Inside an Antarctic time machine Lee Hotz
come with me to the bottom of the world
Antarctica the highest driest windiest
and yes coldest region on earth more
arid than the Sahara and in parts colder
than Mars the ice of Antarctica glows
with a light so dazzling it blinds the
unprotected eye early explorers rub
cocaine in their eyes to kill the pain
of it the weight of the ice is such that
the entire continent sags below sea
level beneath its weight yet the ice of
Antarctica is a calendar of climate
change it records the annual rise and
fall of greenhouse gases and
temperatures going back before the onset
of the last ice ages nowhere on earth
offers us such a perfect record and here
scientists are drilling into the past of
our planet to find clues to the future
of climate change this past January I
traveled to a place called waste divide
about 600 miles from the South Pole it
is the best place on the planet many say
to study the history of climate change
there about 45 scientists from the
University of Wisconsin the desert
Research Institute in Nevada and others
have been working to answer a central
question about global warming what is
the exact relationship between levels of
greenhouse gases and planetary
temperatures it’s urgent work
we know that temperatures are rising
this past May was the warmest worldwide
on record and we know that levels of
greenhouse gases are rising too what we
don’t know is the exact precise
immediate impact of these changes on
natural climate patterns winds ocean
currents precipitation rates cloud
formation things that bear on the health
and well-being of billions of people
their entire camp every item of gear was
ferried 885 miles from McMurdo Station
the main US supply base on the coast of
Antarctica waste divide itself though is
a circle of tents and the snow in
Blizzard winds the crew sling ropes
between the tents
that people can feel their way safely to
the nearest ice house and to the nearest
outhouse it snows so heavily there the
installation was almost immediately
buried indeed the researchers picked
this site because ice and snow
accumulates here ten times faster than
anywhere else in Antarctica they have to
dig themselves out every day it makes
for an exotic and chilly commute but
under the surface is a hive of
industrial activity centered around an
eight million dollar drill assembly
periodically this drill like a biopsy
needle plunges thousands of feet deep
into the ice to extract a marrow of
gases and isotopes for analysis ten
times a day they extract a ten-foot long
cylinder of compressed ice crystals that
contain the unsullied air and trace
chemicals laid down by snow season after
season for thousands of years it’s
really a time machine at the peak of
activity earlier this year the
researchers lowered the drill an extra
hundred feet deeper into the ice every
day and another three hundred and sixty
five years deeper into the past
periodically they remove cylinder of ice
like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun
shell from the barrel of a drill they
inspect it they check it for cracks for
drill damage for Spall’s for chips more
importantly they prepare it for
inspection and analysis by 27
independent laboratories in the United
States and Europe who will examine it
for 40 different trace chemicals related
to climate some in parts per quadrillion
yes I said that with a Q quadrillion
they cut the cylinders up into three
foot sections for easier handling and
shipment back to these labs some 8,000
miles from the drill site each cylinder
is a parfait of time this ice formed as
snow fifteen thousand eight hundred
years ago when our ancestors were
dobbing themselves with pink and
considering the radical new technology
of the alphabet bathed in polarized
light and cut in cross-section this
ancient ice reveals itself as a mosaic
of colors each one showing how
conditions that depth in the ice have
affected this material at depths where
pressures can reach a ton per square
inch every year it begins with a
snowflake and by digging into fresh snow
we can see how this process is ongoing
today this wall of undisturbed snow
backlit by sunlight shows the striations
of winter and summer snow layer upon
layer each storm scours the atmosphere
washing out dust soot trace chemicals
and depositing them on the snowpack year
after year millennia after millennia
creating a kind of periodic table of
elements that at this point is more than
11,000 feet thick from this we can
detect an extraordinary number of things
we can see the calcium from world’s
deserts soot from distant wildfires
methane is an indicator the strength of
Pacific monsoon all wafted on winds from
warmer latitudes to this remote from
very cold place
most importantly these cylinders in the
snow trap air each cylinder is about 10%
ancient era a pristine time capsule of
greenhouse gases carbon dioxide methane
nitrous oxide all unchanged from the day
that snow formed and first fell this is
the object of their scrutiny but don’t
we already know what we need to know
about greenhouse gases why do we need to
study this anymore don’t we already know
how they affect temperatures don’t we
already know the consequences of a
changing climate on our settled
civilization the truth is we only know
the outlines and what we don’t
completely understand we can’t properly
fix indeed we run the risk of making
things worse consider the single most
successful international environmental
effort of the 20th century the Montreal
Protocol in which the nations of Earth
banded together to protect the planet
from the harmful effects of ozone
destroying chemicals used at that time
in air conditioners refrigerators and
other cooling devices we banned those
chemicals and we replace them
unknowingly with other substances that
molecule per molecule are a hundred
times more potent as heat trapping
greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide
this process requires extraordinary
precautions the scientists must ensure
that the ice is not contaminated
moreover in this 8 thousand mile journey
they have to ensure this ice doesn’t
melt
imagine juggling a snowball across the
tropics they have to in fact make sure
this ice never gets warmer than about 20
degrees below zero otherwise the key
gases inside it will dissipate so in the
coldest place on earth they work inside
a refrigerator as they handle the ice in
fact they keep an extra pair of gloves
warming in an oven so that when their
work gloves freeze and their fingers
stiffened they can Don a fresh pair they
work against the clock and against the
thermometer so far they’ve packed up
about 4,500 feet of ice cores for
shipment back to the United States this
past season they manhandled them across
the ice to waiting aircraft 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
Antarctica was this planets last empty
quarter the blind spot in our expanding
vision of the world early explorers
sailed off the edge of the map and they
found a place where the normal rules of
time and temperature seemed suspended
here the ice seems a living presence the
wind that rubs against it gives it voice
it is a voice of experience
it is a voice we should heed thank you