January 12, 2022 • 21 mins
In the final bonus episode of The Quest for the North Pole, we travel to far northwestern Greenland to see the changing Arctic firsthand. We explore the long history of this area, from its settlement by Indigenous people, to the expeditions of Peary and Rasmussen, to secret military operations during the Cold War. With scientists from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, we visit a climate-monitoring station atop the Greenland ice sheet, which gathers the data scientists need to model future changes in the Arctic—and the rest of our planet. Along the way, we'll see amazing wildlife, get frostbite, and realize how lucky we are not to be man-hauling thousand-pound sledges across the ice.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart radio and mental floss. I'm seven hundred and
fifty miles above the Arctic Circle at the very place
where explorers had launched their quests for the North Pole
more than a century ago. Before me lies the huge
(00:24):
Greenland Ice Sheet, the world's second biggest expanse of ice
after Antarctica. It's covered in a layer of spotless snow
and rises from where I stand up to the horizon,
where it meets a bank of clouds. Behind me, the
bare terrain slopes for several miles to the sea, where
I spot teeny little icebergs dotting the waters. The only
(00:49):
signs of civilization are a couple of shacks and a
gravel road that leads to the U. S. Military's Tully
Air Base, hidden behind some hills, about eighteen miles away
from my vantage point. It's easy to imagine that not
much has changed since the explorer's time, but climate records
show that it has changed dramatically. The Greenland Ice Sheet
(01:13):
is losing two hundred and eighty gigatons of ice a
year due to the warming climate. A metric gigaton is
one billion tons, two hundred and eighty billion tons is
equivalent to more than five million Titanics. It's hard to
(01:34):
see an impact so massive, but that's why I'm here.
I've come with two scientists from the Geological Survey of
Denmark and Greenland, or gay Use, who have invited me
to see how they gather the data that reveals the
future of the ice sheet, and by extension, US. Glaciologist
William Colgan and electrical engineer Christopher Shields are harnessing themselves
(01:58):
to a pair of sleds filled with sensors, tools, and
boxes of lead batteries that each way more than I do.
Despite the six inches of fluffy snow, we still wear
crampons over our waterproof boots. Our destination is an ice
sheet monitoring station fift undred meters away, all uphill. I
(02:21):
have the easiest job, just bringing up the rear while
the guys man hall the sledges in true nineteenth century
explorer fashion. But I still find myself huffing and puffing
in the cold, dry air and terrain as slippery as
a sand dune. More than one years ago, explorers like
(02:42):
fritch Off Nonsen and Robert Perry traversed this Greenland ice
their expeditions tested the boundaries of geography and human endurance.
As I flounder of the icy slope and Chris's sled tracks,
I begin to understand the extreme physical challenge is they
faced in their quests. Our mission may be less strenuous,
(03:05):
but perhaps more important. Leam and Chris will replace environmental
sensors on the monitoring station and download two years worth
of ice sheet data. This information is key towards understanding
how the ice sheets doing now and what kind of
catastrophes might occur in the future if we do nothing
to halt climate change. From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio,
(03:39):
you're listening to the Quest for the North Pole. I'm
your host Cat Long, Science editor at Mental Floss and
this is our final bonus episode live from Greenland. Just
(04:07):
getting to this remote part of Greenland was an adventure.
After flying from New York to Copenhagen by way of
Raikiavik and racking up three negative COVID tests, I met
up with Liam and Chris the following morning at the airport.
We boarded an Air Greenland flight to Kangarloo, Sack, Greenland's
major international hub. Then we transferred to a much smaller
(04:31):
plane for our flight to Tuli air Base, about nine
hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole. The base
would be our research headquarters for the week. From the plane,
the barren terrain of western Greenland spread out below my window.
In the southwest of the country, Countless lakes speckled the
glacier scoured rock. A bit farther north, we flew past
(04:55):
the Jakobshavn Icefield, one of the world's fastest moving aschers,
which appeared to litter the sea with icebergs. The terrain
shifted from weathered rock to snow covered hills, and then
finally the Greenland ice sheet, which covered the land except
for a narrow level strip at the coastline. That's where
(05:16):
we were headed. Canude Rasmussen, a Danish Greenlandic explorer honored
with a bronze bust at the Kangarloosoak Airport, connected this
area to the ancient legends of Tuli when he set
up a trading post here in long before that, this
area served as a crossroads of people and ideas. Waves
(05:39):
of Arctic settlers migrated the short distance across Baffin Bay
from present day Canada to Greenland, between b C and
twelve hundred C. They found a treeless land rich in
food sources. Thanks to the confluence of Arctic, Atlantic and
glacial waters. The seas support a vast web of marine life,
(06:03):
from the tiniest fish to the fattest walruses, as well
as Arctic foxes and musk ox, which were common sights
during my visit. The plentiful game supported a village in
the shadow of a tall, flat topped mesa, both of
which were named Umanac, which means heart shaped. In earlier
(06:24):
episodes of The Quest for the North Pole, we mentioned
how John Ross and William Edward Perry were the first
European explorers to meet the in white here in eighteen eighteen.
In the century following that meeting, more explorers and whalers
dropped their anchors at the foot of Umanac. In eighteen
forty nine, HMS north Star was on a mission to
(06:47):
resupply ships searching for the missing Franklin expedition. The North
Star got iced in and its crew was forced to
spend the winter just offshore, which gave its captain, James Saunders,
plenty of time to bestow British names on all of
the surroundings. On a map today, you'll find north Star Bay,
(07:07):
Saunders Island, and Mount Dundas, the British name for the MESA.
Robert Peery made the area his headquarters for his attempts
to reach the North Pole, though his main camp at
Eta was about a hundred forty miles north of Umanac, Canud.
Rasmussen lived in Umanac while operating the training post and
conducting his seven TOOLI expeditions across the Polar Wilderness between
(07:30):
nineteen twelve and nineteen thirty three. His colleague Peter Ferkin's
house still stands among the small cluster of brightly painted
shacks on the edge of North Star Bay. When I
visited the village, now usually called Dundas, it was eerily quiet.
In fact, it was abandoned. The U. S military had
(07:53):
removed the twenty seven families who lived here in the
nineteen fifties to a new settlement sixty miles north because
the Americans were building a top secret air base on
the other side of the bay. It was called Operation
Blue Jay. We'll be right back. At the height of
(08:28):
the Cold War, the US invested heavily in building air
bases to create a network of defenses against the Soviet Union.
Because the Soviets could theoretically launch ballistic missiles the short
distance over the North Pole to the US, American military
leaders realized they needed an Arctic based system to detect
(08:48):
those missiles. After securing agreements with NATO and Denmark, which
administered Greenland, the U. S Army launched Operation Blue Jay
to construct totally base. In nine More than seven thousand
construction workers and engineers departed from Norfolk, Virginia to build
(09:08):
the base, but the mission was so secret they weren't
even told where they were going. The Tully airstrip opened
in September, followed by sleddog patrol units and a lot more.
The specially designed construction materials proved so sturdy that most
of the barracks and offices dubbed flattops at Tulli today
(09:30):
are the original nineteen fifties facilities. In nineteen fifty two,
the military went public with Operation Blue Jay. A few
years later, the US built camps nearby to experiment with
cold weather defense and nuclear technology. One was Camp Tuto,
an acronym for Tulli Takeoff. It served as a staging
(09:54):
area for transporting equipment to Camp century, a nuclear reactor
base dug inside the ice sheets. Inland there were red
plywood buildings with snow all around them. So someone would
be like a mess hall. Another would be the latrine,
another would would be the library, and the library was great.
(10:16):
That's Jim Finnel. He was trained as a weather observer
in the Army and served at Camp two to into
And what were your duties during your weather observations. There
was a standard sheet that you had to fill out
every hour, which was of course the temperature, wind speed, direction,
(10:38):
and then you go out and estimate that cloud heights
and the types and the and the visibility. All these
things were done, of course without any radar or any
thing is that people used today. Uh. The only mechanical
thing that we had where the wind speed and direction
a little looked like a little airplane that was spent
(10:58):
around and that would it out on a printer in
a in a weather station. I remember the one thing
that most stood out was I recorded a low temperature
for and that was minus sixty three of the Camp century.
That's minus sixty three degrees fahrenheit. By recording the weather
(11:19):
conditions at Camp Tuto and century, Jim became part of
the earliest organized climate research in this area of the Arctic.
To me, it was more of an adventure. I didn't
get to go to Germany, I didn't get to travel
in Europe, but I at least got a fight break
from staying in the US all the time. These camps
(11:39):
were abandoned roughly a decade after they were built. The
Army dismantled Camp Tuto's red buildings, but left the long
gravel access road from too Lea Air Base out to
the edge of the ice sheet. And that's where I
found myself in September, bouncing along in the back seat
of a red pickup with Liam at the seal, Chris
(12:01):
on the passenger side, and sea shanties blasting from the stereo.
The terrain, as far as I could see, had been
bulldozed to create material for the road. The light layer
of snow gave the plantless brown land a sugar dusted look.
As we neared the end of the road, the edge
of the ice sheet came into view. The smoothly sloping
(12:24):
mountain of ice broke off in a slushy lake on
one side of the road. On the other, I could
see that the ice had receded and left behind a
field of rounded boulders. The remains of the road leading
to Camp Century rose about a hundred fifty feet above
the surface of the ice sheet. Though it was no
longer safe to travel on, we used the old ramp
(12:47):
as a landmark on our slippery truck up to the
ice monitoring site. The station is not a building or
large structure. It's a tall steel tripod and T shaped
metal bar with sensors to measure wind speed and direction,
air temperature, solar radiation, and snow height to other sensor
(13:07):
arrays were installed within the ice to measure temperature and
pressure at different depths. They're all connected to a box,
which Chris described as a station's brain, that transmits the
data by satellite to the Internet. Anyone can view the
status of the Greenland ice sheet in real time. This
site is paired with another identical site higher up on
(13:29):
the ice sheet. The eight pairs of stations scattered around
Greenland make up gay Uses Program for monitoring the Greenland
Ice Sheet a k A pro mice. As Liam explains,
these stations one lower and one higher. Their goal is
to measure ice and climate parameters, and so that means
(13:51):
things that we need to know about how the ice
sheet is responding to climate change, and so we have
to measure all the things you might need in a
climate model, for example, we want to actually measure them,
as we say, in situ or out in the real world,
so we can compare what our climate models sees or
thinks is happening versus what is actually happening. No one
(14:15):
had visited this station since May. Thanks coronavirus, Liam and
Chris had to lay the whole station on its side
to replace the sensors, and that required digging the tripod
out of a year and a half of accumulated ice.
Then each sensor had to be unscrewed from its amount
and a new one screwed in. Knots of frozen wires
(14:38):
had to be untangled. Easier said than done when it's
about seventeen degrees and snowing sideways like it was during
our visit. This is why you get like frostbite on
your fingers because you're you're doing this really fine detailed work,
like splicing a wire in and then trying to like
close the cap back on and like doing these little screws,
(14:59):
and you know, something like that it'll take forty five
minutes to troubleshoot and solve. The pain is worth it.
Two Glaciologists like Liam because it leads to a better
understanding of the ice sheets mass balance, the measure of
how much mass the ice sheet is accumulating through snowfall
and how much it's losing through melting or icebergs breaking off.
(15:21):
The idea is if we can get a handle on
the mass balance, the inputs and the outputs through time
through space, then we can understand how the ice sheet
health is changing through time and space today or at
least in recent years. When we look into the climate
projections that the UN talks about, we can look at
the different climate pathways and try to say, hey, this
(15:41):
is what the ice sheet health is going to be
under each pathway based on our knowledge of these processes today,
and so what is the health today that you're looking at.
Um The ice sheet is in a state of persistent
decline or poor health today. It has a negative mass balance,
which means the output that is the melt water runoff
(16:04):
and the iceberg having the outputs are much greater than
the inputs. And as the climate warms, you know that
has a direct effect on how much the ice sheet melts.
Remember those five million titanic's worth of ice lost each
year that I mentioned at the beginning of our story.
That's equivalent to about eight or nine thousand metric tons
(16:27):
per second, which is also an almost inconceivably large number,
But maybe it also helps to contextualize it when you
just think of thousands of tons of mass loss per second,
you know that's that's the annual average. That's day in,
day out, around the clock, around the year. All of
this is actually changing gravity. Essentially, as Greenland loses ice,
(16:51):
it becomes lighter, which means it can exert less gravitational pull.
Because of that, it can't hold ocean waters as close
to it as four The waters are released to slosh
around the earth and collect elsewhere, meaning that places thousands
of kilometers away are more affected by melting ice than
(17:11):
places nearer to the poles. Another mind boggling effect of
Greenland's loss of ice is called post glacial rebound. For millennia,
Greenland's land has been pressed down under the weight of
the ice sheet, but as the ice sheet melts, it
gets lighter and the land below it springs upward at
(17:33):
a monitoring station near the fast moving Yakopshoven Glacier. The
bedrock is now ten ft higher above sea level than
in nine That's ten times the average. Other Greenland glaciers
have experienced one foot of rebound in that time period,
which is still a lot. Knowing how different Greenland looked
(17:55):
back then, I couldn't help but reflect on the many
ways the explorers experiences differed from mine. The glaciers and
icebergs and snowpack they witnessed no longer exist. The Greenland
ice sheet near the Tudor Road terminates in a lake
instead of land. Just the fact that I, a regular
(18:16):
New Yorker, could visit this part of the world, was
an indication that times had changed. Instead of sea boots
and woolen mittens, we wore layers of down and fleece.
Instead of hauling thousand pounds sledges over the ice, we
carried only the gear we needed for each day's work.
And instead of spending months or years in the Arctic wilderness,
(18:38):
we went back to the air Bass hotel each night.
We even had a beer at the top of the
World Club the local bar. Our. Days were hard, they
were tough, they were long, they were cold and windy,
But if you back up almost a hundred years, you know,
now we have you know, cortex and like goggles and stuff.
(19:00):
I can't imagine what it would be like to be
sledging across the ice sheet in anything colder than full
polar summer. You know, must have just been super tough.
I was encased in multiple layers at all times on
(19:20):
of my entire body for this entire week. So for
all the obsessing and reading and historical analysis I've done
of the Arctic, this was my first time actually going
there and I survived and that's okay. And I didn't
even have to eat any pemmican, So no, I mean,
(19:41):
by Arctic standards, this is the first week that the
snow has started to collect on the ice sheet, so
it was still Arctic summer here last week, and now
the snow is starting to collect, and we're in single
digits negative temperatures, so it's cool. I can't help but
notice that throughout the whole week in Greenland, you never
once wore a scarf. Can you discuss how this is possible? So, uh, well,
(20:09):
I didn't pack a scarf. It was colder than I expected,
but it wasn't It wasn't that bad to me. This
trip really capped off the story of the Quest for
the North Pole. I was able to see the dramatic
effects of climate change on a place that explorers believed
would be frozen forever. It drove home the idea that
(20:32):
what happens in the Arctic does not stay there. Its
future is our future too. The Quest for the North
(20:52):
Pole is hosted by me cat Long. This episode was
researched and written by Me, with fact checking by Austin
to Simson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited
by Dylan Fagan. Thank you to Jim Fennel, Liam Colgan,
(21:13):
and Chris Shields for transcripts, a glossary, and to learn
more about this episode, visit Mental Flaws dot com slash podcast.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental gloss For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more
(21:49):
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart radio and mental floss. I'm seven hundred and
fifty miles above the Arctic Circle at the very place
where explorers had launched their quests for the North Pole
more than a century ago. Before me lies the huge
(00:24):
Greenland Ice Sheet, the world's second biggest expanse of ice
after Antarctica. It's covered in a layer of spotless snow
and rises from where I stand up to the horizon,
where it meets a bank of clouds. Behind me, the
bare terrain slopes for several miles to the sea, where
I spot teeny little icebergs dotting the waters. The only
(00:49):
signs of civilization are a couple of shacks and a
gravel road that leads to the U. S. Military's Tully
Air Base, hidden behind some hills, about eighteen miles away
from my vantage point. It's easy to imagine that not
much has changed since the explorer's time, but climate records
show that it has changed dramatically. The Greenland Ice Sheet
(01:13):
is losing two hundred and eighty gigatons of ice a
year due to the warming climate. A metric gigaton is
one billion tons, two hundred and eighty billion tons is
equivalent to more than five million Titanics. It's hard to
(01:34):
see an impact so massive, but that's why I'm here.
I've come with two scientists from the Geological Survey of
Denmark and Greenland, or gay Use, who have invited me
to see how they gather the data that reveals the
future of the ice sheet, and by extension, US. Glaciologist
William Colgan and electrical engineer Christopher Shields are harnessing themselves
(01:58):
to a pair of sleds filled with sensors, tools, and
boxes of lead batteries that each way more than I do.
Despite the six inches of fluffy snow, we still wear
crampons over our waterproof boots. Our destination is an ice
sheet monitoring station fift undred meters away, all uphill. I
(02:21):
have the easiest job, just bringing up the rear while
the guys man hall the sledges in true nineteenth century
explorer fashion. But I still find myself huffing and puffing
in the cold, dry air and terrain as slippery as
a sand dune. More than one years ago, explorers like
(02:42):
fritch Off Nonsen and Robert Perry traversed this Greenland ice
their expeditions tested the boundaries of geography and human endurance.
As I flounder of the icy slope and Chris's sled tracks,
I begin to understand the extreme physical challenge is they
faced in their quests. Our mission may be less strenuous,
(03:05):
but perhaps more important. Leam and Chris will replace environmental
sensors on the monitoring station and download two years worth
of ice sheet data. This information is key towards understanding
how the ice sheets doing now and what kind of
catastrophes might occur in the future if we do nothing
to halt climate change. From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio,
(03:39):
you're listening to the Quest for the North Pole. I'm
your host Cat Long, Science editor at Mental Floss and
this is our final bonus episode live from Greenland. Just
(04:07):
getting to this remote part of Greenland was an adventure.
After flying from New York to Copenhagen by way of
Raikiavik and racking up three negative COVID tests, I met
up with Liam and Chris the following morning at the airport.
We boarded an Air Greenland flight to Kangarloo, Sack, Greenland's
major international hub. Then we transferred to a much smaller
(04:31):
plane for our flight to Tuli air Base, about nine
hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole. The base
would be our research headquarters for the week. From the plane,
the barren terrain of western Greenland spread out below my window.
In the southwest of the country, Countless lakes speckled the
glacier scoured rock. A bit farther north, we flew past
(04:55):
the Jakobshavn Icefield, one of the world's fastest moving aschers,
which appeared to litter the sea with icebergs. The terrain
shifted from weathered rock to snow covered hills, and then
finally the Greenland ice sheet, which covered the land except
for a narrow level strip at the coastline. That's where
(05:16):
we were headed. Canude Rasmussen, a Danish Greenlandic explorer honored
with a bronze bust at the Kangarloosoak Airport, connected this
area to the ancient legends of Tuli when he set
up a trading post here in long before that, this
area served as a crossroads of people and ideas. Waves
(05:39):
of Arctic settlers migrated the short distance across Baffin Bay
from present day Canada to Greenland, between b C and
twelve hundred C. They found a treeless land rich in
food sources. Thanks to the confluence of Arctic, Atlantic and
glacial waters. The seas support a vast web of marine life,
(06:03):
from the tiniest fish to the fattest walruses, as well
as Arctic foxes and musk ox, which were common sights
during my visit. The plentiful game supported a village in
the shadow of a tall, flat topped mesa, both of
which were named Umanac, which means heart shaped. In earlier
(06:24):
episodes of The Quest for the North Pole, we mentioned
how John Ross and William Edward Perry were the first
European explorers to meet the in white here in eighteen eighteen.
In the century following that meeting, more explorers and whalers
dropped their anchors at the foot of Umanac. In eighteen
forty nine, HMS north Star was on a mission to
(06:47):
resupply ships searching for the missing Franklin expedition. The North
Star got iced in and its crew was forced to
spend the winter just offshore, which gave its captain, James Saunders,
plenty of time to bestow British names on all of
the surroundings. On a map today, you'll find north Star Bay,
(07:07):
Saunders Island, and Mount Dundas, the British name for the MESA.
Robert Peery made the area his headquarters for his attempts
to reach the North Pole, though his main camp at
Eta was about a hundred forty miles north of Umanac, Canud.
Rasmussen lived in Umanac while operating the training post and
conducting his seven TOOLI expeditions across the Polar Wilderness between
(07:30):
nineteen twelve and nineteen thirty three. His colleague Peter Ferkin's
house still stands among the small cluster of brightly painted
shacks on the edge of North Star Bay. When I
visited the village, now usually called Dundas, it was eerily quiet.
In fact, it was abandoned. The U. S military had
(07:53):
removed the twenty seven families who lived here in the
nineteen fifties to a new settlement sixty miles north because
the Americans were building a top secret air base on
the other side of the bay. It was called Operation
Blue Jay. We'll be right back. At the height of
(08:28):
the Cold War, the US invested heavily in building air
bases to create a network of defenses against the Soviet Union.
Because the Soviets could theoretically launch ballistic missiles the short
distance over the North Pole to the US, American military
leaders realized they needed an Arctic based system to detect
(08:48):
those missiles. After securing agreements with NATO and Denmark, which
administered Greenland, the U. S Army launched Operation Blue Jay
to construct totally base. In nine More than seven thousand
construction workers and engineers departed from Norfolk, Virginia to build
(09:08):
the base, but the mission was so secret they weren't
even told where they were going. The Tully airstrip opened
in September, followed by sleddog patrol units and a lot more.
The specially designed construction materials proved so sturdy that most
of the barracks and offices dubbed flattops at Tulli today
(09:30):
are the original nineteen fifties facilities. In nineteen fifty two,
the military went public with Operation Blue Jay. A few
years later, the US built camps nearby to experiment with
cold weather defense and nuclear technology. One was Camp Tuto,
an acronym for Tulli Takeoff. It served as a staging
(09:54):
area for transporting equipment to Camp century, a nuclear reactor
base dug inside the ice sheets. Inland there were red
plywood buildings with snow all around them. So someone would
be like a mess hall. Another would be the latrine,
another would would be the library, and the library was great.
(10:16):
That's Jim Finnel. He was trained as a weather observer
in the Army and served at Camp two to into
And what were your duties during your weather observations. There
was a standard sheet that you had to fill out
every hour, which was of course the temperature, wind speed, direction,
(10:38):
and then you go out and estimate that cloud heights
and the types and the and the visibility. All these
things were done, of course without any radar or any
thing is that people used today. Uh. The only mechanical
thing that we had where the wind speed and direction
a little looked like a little airplane that was spent
(10:58):
around and that would it out on a printer in
a in a weather station. I remember the one thing
that most stood out was I recorded a low temperature
for and that was minus sixty three of the Camp century.
That's minus sixty three degrees fahrenheit. By recording the weather
(11:19):
conditions at Camp Tuto and century, Jim became part of
the earliest organized climate research in this area of the Arctic.
To me, it was more of an adventure. I didn't
get to go to Germany, I didn't get to travel
in Europe, but I at least got a fight break
from staying in the US all the time. These camps
(11:39):
were abandoned roughly a decade after they were built. The
Army dismantled Camp Tuto's red buildings, but left the long
gravel access road from too Lea Air Base out to
the edge of the ice sheet. And that's where I
found myself in September, bouncing along in the back seat
of a red pickup with Liam at the seal, Chris
(12:01):
on the passenger side, and sea shanties blasting from the stereo.
The terrain, as far as I could see, had been
bulldozed to create material for the road. The light layer
of snow gave the plantless brown land a sugar dusted look.
As we neared the end of the road, the edge
of the ice sheet came into view. The smoothly sloping
(12:24):
mountain of ice broke off in a slushy lake on
one side of the road. On the other, I could
see that the ice had receded and left behind a
field of rounded boulders. The remains of the road leading
to Camp Century rose about a hundred fifty feet above
the surface of the ice sheet. Though it was no
longer safe to travel on, we used the old ramp
(12:47):
as a landmark on our slippery truck up to the
ice monitoring site. The station is not a building or
large structure. It's a tall steel tripod and T shaped
metal bar with sensors to measure wind speed and direction,
air temperature, solar radiation, and snow height to other sensor
(13:07):
arrays were installed within the ice to measure temperature and
pressure at different depths. They're all connected to a box,
which Chris described as a station's brain, that transmits the
data by satellite to the Internet. Anyone can view the
status of the Greenland ice sheet in real time. This
site is paired with another identical site higher up on
(13:29):
the ice sheet. The eight pairs of stations scattered around
Greenland make up gay Uses Program for monitoring the Greenland
Ice Sheet a k A pro mice. As Liam explains,
these stations one lower and one higher. Their goal is
to measure ice and climate parameters, and so that means
(13:51):
things that we need to know about how the ice
sheet is responding to climate change, and so we have
to measure all the things you might need in a
climate model, for example, we want to actually measure them,
as we say, in situ or out in the real world,
so we can compare what our climate models sees or
thinks is happening versus what is actually happening. No one
(14:15):
had visited this station since May. Thanks coronavirus, Liam and
Chris had to lay the whole station on its side
to replace the sensors, and that required digging the tripod
out of a year and a half of accumulated ice.
Then each sensor had to be unscrewed from its amount
and a new one screwed in. Knots of frozen wires
(14:38):
had to be untangled. Easier said than done when it's
about seventeen degrees and snowing sideways like it was during
our visit. This is why you get like frostbite on
your fingers because you're you're doing this really fine detailed work,
like splicing a wire in and then trying to like
close the cap back on and like doing these little screws,
(14:59):
and you know, something like that it'll take forty five
minutes to troubleshoot and solve. The pain is worth it.
Two Glaciologists like Liam because it leads to a better
understanding of the ice sheets mass balance, the measure of
how much mass the ice sheet is accumulating through snowfall
and how much it's losing through melting or icebergs breaking off.
(15:21):
The idea is if we can get a handle on
the mass balance, the inputs and the outputs through time
through space, then we can understand how the ice sheet
health is changing through time and space today or at
least in recent years. When we look into the climate
projections that the UN talks about, we can look at
the different climate pathways and try to say, hey, this
(15:41):
is what the ice sheet health is going to be
under each pathway based on our knowledge of these processes today,
and so what is the health today that you're looking at.
Um The ice sheet is in a state of persistent
decline or poor health today. It has a negative mass balance,
which means the output that is the melt water runoff
(16:04):
and the iceberg having the outputs are much greater than
the inputs. And as the climate warms, you know that
has a direct effect on how much the ice sheet melts.
Remember those five million titanic's worth of ice lost each
year that I mentioned at the beginning of our story.
That's equivalent to about eight or nine thousand metric tons
(16:27):
per second, which is also an almost inconceivably large number,
But maybe it also helps to contextualize it when you
just think of thousands of tons of mass loss per second,
you know that's that's the annual average. That's day in,
day out, around the clock, around the year. All of
this is actually changing gravity. Essentially, as Greenland loses ice,
(16:51):
it becomes lighter, which means it can exert less gravitational pull.
Because of that, it can't hold ocean waters as close
to it as four The waters are released to slosh
around the earth and collect elsewhere, meaning that places thousands
of kilometers away are more affected by melting ice than
(17:11):
places nearer to the poles. Another mind boggling effect of
Greenland's loss of ice is called post glacial rebound. For millennia,
Greenland's land has been pressed down under the weight of
the ice sheet, but as the ice sheet melts, it
gets lighter and the land below it springs upward at
(17:33):
a monitoring station near the fast moving Yakopshoven Glacier. The
bedrock is now ten ft higher above sea level than
in nine That's ten times the average. Other Greenland glaciers
have experienced one foot of rebound in that time period,
which is still a lot. Knowing how different Greenland looked
(17:55):
back then, I couldn't help but reflect on the many
ways the explorers experiences differed from mine. The glaciers and
icebergs and snowpack they witnessed no longer exist. The Greenland
ice sheet near the Tudor Road terminates in a lake
instead of land. Just the fact that I, a regular
(18:16):
New Yorker, could visit this part of the world, was
an indication that times had changed. Instead of sea boots
and woolen mittens, we wore layers of down and fleece.
Instead of hauling thousand pounds sledges over the ice, we
carried only the gear we needed for each day's work.
And instead of spending months or years in the Arctic wilderness,
(18:38):
we went back to the air Bass hotel each night.
We even had a beer at the top of the
World Club the local bar. Our. Days were hard, they
were tough, they were long, they were cold and windy,
But if you back up almost a hundred years, you know,
now we have you know, cortex and like goggles and stuff.
(19:00):
I can't imagine what it would be like to be
sledging across the ice sheet in anything colder than full
polar summer. You know, must have just been super tough.
I was encased in multiple layers at all times on
(19:20):
of my entire body for this entire week. So for
all the obsessing and reading and historical analysis I've done
of the Arctic, this was my first time actually going
there and I survived and that's okay. And I didn't
even have to eat any pemmican, So no, I mean,
(19:41):
by Arctic standards, this is the first week that the
snow has started to collect on the ice sheet, so
it was still Arctic summer here last week, and now
the snow is starting to collect, and we're in single
digits negative temperatures, so it's cool. I can't help but
notice that throughout the whole week in Greenland, you never
once wore a scarf. Can you discuss how this is possible? So, uh, well,
(20:09):
I didn't pack a scarf. It was colder than I expected,
but it wasn't It wasn't that bad to me. This
trip really capped off the story of the Quest for
the North Pole. I was able to see the dramatic
effects of climate change on a place that explorers believed
would be frozen forever. It drove home the idea that
(20:32):
what happens in the Arctic does not stay there. Its
future is our future too. The Quest for the North
(20:52):
Pole is hosted by me cat Long. This episode was
researched and written by Me, with fact checking by Austin
to Simson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Clang.
The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited
by Dylan Fagan. Thank you to Jim Fennel, Liam Colgan,
(21:13):
and Chris Shields for transcripts, a glossary, and to learn
more about this episode, visit Mental Flaws dot com slash podcast.
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental gloss For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more
(21:49):
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
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