After two weeks on the ship it felt like all of the icebergs that developed their own
personalities Lars was the giant Archie fell apart every time we tried to measure it and Stingray was
elusive so every time we found it again it was like reconnecting with an old friend welcome to
wavelengths where we talk about our planet with experts from Scripps Institution of Oceanography
covering everything from the deep sea to the edge of the atmosphere I'm Kate Furby a marine
biologist and journalist I got my PhD here a few years ago and now I'm back learning more about
what's happening at Scripps I'm here today with Margaret Lindemann she's a fourth year graduate
student here at Scripps Oceanography and do you study icebergs is that right yeah I studied ice
ocean interactions so the way that glaciers flow into the ocean and how they melt welcome to the
ice berg repository and please I feel like we're really going somewhere oh oh it's like Narnia
this is like the Narnia closet so welcome to the freezer this is all cool cool yeah this is where
the Paleo climate people keep their ice cores and there's a real ice core from Greenland whoa
so this is tens of thousands of years old and it formed when snowflakes fell over many many years
and compacted together well it was like fossil clearly it's just like fossil snow flakes and
so when they compacted together I trapped air in these little bubbles and that's what you see when
you look closely Wow yeah you can totally see the whole the total bubble has the atmosphere for all
kinds of thousands of years yes every single one so in Greenland the snow accumulates over many
years and compacts to form ice and then it gets so thick it flows under its own weight and when
it reaches the ocean it breaks off in a process called calving which is how the icebergs form
so then like how big are we talking like so when they break off they can be really huge
and there's some that we saw that were the size of 7 football fields just really massive out
so are you ready to watch some ice melt yes great so here we have our super fancy aquarium tank and
we're gonna use this to look at the different types of water that there are in the ocean in
Greenland and so mine are relatively fresh and yours are warm and salty warm and salty so let's
pour them into the tank at the same time okay so when we pull out the divider we should see the
less dense water go on top of the more dense water so here it is it's an iceberg it's like a popsicle
cool this one's blue raspberry they're all blue raspberry flavored I'm just gonna put that in our
ocean here and so for a lot of these icebergs they can be as deep as Empire State Building it's tall
and so it really matters how they're affected by these different layers of the water so the
iceberg is melting under water and you're studying where that meltwater is going right cool so like
why is that important well the oceans really control the climate in some very important ways
and for example the Gulf Stream brings more warm water from near the equator up towards northern
Europe and so that's for example why Italy is usually a lot warmer than Maine and so adding
a lot of fresh water to the ocean is going to change how those currents are able to move heat
around in the ocean and where the fresh water is what Duff it's at is going to play a really big
role in what that looks like so actually the way icebergs are melting could be critically
important for the global climate yeah and climate change and sea level rise are already happening so
really understanding what we're observing now can help us be better prepared for the future
it's amazing to get to do research in a place that feels so different from everywhere that I know but
know that the research has really big implications also for the places that I have called home