[ICE RUMBLES]
[MUSIC]
[SCUBA DIVER 1: Let's do it.]
[SCUBA DIVER 2: Ready?]
[SCUBA DIVER 1: One, two, three.]
>>JOHN SPARKS (Curator, Division of Vertebrate Zoology): So it’s the end of our roughly
two-week trip in Greenland, and I’m sitting, because I can barely stand.
This has, without a doubt, been the toughest trip, expedition I’ve ever been on.
The dives are brutal.
They’re exceedingly cold…
It’s crazy, in a way.
My name is John Sparks and I’m a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York City.
>>DAVID GRUBER (Research Associate, Division of Vertebrate Zoology): My name is David Gruber
I am a marine biologist here at the American Museum of Natural History and a professor
of biology at Baruch College, City University of New York.
>>SPARKS: And we were on an expedition to look at the prevalence of biofluorescence
in the Arctic.
>>GRUBER: Biofluorescence is the process of animals absorbing blue ocean light and
transforming that light into other colors.
>>SPARKS: We had been looking at fluorescence in the tropics, where you get pretty much
year-round even amounts of daylight and dark, so we wanted to see if fluorescence was as
prevalent, or as common, in areas where there are very different amounts of daylight.
At certain times of the year in polar regions, you get sunlight 24 hours a day and other
parts of the year, it’s dark all the time.
>>GRUBER: Yeah, it was a little bit like a detective story.
We were sitting over a coffee here in New York where like, “I wonder, how does that
effect animals underwater when there’s 24-hour light, some parts of the year, and zero light
other parts of the year.
And we were surprised that no one had looked.
>>SPARKS: We targeted Greenland because there were groups there, like the scorpion fishes,
that we found elsewhere that fluoresce.
So we could directly compare it to tropical or temperate regions.
For this trip we had to fly to Iceland first, and then
we took a small plane to Kulusuk on the east coast of Greenland and they have just a tiny
airport there.
And from there, we took about a two-hour boat ride to Tasiilaq, and that was our first diving site.
>>GRUBER: We did a lot of interesting day dives around there, but when we went another
few hours out to this really remote ice camp where we had a cove that we could just dive
any time we want.
>>SPARKS: As soon as we got to Greenland, we realized, “Boy, we might be in over our heads.
This is really cold.
Whose idea was this?”
>>GRUBER: Yeah, it was one thing sitting in a nice, cozy little café in New York and
just kind of pondering these topics and then, once we’re in the water in 30 minutes my
hands were just freezing.
>>SPARKS: As soon as you get under your face gets numb.
And you’ve got very limited time to do your work because of the cold.
I mean, it just burns.
>>GRUBER: I actually got frostbite in my fingers, but I want to stay longer because,
it’s like, we went through so much effort to get out here.
>>SPARKS: This is our ice camp.
We’ve got our huts here that we sleep in.
We’ve got a makeshift lab we’ve set up in a storage room.
[CAMERA FLASHES.]
[SPARKS: That’s good.]
[GRUBER: Really nice.]
>>GRUBER: Yeah, we’ve got fresh water coming here from the glacier.
>>SPARKS: And it’s delicious.
These are our dry suits
that made diving possible here.
>>SPARKS: There was so much kelp!
Kelp with the enormous fronds and there’d be little fish swimming, or shrimp, lots of
shrimp swimming amongst the kelp.
It was very beautiful underwater.
>>GRUBER: On land, there’s almost nothing living, like nothing dares to grow more than
a foot off the ground up there, but all the life is really in the ocean.
We did dives in several different habitats.
We looked in fjords, we looked in the kelp forest, and in several of the dives we
actually looked for specimens in the ice, among the icebergs.
>>SPARKS: What’s really interesting about these icebergs is that they are a refuge for
lots of little creatures.
Crustaceans live right among the icebergs.
There’s even fish that kind of dart in among the crevices of the iceberg.
So they’re like floating habitats for lots of these arctic creatures.
>>GRUBER: We would have to position ourselves on the part of the icebergs that didn’t
have a chance of ice falling on top of us.
>>SPARKS: We got a waring when we got back to the boat on one dive that we were too close.
And—but, you can’t—underwater you can’t tell.
It was like, “That was kind of dangerous.
You were pretty close there.”
>>SPARKS: We both didn’t know what to expect.
I mean, in general, we both thought there would be less fluorescence there just because
for a large portion of the year, there’s not enough, we thought, ambient light
to stimulate fluorescence in these organisms,
so it would be of no use.
But then when we got up there, I thought, “Eh, we’d find it just as much as anywhere else."
But we didn’t.
Groups that we found all fluorescence members elsewhere, like scorpion fishes—
not a single member up there was fluorescent,
which really was kind of startling.
>>GRUBER: In the tropics, almost all hard corals are fluorescent.
Many of the anemones are fluorescent and when we get to Greenland, there’s almost zero
and that’s interesting.
[SPARKS: Lights off.]
[CAMERA FLASH]
[GRUBER: Ooh. Look at that John.]
[GRUBER: Alright let’s take one more with the white light.]
[CAMERA FLASH]
>>SPARKS: There are cases of things that are fluorescent.
They’re very beautiful, but they’re few and far between.
>>GRUBER: You know, Greenland is really discussed a lot in the news, it being a kind of
Ground Zero of climate change or of change.
Really, the fluorescence became one part of the research, but I think the broader thing
will be as the waters begin to warm, are there new fish coming in that didn’t used to be there?
We don’t even really understand fully yet what exactly it is we’re losing.
>>SPARKS: It’s just such a cold, unexplored environment.
We felt like a lot of these places, we were the first people ever to dive underwater.
And that’s kind of cool in a way.
It’s just—look at these habitats that very few people have seen.
>>GRUBER: What I love about this is that it was really like pure, pure exploration.
It was just John and I and a small boat in some of the most far-flung, difficult-to-get-to
places.
It was—you know—I’ve been diving for several decades and it felt like it was just
totally new.