Below Europe’s largest glacier
lie secrets that could have devastating global consequences.
Go, go, go!
Oh my. Oh.
Oh!
Holy shit!
Oh my God.
I have never seen anything like this.
We’re in Iceland,
embedded with an international team of drone pilots and scientists.
They’re about to use cutting-edge drone technology
to 3D map underneath a glacier for the very first time.
If you lose a drone, you lose the data.
To get there requires crossing
some of the world’s most treacherous terrain.
-Are you OK? -Just a little scratched up.
Their aim:
to find out if glaciers are melting from below
as well as on top.
And how this could lead to disastrous volcanic eruptions.
When the red-hot magma mixes with the ice-cold glacier ice,
then you have an explosion.
These are very extreme environments.
[THE HIDDEN THREAT UNDER EUROPE’S LARGEST GLACIER]
So we are on our way to the La Venta team,
and we’re going to figure out what the plan is for today and tomorrow.
The team of drone pilots is about to meet the group of scientists
before heading to Vatnajökull,
an icecap which covers 8 percent of Iceland.
-Hey. -Hey, nice to meet you.
-Morning! -Morning!
-How are you? -Alright.
We send the drone in places where it’s too dangerous to go.
We will be able to do a complete map of the cave in a matter of minutes.
And we will be able to follow in live the trajectory of the drone.
I’m not excited about carrying the ten kilos of batteries.
But for the flight, it’s going to be amazing.
In order to start their research,
the team must do a ten-mile round trip,
scaling sheer ice and crossing deep crevasses.
It’s going to be a long walk.
Five miles. Five and a half each way... on ice.
Pretty tricky.
We’ll take it slow and steady
and do some science when we get there.
The team’s hypothesis is that as the glacier melts,
it increases the chance of the volcanoes underneath
becoming more active.
If this is true, with Vatnajökull covering multiple volcanoes,
it could lead to another eruption like what the world saw in 2010,
which grounded 100,000 flights across the globe.
Usually people think that
the water flows only on the surface of the glacier.
But as we can see here,
the water flows also inside the ice,
and it excavates from below the surface of the ice.
And that’s why we are here, to study this phenomenon
and to see how this mass of water flows inside the ice.
This is a long walk. Taking a little while to get there.
Each step gets us closer to the goal.
Hear that?
So now we can just hear that the glacier is moving.
And as you can see, there is a cliff, so it's falling down.
So from time to time, you will hear ice falling down.
It trembles a little bit,
and it’s just moving as the glacier is moving forward.
More than two and a half gruelling hours in,
we are just about at our destination.
It’s fucked up. Man, I don’t like it. Maybe in the dirt?
No, you don’t slide, don’t worry.
-It’s not going to slide? -No.
It looks like it’s going to slide.
This way, yes, because you have to stay--
Open your legs.
It’s getting sketchy, dude.
Whoa!
Woohoo!
Even before the team gathers hard data,
we can see with our own eyes
that this glacier is shrinking from underneath.
But without the drone,
there’s no way to tell how deep the recession goes.
So Charles is setting up the Elios 3.
This is a newly released drone.
It still has the cage.
The propellers are guarded so it can bounce off of different objects,
and it will not cause any damage.
It can come up with a 3D model of where the drone is
or what the space is that’s being flown.
So it is cutting edge stuff.
Nothing else could fly in a hole like that
and go underneath the ice
and document what’s going on down there.
The idea is to keep an eye on your battery and plan your flights
so that you don’t push that battery all the way down
or else you'll fall out of the sky.
Most importantly, it’s a LiDAR pack. It allows it to record data.
LiDAR is really similar to sonar,
kind of like what bats use to fly inside of caves.
So for a bat, what they do is they make sounds,
then wait for the echoes to know how far things are away from them.
And it kind of helps them map the cave.
A LiDAR sensor is the same thing, just with light.
So it’s just emitting a bunch of photons into the environment,
it’s collecting those,
and it’s building a map of whatever it's flying through.
And over time, doing that repeatedly,
you can see exactly, to very, very close specifications
how much the ice is changing.
Even though this drone is top of its game,
it’s running into issues.
I think it's the the cold weather is giving it a bit of a problem.
The hope is that we can keep it running with a little bit of battery,
and then the internals will warm up.
But it’s... not working so well yet.
We do put these things in very difficult situations.
We do that on purpose.
The idea is that we’d rather send the drones than people
into some of these hotspots.
At last, the drone is back in action,
completing several successful flights
hundreds of feet deep into the glacial cave.
We won’t truly know the impact of the melting underneath the glacier
until the crew can go back and analyze the data.
Probably the thickness of the ice reduce and reduce
until this fall down and disappear in a few months.
Shrinking glaciers give us undeniable proof that our planet is warming up.
And as these glaciers melt,
it can have catastrophic effects on rising sea levels
across the globe.
So we’ve just come out of the cave.
Now we still have about two hours of walk to the cars.
It’s a long day.
Time for a beer, that’s for sure.
Thank you very much.
Cheers.
The following morning,
the team of drone pilots and scientists
are analyzing the data.
This drone allowed us to go in impossible places.
The idea was to do a reconnaissance
and try to go as far as possible in a safe manner.
And we went all the way down very deep inside the cave,
when you have maybe 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters
between the drone and the water.
Inside, we try to focus not to lose [the drone] in the river.
If you lose the drone at the bottom there,
it’s almost certain that you cannot recover it.
For missions like this, sometimes the main win
is just getting the drone back without damage.
But the data it’s gathered is a monumental starting point
for more precise research.
We have an Ouster LiDAR on the drone that is recording in live
and giving us a live stream of the cave in which we are flying.
The 3D map reveals that the team flew the drone
more than 300 feet deep into the cave,
a distance equal to the height of the Statue of Liberty.
But they say the cave itself
continued even deeper than the drone could go.
As it stands, Iceland’s glaciers are reported to be losing
five gigatons of ice each year.
That’s a lot of ice.
It’s the equivalent of 500 million African elephants.
But if the glaciers are also receding from below,
then that figure could be even greater than previously thought.
For the first time, we obtained incredible data.
These are amazing for future comparison.
While this is just the start of the scientist’s research,
others have been studying this glacier for decades.
We went to visit Thorvardur Arnason,
a scholar at the University of Iceland,
who has documented the country’s glaciers
through multiple photography projects over the years.
His team’s time-lapse photography of part of Vatnajökull
has shown a stark reality.
His research shows that since just 1989,
this glacier has shrunk by close to the size of Denver, Colorado.
I moved to this area 16 years ago,
but I’ve seen incredible changes.
I’ve become an eyewitness to...
changes that I would never have been able to imagine.
All of the glaciers in this part of Iceland
and in Iceland in general,
they are shrinking more and more rapidly.
The glaciers are early warning systems, in a way,
or canaries in a coal mine.
They react very quickly to the climatic changes
or global warming.
They have responded by getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
That was a calving event.
Producer: Which is?
That’s when there are icebergs
that are breaking off the front of the glacier itself.
As we speak to Thorvardur, we can see and hear
parts of the glacier breaking away in real time.
That’s another one.
Producer: Did we just miss it?
Like the Holy Grail, it happens once in a blue moon.
Producer: Can we go over that side a bit more, or is it too dangerous?
If there is a huge calving,
you can have a wave of two meters, kind of.
Producer: Cool. Well, let’s-- As close as you’re comfortable.
Yeah, yeah, I will.
Producer: Go, go, go!
Holy grail!
Oh my God.
Oh!
Oh my God, hold on to the--
Oh my. Oh.
-Oh my God. -Oh, whoa!
Producer: Fuck! Are we going to be OK?
Our captain evacuates us quickly,
as not only has the calving created
waves that threaten to overturn the boat,
a breakaway this big means more calving could follow.
Oh!
Holy shit!
Oh my God!
I have never seen anything like this in real life.
Even her.
Yeah, it’s the first time.
It's unbelievable.
So when we had the calving event, and we had the icebergs breaking off
and the front sort of disintegrating,
then the support that this iceberg had disappeared.
And here we’re sort of seeing the mild tsunami
that’s caused by this.
It's moving the icebergs
and even making some of them more prone to start flipping over.
Producer: For perspective, how big do we think it is?
Is it a car? Is it a building?
It's more like an apartment building.
This was an apartment building.
The next could be a skyscraper.
An event of this size here is quite rare,
and the fact of capturing it on film is even rarer.
We’ve been on the water for only 45 minutes.
And in that time, we’ve managed to capture
the real-life fallout of what we saw below the glacier.
It is disintegrating in front of our eyes.
But ice melt has another dangerous consequence.
The weight of the glacier ice,
which is up to 900 meters in thickness,
this exerts pressure on the underlying volcanic systems,
so we have subglacial eruptions.
As the ice cap or the glacier downwastes,
this pressure becomes less and less,
so it becomes easier for the magma to come up and cause an eruption
and for that eruption also to break through the ice overhead.
This, in turn, releases more ash and CO2 into the air,
which triggers more ice melt.
It's a feedback loop which could be accelerating exponentially.
And fallout from Iceland's volcanoes isn't just a problem for the island.
Volcanic ash has caused the worst disruption in air travel since 911.
More than 63,000 flights have been canceled since Thursday.
Almost 7 million passengers affected.
While the dance between volcanic activity and glacial ice melt
may feel like it’s moving to Mother Nature’s beat,
the scientists we’ve traveled with
tell us there is no doubt in their mind
that people, not nature, are to blame for the threat.
It's caused by human activities.
The biggest contributors are large companies.
How quickly it could spiral remains to be seen.
For me personally, I feel... grief.
I feel sadness
because places that I love are being changed forever.
Everything you love, everything you cherish
is in danger of extinction
if we don't learn to act now.