functioning properly.

Johnston lifts the drone over his head as you test each movement and call out, “pitch back, pitch forward, roll right, left.”

Deep breath. “Ready for take off?”

“Ready,” Johnston says, preparing to let go.

“Launching now.”

The drone rises quickly. Once it has reached roughly 30 meters in altitude, glance at the battery level and camera settings. Everything looks good. Now direct the aircraft to your target — a massive humpback whale.

This is the job of KC Bierlich, a PhD student at the Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab at Duke University, currently working in Antarctica.

“It’s a matter of staying focused, and trying to control your adrenaline,” Bierlich says. “You’re thinking about so many things at once — you’re on a boat that’s moving, controlling an aircraft that’s moving, trying to follow a whale that’s moving.”

As you might imagine, flying a highly specialized drone in one of the most extreme, remote environments on the planet comes with some degree of stress. “There’s the expense factor, the safety factor, the science factor — but you have to stay focused and be confident,” Bierlich says. “Your heart can be pounding but your hands have to be steady.”

While Bierlich just earned his commercial drone pilot license in May of 2017, he has spent many hours engaged in training exercises and practice flights — enough that the controller in his hands now feels intuitive.

“I have to be able to fly the drone without overthinking it,” he says. “That allows me to focus on locating the whales, and getting the perfect shot.”

The drone, a Microkopter LemHex-44, includes a laser altimeter so that Bierlich can track the exact height of the aircraft at all times. In Antarctica, he’ll fly between 15 and 80 meters, typically around 50 meters.

Tracking altitude is important for both safety and regulation — Johnston and Bierlich have special permits to fly in the Antarctic, but the aircraft must remain at least 12 meters above the animals.

The altimeter also aids in providing accurate measurements of the whales.

“If you know the size of the sensor on the camera and the focal length of the lens, you can scale any photo to a real-world measurement,” Johnston says. For example, one pixel might equate to three centimeters. They use programs like ImageJ or R to count pixels, and then scale those numbers with the altitude measurements.

“We can gather data on whales really quickly, and find out a lot about their health,” Bierlich says. “And it’s non-invasive. When we fly over animals they often don’t even know we’re there — so we can collect detailed information without disturbing them.”

During this particular research trip, Bierlich has logged 26 flights, gathering data-rich images on over 40 different whales.

In the Antarctic Peninsula, close encounters with whales can be commonplace, but Bierlich experiences them from a very unique perspective. As he flies the drone, he looks at the video screen, allowing him to see exactly what the drone’s camera sees.

“We have these amazing interactions with whales, but I get to watch them happening from above,” Bierlich says. “Oftentimes I can see the whales before the people in the boat do.”

When the team encountered a pod of minkes, Bierlich gained a new appreciation for their athleticism. “I could see them barrel rolling under the boat. At the surface, it looked like there were only two whales, but from above I could see five of them.”

Perhaps one of the most special moments occurred when Bierlich flew the drone over a mother humpback whale and her calf. “The mom was stationary, while the calf kept swimming under her and nuzzling her. It was so cool to watch the scene unfold — no one else could see that.”

Editor’s note: Mary Lide Parker is a photographer and communications specialist on the trip. This post was originally published in the In Search of Minkes blog.