Transcriber: Nhung Nguyen Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Having grown up in the mountains of West Virginia,
I came to Ohio State University for my graduate work
and during my first quarter here, I was offered a position
in what was the Institute of Polar Studies,
to study ice.
And at the time, I remember thinking:
“How in the world could you ever make a living looking at ice?”
But I took the position and went on to do my Ph.D.
by comparing the very first climate record
from an ice core drilled through Greenland that came
with the very first ice core record
drilled through West Antarctica at Byrd Station.
And in doing that, I realized that we needed some records
from the lower latitudes to connect these distant parts of the world.
So in 1973, I took some aerial photographs of a tropical ice cap,
Quelccaya ice cap in the Andes of Peru right above the Amazon basin.
I took it to National Science Foundation and the polar programs.
They were the only ones that funded ice core research at the time.
And I made the case.
And when I finished, the program manager looked at me.
He said, you know, Lonnie, that sounds like it could be very important.
But, you know, I can’t fund it
because it’s not North of the Arctic Circle.
It’s not South of the Antarctic Circle.
So disappointed, I left.
And in the winter of 73, 74, I made my first trip to Antarctica.
To Byrd Station.
In February, I got a telex from the program manager and he said, Lonnie,
I have 7000 dollars left. I funded all of my real science projects.
What could you do on that tropical glacier for 7000 dollars?
And I thought about it, I telexed back, I said, I think we could get there.
And the next summer four of us made a trip to this Quelccaya ice cap.
We were amazed about the size of the ice cap and but we saw the difficulty.
It was a two day journey from the end of the nearest road.
The summit was almost 19,000 feet.
So how would you ever get an ice core out of this remote part of the world?
This started almost a decade of trial and failure.
And at one stage, one of the leading scientists in our area sent a letter
to the National Science Foundation,
said this ice cap is too high for human beings
and the technology didn’t exist to drill it.
But we persisted and we developed
the very first solar powered ice core drill.
In 1983, we drilled not one but two ice cores.
Each 1500 feet in length.
We brought back 6000 bottles of water samples and produced a wonderful record
covering the last 1800 years in the part of the world
where we knew nothing.
Now, ice cores are amazing.
They record everything that’s in the atmosphere and they freeze it in time.
We can look at not only climate,
things like temperature through the isotopes
that make up the water that makes up the ice.
But we can look at precipitation where we have annual layers
and how precipitation has changed through time.
But they also record their forcing of climate,
things like volcanic eruptions through tephra and sulfate layers.
They record the history of energy output of our sun
through the cosmogenic nuclides like chlorine-36 and beryllium-10.
These ice cores capture the atmosphere of our past
in the bubbles in the ice.
And we now have records that span 800,000 years of CO2
and methane and nitrous oxide,
the greenhouse gases that we’re concerned about today.
More recently, we’re looking at the fire history of the Amazon.
And we’re looking at the evolution of microbes through time.
It’s a wonderful archive of our past.
We often forget we live on a sphere.
And because of that we have
over 50 percent of the surface area of our planet,
between 30 North and 30 South.
We also have over 70 percent of our 7.8 billion people living in this area.
So it’s very important to understand both natural
and human driven climate change.
And since Quelccaya, we have now drilled in 16 different countries
in addition to Antarctica and Greenland.
And this is a team effort.
A team effort, our group at home, and also internationally.
And it could not be done without international collaboration.
The other challenge we had was --
How do you get the ice cores back
and keep them frozen when you bring them out of the tropics?
And we developed the technology to do that.
Every country is different.
But if you're drilling in the Himalayas,
you start out above 22,000 feet.
You can use Sherpas and porters to carry the cores.
But when you get down to the margin,
you’re still 4000 feet from the Tibetan plateau,
where you can bring in a freezer truck.
So you have to use local transportation.
If you’re in the Himalayas,
these are yaks and these are special insulated boxes.
The cores go down to the freezer truck.
They have to be transported
from the other side of the world to the Byrd Polar Climate Research Center.
There we have freezers where we have over four and a half mile of ice
at minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
And we have cores now in this collection from glaciers that no longer exist
in the natural world.
When we started this program,
climate change and global warming was not an issue,
what we were trying to do is to understand climate change in parts of
the world where we had no records.
So in the Andes, we developed the very first record
of the little ice age in the tropics.
We went on to develop a history of the last ice age
in the Andes right above the Amazon basin.
At the same time, Columbus, Ohio, was under a mile of ice.
And in the Himalayas, we were able to develop a history of monsoon failure
long before people were there to record these.
And these were published in science papers.
But it was in the collection of these cores from these diverse regions that
and looking at the temperature records that we started to become concerned.
For example, if you looked at the last 2000 years,
you can see how rapid the temperatures have warmed in the last 50 years.
And ice serves not only as a recorder, it serves as an indicator of change.
On the left here, you can see Qori Kalis glacier.
This is the largest outlet glacier coming off the Quelccaya ice cap.
This is what it looked like in 1978.
Forty years later, this is what it looks like.
And this is happening to every glacier in the Andes,
in the Himalayas and throughout the world the high mountain regions.
On the right, you can see the layers that were visible
in the margins of this ice cap in the 1970s.
These are annual layers and they’re two to three meters thick.
And you can see the history there.
Twenty two years later, this is what that same place looks like.
So it brings home the message:
we’re losing the history that’s in the ice,
but we’re also losing a very valuable water resource
for the people who live downstream.
There are millions of people who live downstream from glaciers,
and they depend on these glaciers in the dry season
and during times of drought for water,
for irrigation and for hydroelectric power.
But it was this observation that led me to join a number of paleo climatologist
to testify before the US Senate in 1992 about climate change.
Since then, glaciers around the world have continued to retreat.
Some have disappeared.
Now we have melting going on around the big ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica.
All that water is going in the ocean.
The oceans are getting warmer, the water is expanding.
And over the last hundred years,
sea level has risen by eight inches and it's accelerating.
And if you ask the question,
what would the world look like if we lost only ten percent of the ice
that’s now on land?
So here’s our Gulf Coast.
This is how it appears today if you lose ten percent.
This is what it looks like.
And over 50 percent of our largest cities on this planet are in the coastlines
and are at risk with climate change.
On land, we have seen extreme events in 2020.
The mega fires here in the US.
We lost 11.3 million acres of forest.
Back in 1992 we were losing on average,
about two million acres of forest to fires.
Since 1992, we’ve added another 2.5 billion people to the planet.
This is what our world looks like at night from space.
Those electric lights, 65 percent of the energy
is coming from burning of fossil fuels.
But what is really challenging is
what the world is projected to look like in less than 10 years?
And the question is, where will that energy come from?
We’re at a time where we have to have a mindset change for human being,
if we are going to have any hope of reducing major climate effects
going forward in time.
Having a mindset change is not unfamiliar to me in my own life.
Over 20 years ago, I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma,
which made it difficult for me to breathe and operate on these mountaintops.
But there was medicine for that.
And for 20 years, I ran, followed my passion.
But then shortness of breath got worse, coughing, so I sought medical help again.
This time I was told I had congestive heart failure.
And going forward I had one choice and one choice only.
And that was to get a heart transplant.
And I thought about that, I said no, I fought it for two years.
It’s got to be the asthma and oh, by the way, I’m getting older.
It's harder to climb the high elevation.
But two years later, I was drilling in the Alps,
couldn’t walk from my tent to the drill site.
And coming back home to Ohio State University,
I went to the Ross Heart Hospital.
On May 1st of 2012, I got a heart transplant.
And I was very fortunate to get a heart transplant.
And if you think about it,
a heart is the ultimate gift that one human being can give to another.
But what I realized that all my fears of the future were unfounded.
Since 2013, I’ve run six expeditions to the highest mountains on Earth.
In 2015, I had set a world record for a heart transplant patient
above 22,000 feet in the Western coolands in far Western Tibet.
And in 2019, our team drilled the highest tropical mountain on earth.
Our fossil fuel industry has to have a mindset change as we go forward in time.
You can’t deny climate change any longer.
Just like me.
Honestly, you have to deal with the facts and you have to make the change.
And I believe that our fossil fuel industries can make a big difference
and making this switch so they become the energy companies of the future.
We’re very fortunate to live in a time where we now have technologies
that have produced alternative energies like solar and wind
that are now per megawatt hour cheaper than many of our fossil fuels.
We’ve also made great strides in electric cars
and batteries for those cars.
And yes, we have a long ways to go.
But everything is impossible until it becomes possible.
If we’ve learned anything from our international space program is that
our planet is unusual in the universe.
And as we go forward in the 21st century, we have two major challenges.
One is how to get along with each other on this planet.
That's been with us for a very long time.
But the other is how to get along with our planet.
So life as we know it is sustainable as we go forward in time.
For climate change, nature is the timekeeper.
And unfortunately, none of us know how much time we have to make this change.
It's already too late for most of the mountain glaciers,
but it’s not too late for us,
if we work together both nationally and internationally.
And we act now.
Thank you.