Sometimes when you come close to the glaciers,
you risk your boat, you risk your life.
It’s really starting to freak me out
that... I can’t leave.
[My Dad And I At The End Of The World]
This is Julia.
I’m 24 years old, I’m a filmmaker.
The seas are rising.
We all know that.
But how do we know that?
Who’s the soothsayer spilling the beans on this existential threat?
Well, it’s my dad.
I found him.
My dad is Eric Rignot.
He’s one of the world’s foremost glaciologists.
He spends his life on vast oceans
in a tiny boat, hundreds of miles from help,
being battered by storms and dodging icebergs.
Why?
Because the melting of Earth’s ancient glaciers
could spell the end of the world,
and he needs to work out just how much trouble humanity is in.
His latest mission is to Greenland
to study some of the hardest to reach glaciers in the world.
And I'm going with him.
What did Ian say
when you told him you were bringing your daughter on the trip?
Oh, he told me, “Has your daughter done that before?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “You’re crazy.”
I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
That's the fishing boat.
I’m not helping at all because I have too much stuff to carry,
but he’s going to take us to the small boat on this boat
and then we get on the bigger boat.
And if my dad asks me why I’m in a bad mood one more **** time,
or calls me my sister’s name,
I think I’ll just stay.
There's dogs though.
Finally aboard the
Kim and Florent, the two deckhands,
and Nolwenn, the captain and my dad’s co-researcher.
What if I want to puke?
You just need to put your head overboard. Got it?
This is no good.
Go like this.
The plan is to survey at least ten glaciers in northwest Greenland
over the span of ten days.
The most crucial part of the journey will be measuring
the Humboldt Glacier, which has never been done before
as it’s fraught with sea ice and very hard to get to.
We have to go through some icebergs.
If one starts toppling over, it’s not good.
It’s always a little bit of a balance between what we want to do
for our science objectives,
and what is safe for the boat and the people on board.
So, we finally made it on the boat.
One of the bedrooms sleeps two people.
It’s one person here, one person here.
OK, let’s go figure out the toilets.
You unlock it.
What did you do?
I think the challenge is going to not only be to not get seasick,
but also privacy.
It’s really tight in here, it’s a boat for four, and we’re five.
Also, I don’t know what the **** I’m doing,
so I’m definitely going to get in people’s way.
Glaciologists like my dad study how glaciers and ice caps
transform in response to climate change.
They then analyze how the movement and melting of this ice in turn
influences our climate.
We have one big mighty glacier,
120 kilometers wide.
That's the Humboldt.
This glacier is important because it’s one of the big potential
contributors to sea level rise.
It’s been retreating quite rapidly in the last decade.
We're not exactly sure why.
First glacier of the trip, Bowdoin Glacier.
[Bowdoin Glacier Northwest Greenland]
There’s actually two waterfalls.
One there and one further down, which they say happens.
But apparently they haven’t seen so many at this one before.
My dad was literally dancing up and down when we got close to it.
And he's just in a way better mood.
You know, it’s not just some ice for him.
Nolwenn told me that the sun’s not going to set.
I thought we’d at least get a couple of hours of night time,
but it’s 9:30 right now,
and it looks like it might as well be 3:00 pm.
Bed time.
I didn’t actually sleep that much
because we were hitting a lot of icebergs,
and you can really feel that at the front of the boat.
This is the GPS antennas.
The sonar is scanning the seafloor and measuring the seafloor depth.
The multi sonar beam is the big instrument
attached at the bow of the boat.
It sends acoustic beeps throughout the water and across the seafloor.
This is how they map out the depth of the sea
and the base of the glaciers.
We want to know exactly where the foot of the glacier is
because then we can measure the total thickness of the ice.
Here, you see that part here?
It’s curved inwards, slanted backwards.
It's being eaten by the ocean at the bottom.
The other tool they’re using is a big thermometer
called the CTD.
Once or twice a day it’s dropped hundreds of meters down to
the seafloor to measure the water temperature.
The warm water is at depth because it’s also saltier,
so it makes it denser.
The warm water that we find is zero degrees Celsius.
But that’s still two degrees above the freezing point of seawater.
There’s still plenty of heat to melt ice from below.
The combination of the immense pressure in the deeper channels
found by the sonar
and the heat in warmer water found by the CTD thermometer
show the team key areas where the glacier is regressing.
The seafloor depth is a little bit deeper than what we expected.
Now, “a little bit deeper” may not sound like a big deal,
but a hundred meters deeper might be the difference between
having a lot of warm water coming in, or not.
Everything is about the ocean.
Nolwenn and my dad keep explaining how warm the water is,
apparently this is swimsuit weather.
I feel like I've been on this boat for a week.
It’s been...
30 hours.
Wow.
Poof!
He’s coming to get us now.
Today is Sunday, August 18th.
It’s 4:00 am, we’re getting out of the fjord now.
And we’re going to remove our sonar
to be a little bit maneuverable and gain a little bit of time
to go to Humboldt.
Aha!
A fish?
It’s true, you have to have a lot of patience on a boat.
You don’t find him to be patient?
No, not really.
No?
I’m starting to lose...
my zen.
Doing the dishes was really nice today because I was just alone...
for ten minutes.
Sleeping in four-hour shifts.
Waking up for two hours some time in the middle of the night.
It’s really starting to freak me out
that... I can’t leave.
It’s a challenge being in this place and feeling like...
sometimes a little bit of boredom and the routine and stuff.
But it’s like an escape.
It’s like being on a spaceship.
You don’t impose anything on this space,
it imposes on you.
My dad has been coming to Greenland for over 20 years,
but this will be his first time seeing Humboldt up close, in person.
We finally make it through Kane Basin and meet the glacier
that’s been commanding his attention for years.
Goodbye, Jack.
I'll never let go.
We’re here to measure Humboldt’s depth and its erosion,
the rate of which, combined with its neighboring Petermann Glacier,
could cause half a meter in global sea level rise.
There are three main gates for Greenland to melt very quickly,
and Humboldt is one of them.
The warm water in front of Humboldt was not coming from Baffin Bay,
but we think it’s coming from the north now.
This means that this is less exposed to warm water than I thought.
My dad’s discovery that the water comes from the north
means it takes longer for it to reach Humboldt
and it loses a lot of its heat before coming into contact with the glacier.
But still Humboldt, the biggest glacier in Greenland,
is retreating by about 600 meters a year.
While this might not sound enormous for a 110 kilometer wide glacier,
giant ice caps this far north should not be melting at this speed.
Zero degrees is still warm.
With climate change, it’s going to get warmer
and it’s going to melt the ice faster,
it’s going to break up into icebergs faster.
Glaciers like Humboldt,
it could be the ones that produce the most icebergs into the ocean.
So today, August 19, a pretty good day.
We went the farthest north I’ve ever been on a boat.
I think we’ve achieve a lot on Humboldt.
But it was not easy.
That’s sea ice.
This much ice is really dangerous for the boat,
as it isn’t made to break through ice this thick.
With no one around for hundreds of miles,
and no radio signal to get help if we get stuck,
we had to advance cautiously.
You see that the boat has to advance in crushed ice.
A lot of that ice comes from icebergs
that disintegrated completely.
We had a bit of wind and swell against us,
it’s slowed the boat.
And some of us were not feeling good.
Storm is coming.
It should be here tonight, so we’re going to finish this up.
A 35, 40 to 50 knots wind,
that’s the kind of wind where you just don’t want to be at sea
because... it’s a safety issue.
So, what my dad’s tone of voice does not convey
is just how freaking terrifying and life threatening
a storm like this can be.
Captain Nolwenn announced we needed to head south immediately.
Otherwise there was no way we'd make it back to our base in time.
We tied everything down and proceeded full speed ahead into the storm.
I just took two motion sickness pills
because its really starting to get crazy, so...
Seasickness is a discomfort that can last for days.
We tried motion sickness pills and anti-nausea patches
but even they couldn’t prevent the compulsive vomiting and headaches,
even for a veteran like my dad.
I knew the crew was worried, too, because they remained silent
throughout the 30-hour nightmare.
But after two and a half days,
we finally made it to Upernavik unscathed.
Though it meant we missed some of the glaciers on our trip.
I wish we had done a little bit more...
but we had some bad weather, we have to accept that.
But the main goal was Humboldt, and we did Humboldt.
We do this work in Greenland because we want to
understand how things works and project it better.
From what we found,
we’re going to be able to evaluate the risk of this sector a lot better.
This summer’s hot weather caused a record melt across Greenland.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center,
90 percent of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melted
between July 30th and August 2nd 2019.
An estimated 55 billion tons of ice melted into the ocean
during this time.
It's hard to fathom the scale of the effect these glaciers will have
on our collective future.
But the findings from this trip will help scientists globally
with their climate change projections.
We only have one planet Earth.
Us scientists we can’t solve the problem,
we can only point it out and just say, “Hey guys,
if we don’t do something it will be even worse.”
We want to understand how this system works and help the models
do better projections so we can better prepare society
for what’s really going to happen.
All these projections are very conservative.
From what I’ve seen in the past 20, 30 years,
things are moving much faster.
I’m not going to save the world, that would be pretentious.
I'm just doing my job.
Well, it’s fun.
I wouldn't do it if it was not fun.
Bye bye, Dad.