SEASON TWO EXTRA

Cry, O Sphere

AURICLE PROMO: Membership drive, Giving Tuesday, by Taliah

AMY: I'm not really a big “pun” person, but when I was researching the Arctic before I took off to report there for season two of our show, I learned this new word, and the pun possibilities just overwhelmed me. The word is cryosphere. I'll let Twila Moon explain it. She's the deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. And her specialty is the cryosphere in the Arctic.

TWILA: The cryosphere being all things frozen in the Earth system. Permafrost, sea ice, land ice, snow.

AMY: Yeah, when I learned the term cryosphere I just instantly wanted to start playing with that word. But there's really, there's really no where to go with that except for down, because you end up doing all these like mournful tear, tear-related puns. And I've given up on that, but was that part of your education? Lots of crying jokes with the cryosphere?

TWILA: You know, I have actually this is the first time I've ever even thought of that or heard it. No, I've never made I've never made a joke about crying about the cryosphere. But I might not be able to resist now because I do like a good pun.

AMY: Well, you're welcome. Or, I'm sorry. Whichever way you want to take that.

AMY: This is a Threshold season two extra, I’m Amy Martin, and yes, I’m calling this episode Cry, O Sphere. God that's so bad. And yet, unfortunately, so apt. It's 2020. A lot to cry about this year. And just a lot to process, in general. So much news. So much information—and disinformation—to wade through. For a million very good reasons, most of us have not been thinking all that much about the frozen things in the Arctic. The sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, the frozen soil, called permafrost. But just because we haven't been thinking about the cryosphere, doesn't mean it's not important.

AMY: How are we doing? How is the cryosphere this year?

TWILA: The shortest answer is we are not doing well. We continue to see really dramatic and rapid changes happening in sea ice, in land ice, and in snow, and in permafrost, frozen ground, all around the Arctic. The Arctic is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet. And so very big changes in temperature relative to the rest of the planet are happening in the Arctic and those can create very dramatic and rapid changes in the environment. And that is what we have continued to see this last year.

AMY: In fact 2020 came very close to being one of the worst years for the Arctic cryosphere ever.

MUSIC

AMY: And I know. More bad news is the last thing we need. But one of the big lessons from 2020 is that denying the reality of a problem only makes it worse. We need to pay attention to the cryosphere, and understand it, if we're going to do anything about the climate crisis. So first let’s clear on the definition: the cryosphere is all of the planet’s frozen stuff, wherever it might be. If you listened to season two of Threshold, you already know quite a bit about the Arctic parts of the cryosphere. In this extra, we're going to get an update on two key parts of it: the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic sea ice. These elements of the cryosphere are so big that they actually help make our climate what it is. Even though we don’t think about them very much, their fate actually affects everything we're arguing about down here in the lower latitudes: health care, migration, national security, if and how we plan to take care of each other in a rapidly changing world. 

TWILA: Already now people in Florida see flooding happening on days it never would have happened before. They sometimes call it blue sky flooding. It's not even flooding caused from raining, it's flooding caused from tides because we already have significantly more water in the ocean.

AMY: We're going to start with a visit to the lab of Joel Harper, the glaciologist who let me tag along with his team when they went to the Greenland ice sheet back in the summer of 2017. We’ll find out what he’s studying now, and how he’s holding up as a person. Because this work can be depressing—it can lead you into a truly tearful state. But Joel, Twila and other cryosphere scientists can’t just look away. In my mind, they’re kind of like the front line workers during this pandemic, they don’t have the luxury of tuning out. So, as I got myself up to date on some of the science in the cryosphere, I also wanted to learn more about how you keep going when it’s your job to study something that’s all-too-quickly melting away.

INTRO

AMY: So, the last time you heard from Joel Harper here on Threshold, we were in the cold, windy, wild world of the Greenland ice sheet, and it sounded like this:

    CLIP from S2 episode:

 AMBI: wind

JOEL: So, here's the plan, we're going to set up our personal tents. Everybody gets a tent, a piece of white foam, and then this big paco pad that goes down. The key to setting up your personal tent is to not let the tent blow away, or you will be never seeing it again. And cold for a while.

AMY: This time, the setting was a little tamer.

AMBI: Door opening

AMY: Hey! How ya doing?

JOEL: Good, good to see you!

AMY: Good to see you too!

AMY: It's October 2020, and I'm meeting Joel in his lab at the University of Montana in Missoula.

JOEL: Yeah, it’s a circuit board, calibration equipment…

AMY: Although Joel's research is focused on the Greenland ice sheet, mostly, he and his team are here in the lab, making and testing their instruments, and processing the data they collect in the field. If going to the ice sheet is the Broadway show, this is backstage, where all the planning and prep takes place.

JOEL: Things are kind of a mess right now. But, you know, this is the kind of thing that we do. We make all our instrumentation ourselves, and for a variety of reasons. We need it to be really low cost. We need it to be robust in a difficult environment. And then the biggest thing we need is it to be ultra, ultra low power.

AMY: If our voices sound a little muffled, it's because we're both wearing masks. Coronavirus cases were rising quickly in Montana at this time, and the university campus was nearly deserted. But, in Joel's lab, science is still happening. He shows me a special walk-in freezer they can use to test out their gear. A workbench in the center of the room is looped with long cables and tiny little pieces of circuit boards are scattered about. The Greenland flag hangs in one corner, and in the hallway, there are giant maps of the ice sheet—the world's second largest source of fresh water, surpassed only by Antarctica in terms of the potential sea level rise it contains. If the entire Greenland ice sheet ends up in the ocean, it will raise sea levels by seven meters, or 23 feet. And as Joel explained as we walked around the ice sheet a few years ago, the crucial question is the rate of that change; how quickly the ice moves from the land into the sea. That’s what Joel and his team are trying to figure out—the nitty gritty of how and how fast that all happens.

AMBI: crossfade indoors/outdoors

AMY: We head outside and find a picnic table on campus where we can sit six feet apart and talk, un-masked. 

JOEL: Well, our work is really focused on how this thing works. Right. There are scientists that are sort of keeping track of what's going on and there's other ones that are trying to figure out, well, how does it actually work? And both are essential because if we want to look down the road, we've got to know what it's doing now. And then we have to know how it works and factor that into whatever simulations and projections we try to put forward.

AMY: Given how big and interesting and important ice sheets are in the Earth's climate system, it's surprising how little we really know about them—in part because they’re very difficult places to do field work. But Joel insists on getting out onto the ice, seeing things for himself, and leaving little sensors there to measure temperature, movement and other key changes. For him, all of the computer code, charts and graphs generated in the lab are secondary to the time he spends in the field, interacting directly with the thing he’s studying. Even if that field work is really uncomfortable sometimes. He tells me about the location they've been working in for the last few years, which is further north and higher in elevation than where we went in 2017.

JOEL: This is a really remote area of the ice sheet. So there's no sort of standard logistics in place. We have to charter an aircraft that comes from, a Twin Otter aircraft, that comes from Iceland, comes up, takes us and then takes us out onto the ice sheet, puts us in. And then they go back to Iceland for a month and then they come back and get us. So you can imagine the costs are astronomical. So we don't want to be doing too many trips like that.

AMY: And that's just getting to the site. Once they're there, they need to move around to different spots on the ice sheet. Normally, the way to do that would be by snowmobile. But if everyone on the team had their own snow machine, that would likely mean multiple trips for the Twin Otter airplane, just to get the gear to the site. Snowmobiles are big and heavy, and they need a lot of gas.

JOEL: And so we made a logistical call...instead of everybody has a snowmobile to traverse on. Hey, we're from Montana. We know how to ski. So we have snowmobiles that pull sleds and then skiers that are tied into the sleds, and so, you know, most the people are actually just being pulled along on their skis.

AMY: That is burly.

JOEL: Yeah, you just, what you do is, it turns out the way you do this and this isn't something we invented, this is what people do here to go ski in the mountains. You get a bike tire and you put it around your waist, and then you have a carabiner that holds the bike tire together. And then you take the rope that's holding you to the snow machine and you wrap it around the carabiner. And the more wraps you do, the less you have to actually hold anything and you can just kind of let go. But the bigger risk it is, if you go down, it's gonna take a little while for the rope to unravel around those wraps. You might get dragged a little bit. So you have to make this decision on exactly how many wraps you're okay with. Your face can get quite cold when you're driving into the wind at, you know, 15, 20 miles an hour and the wind's blowing at you, but you just bundle up.

AMY: I got to say, I'm so glad I didn't come with you. That sounds, honestly, like hell.

MUSIC

AMY: Just to clarify: I think it'd be a blast to get pulled behind a snowmobile for a little while on a beautiful winter day in the mountains, when I know there's a hot shower and a warm bed waiting for me at the end of the day. But on the Greenland ice sheet? With only the warm clothes I'm able to carry, and where I'm going to be sleeping in a tent in the snow? For a month?

JOEL: It's also one of the windiest places on the planet, you're just always living in the snow or in the wind. And it's just always drifting. So you're just...everything you deal with is getting buried continuously. And it's just a fight, you know? And when you have storms and wind, you literally have to get up every hour or two and dig out your tent so it doesn't get completely drifted over. And, you know, you set an alarm and you're just constantly sort of fighting the drifts. But we had good days, too.

AMY: (laughter) 

AMY: And as it turns out, the fact that they’re getting constantly pummeled with snow at their study site is relevant to the science they're doing. 

MUSIC

AMY: Snowfall is like food for the ice sheet, it’s how the ice is nourished, how it grows. Snow comes down and gets compacted over time into ice, building layer upon layer until it becomes really thick—more than 10,000 feet thick in the middle. But at the same time that the ice sheet is eating snow and fattening up in the middle, it's losing weight out at the edges. Even without human-caused warming, it's normal for the ice sheet to gain and lose mass at the same time. The problem is the planet-warming emissions we’re putting into the atmosphere are causing those two forces to get out of balance. The fattening processes are still happening, but the weight loss processes are speeding up. Mass loss is outpacing mass gain.

JOEL: And we lose mass. Two ways. One is by some melting and the other way is by iceberg calving. And right now, we lose about half the mass from calving and half the mass from melting.

AMY: Calving is when the ice sheet actually extends out into the ocean and breaks off in big chunks. Melting is just what it sounds like—ice turns to water, runs through and off the ice sheet, and eventually makes it way out to the sea. Except when it doesn't.

JOEL: So it turns that if you look at the Greenland ice sheet and you look at all the melt that's going on across the surface, probably half of the melt that happens each summer never actually escapes the ice sheet. It doesn't find its way into a river and off into the ocean. Instead, it's melt that's taking place on this layer of snow and firn that covers the ice sheet and it's got nowhere to go but sort of down.

AMY: Firn is just old snow that's transitioning into becoming ice. So Joel's saying that about half of the snow that melts every year is actually absorbed back into the ice sheet, into this old snow.

JOEL: Essentially, this firn is a, is a sponge. And what's the volume of that sponge? Because we've got the surface melting. And you can imagine that one day the sponge is going to fill up. Then any new melt, it will find its way off the ice sheet.

AMY: If you live in a place where there’s snow on the ground you can see what Joel means about the snow being a sponge just by going outside with a drinking glass or a canning jar and scooping up some snow. Maybe fill it half-full and put a little piece of tape to mark the snow level. And then slowly add some water to that glass. And you'll see that at first, the level of the snow doesn't rise. The snow you’ve collected in your jar absorbs that water.

JOEL: You know, that snow is is mostly air. And so you have this porosity of open space in the, in between the ice grains. And that airspace is currently full of air, but if you add meltwater that moves through the the voids and spaces in between all the ice grains, you can start to fill that with water that refreezes and takes up the space. So that that's really what the sponge is, it's this airspace in the compacting snow.

AMY: But your mini snow-sponge doesn't have limitless capacity, and neither does the Greenland ice sheet. It will eventually spill over. And that’s kind of what we’re doing now. As we warm up the world, we’re causing the melt rate to increase. And that means the spongey part of the ice sheet... 

JOEL: ...fills up more quickly 'cause you're just pouring water into it. So one of the big sort of science questions revolving around sea level rise is, well, how is this situation going to change as we crank up the surface melt? What's the volume of pore space that sits there that will suck up melt down the road? A secondary question is, are we going to make a lot of new big ice layers underneath the surface that that that then subsequent water would not be able to get through and would be routed off the ice sheet?

AMY: And these are not just academic questions. Right now, the Greenland ice sheet is holding on to around half of the water that melts every year. But increasing the melt rate could mean that snow sponge fills up faster, and a whole lot more water might make its way to the ocean every year. That's why Joel is so interested in working in this spot, almost 7,000 feet above sea level, where the snow is deep, and all of these processes are actively playing out.

JOEL: We call this the percolation zone because the water's percolating down and refreezing. And it's just an area that we know very little about. There's not been prior to recently much scientific motivation to go do research in that area. But it's recently become an area of extreme interest because we see the surface melt increasing. We see that these firn-meltwater interactions are not steady. They're changing over time. So we're trying to figure out more about how things work there.

AMY: And they're making progress. Or... they were. This is a multi-year project; they set up their instruments in the spring, leave them to take thousands of tiny measurements, and then come back the next year to download all of the information from the data loggers. Those are basically little hard drives that hold all of the precious information collected bit by bit throughout the year. The whole research project is built around this annual cycle—and 2020 was supposed to be the last year. The culmination of this big, expensive, ambitious undertaking, when they collect all of the final data, and then pull out the gear.

JOEL: We always factor in weather delays and equipment delays, equipment lost in transport. All these sort of things go go through our minds when we're planning. But never really thought about, yeah, what if there's a pandemic and we just cannot come?

AMY: In early 2020, as the coronavirus began to spread around the world, Joel and his team started to get nervous. Would they be able to get to the ice sheet this year? And if not...what did that mean for their project?

JOEL: By the time sort of April, late April rolled around, it was pretty clear it wasn't going to happen.

AMY: Were you just...I mean, it had to be pretty devastating.

JOEL: Well, yeah. You know, it's not over. It wasn't like, yeah, the project's dead, that's the end of it. Because there's still there's still hope. You know, there is a a scenario where it turns out to be a great thing because we get an extra year of data that we weren't anticipating getting, and we find exciting new discoveries in those data. But the risk or that concern is that we may or may not find our instruments again.

AMY: So, here's a challenge for you. You're flying over a big white thing around the size of Alaska, and you need to find 11 thin poles you left there two years before. And of course, you've got GPS coordinates to work off of, but while you were away, those poles have been blasted with nonstop wind, tons of snowfall and drifts, and a season of melt. That’s what Joel and his team are up against.

We'll have more after this short break.

BREAK 

SPONSORSHIP: Dropstone Outfitting read by Neil Lawrence

PROMO SWAP: On the Green Fence, Deutsche Welle

AMY: Welcome back, I'm Amy Martin, and this is a Threshold season two extra which I'm shamelessly calling Cry, O Sphere. We're getting caught up on the state of some of the frozen stuff in the Arctic, and in just a bit, we’re going to return to glaciologist Joel Harper and the question of when—or if—he’ll be able to find the instruments he left on the Greenland ice sheet. But first, we’re going to get up to speed on what’s happening with another crucial element of the cryosphere: Arctic sea ice. For all of human history, the ice covering the Arctic ocean has formed a nice cold beanie on top of the world. But now, our planet-warming emissions are unraveling more of that cap of cold every year. And 2020 has done a real number on it. 

TWILA: Yes, this has been a year of a lot of bad news for Arctic sea ice.

AMY: Again, this is Twila Moon, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. 

TWILA: We had really warm temperatures over a lot of the Arctic Ocean. And when it came to September of this year we reached our second lowest on record. 

MUSIC

AMY: Just a quick refresher on the annual cycle of Arctic sea ice: it grows in the winter, when it’s dark and cold, and melts back in the summer, but so far, some ice has always persisted throughout the year. September is the end of the melting season, it’s when that hat of Arctic sea ice is at its smallest. And September of 2012 was the worst year so far in terms of sea ice extent, and Twila’s saying 2020 came in second. And what’s even more important is the long term trend here.

TWILA: To give you some context, the the 14 lowest years of of observed sea ice extent have been the last 14 years. 

AMY: October has always been the pivot month, when things get cold enough for the Arctic sea ice to begin to grow again.

TWILA: And one thing that happened this year that was very unusual, this October, we saw a little bit of growth of sea ice, but it was very slow compared to previous years. And so our October sea ice extent did set a new record low.

AMY: Oh, really? I didn't actually know that. I knew it was second worst in September, but it in October...it beat 2012, huh?

TWILA: Yeah, for October it did. So it's at a point where we we weren't losing ice anymore in October, but we weren't gaining it at the pace we should. And so when you compare October of this fall to past Octobers, it's really abysmal looking as far as our ability to grow back sea ice at that time.

AMY: Kind of like with the Greenland ice sheet, sea ice has natural processes of growth and melt. The problem is that we’re throwing those systems out of balance. By warming the climate we’re rapidly increasing the sea ice melt in the summer months, and we’re making it harder for it to grow in the fall and winter. And the ice on the Arctic Ocean isn’t only getting smaller in terms of area, it’s also getting thinner and weaker.  

TWILA: We're often talking about the extent or the area that it covers, but just as important is how old the sea ice in the Arctic is. And if we looked at the Arctic back in the early 1980s, we could see that at that point we had something like 30 to 35 percent of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean in the early eighties was four or more years old. And older sea ice can be also much, much thicker, so it provides a different kind of hunting and a different kind of ecosystem. So in the early 1980s, we had a lot of this older ice. Today we only have a couple percentage of sea ice that is four or more years old, we've lost the vast majority of our older ice. And so now most of our ice simply forms and then disappears each year, forming in winter and disappearing in summer.

AMY: So why does this matter? Well, one reason is that four million people live in the Arctic, and ice is an important part of many of their cultures. Sea ice is a hunting platform, a highway, a protective barrier for coastal communities. Much of the wildlife in the Arctic uses the sea ice in important ways too—everything from zooplankton to seabirds to seals. 

MUSIC

And there are geopolitical and pollution concerns too. A melting Arctic Ocean means more shipping in the far north, more territorial saber-rattling, more companies and countries moving around up there, looking for resources. So the consequences of sea ice loss don’t fit neatly into one category. This is an environmental problem and a social justice issue. It raises questions of sovereignty and trade, it’s a hyper-local story and international news. And Twila says the same goes for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Rapidly moving huge amounts of freshwater from the land into the sea affects the people who live in Greenland and the far north generally, but also everyone. No matter where we live on the planet.

TWILA: Greenland's acting as this global water tower. It's holding all of this water that would otherwise be in our oceans, in this frozen ice. So it's doing us this tremendous service. But if we start to put more and more of that frozen ice into the ocean and allow it to melt, allow it to add to our sea levels, that's something that we feel in countries all over the globe. And a huge portion of the world's population lives on the coast. They're really important to us, right, we have military installations there. We have shipping ports there. It's how we get goods from one country to another. We're really stressing our coastal communities. And those are costs that are going to be borne by all of us.

AMY: Do you think that human beings will see a time when there is no Greenland ice sheet? And if so, when will that be? One hundred years, 500 years, 1500 years?

TWILA: This is a super important question. And there has been work just recently looking far into the future of the Greenland ice sheet. And the good news is we humans are fully the people at the driver's seat. What we do is the determinant of how much ice we're going to have in Greenland and how long we're going to have it.

MUSIC

AMY: The future of the Greenland ice sheet is in the hands of humanity, and Twila’s framing this as good news? If you feel your inner cynic rising up in protest, keep listening. She is by no means a Pollyanna. She just saying: we still have options.

TWILA: On one end, we have a scenario where there's a lot of strong action on climate change and the global community is really coming together to reduce emissions and to control the amount of warming into the future. And then on the other end, we have a scenario where we're continuing activities much as we have over the last decade. And we're putting pretty substantial amounts of carbon dioxide and methane and other things into the atmosphere. And our computer simulations show that if we continue on that route, that looks a lot like what we've been up to for the last decade, there is a very strong possibility that we will lose the entire Greenland ice sheet within the next one thousand years.

AMY: Whoa.

TWILA: And I want to remind you, the Greenland ice sheet, we take ice cores out of it that tell us things about the Earth and the atmosphere hundreds of thousands of years ago because there was ice there for that entire time. So the possibility that that we could make the entire Greenland ice sheet disappear in the next thousand years is stunning, my, my jaw dropped when I saw this this work coming out. But the good news is that if we do take strong action, the vast majority of the Greenland ice sheet is still around in a thousand years. 

AMY: So when Twila says this is good news, she’s not saying we definitely will save the Greenland ice sheet. She’s saying we still definitely could. And that is no small thing. Speaking as a person who’s been there, I really want the ice sheet to survive for as long as possible. And I think most people would feel the same after seeing it up close. It’s not only scientifically important—it’s one of the wonders of our world. It’s beautiful and strange and ancient and ever-new. It holds danger and mystery, it’s frozen and it’s in motion, it’s powerful and it’s vulnerable. We need it to exist to help keep climate and societies stable. But I also just want it to exist, to keep existing, in the same way that I want a redwood tree or a hummingbird or a mountain range or any other wild thing or place to have a chance to keep being itself; to live and die on its own terms, not because we humans have destroyed it.

MUSIC

AMY: What keeps you going? Like, do you ever just feel like every day your head is deep in numbers that are telling a pretty scary story. And how do you manage that?

TWILA: I definitely can sometimes feel quite overwhelmed by all of the news about how the Earth's system’s changing and about those connections and what changes it's creating for people and communities. I refer to them as the climate blues. And for me, the way to get out of the climate blues is to connect to other people. It's in talking about these changes and talking about solutions and action, taking action myself. All of those things feel really powerful in being able to see that this is an area that people all over the world are concerned about. People all over the US, across political lines have concerns in this area and that there are many, many people working towards creating ways that we can do business differently, ways for us to make communities healthier or more economically viable while doing it. So for me, that's the way I stay out of the climate blues, is I stay engaged on the topic and I engage with other people on it. 

MUSIC

AMY: This is something I’ve heard from a lot of scientists who are working on different aspects of the climate issue. They maybe go through a period in their careers, or a period once a week, where they just get kind of flattened by the intensity of the subject. But what ultimately pulls them out of that is not shutting down or moving away from the work, but staying active in it—continuing to try.

AMBI: Campus

AMY: That’s what glaciologist Joel Harper is eager to do, but he and his team are currently in a state of suspended animation thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Back on the campus of the University of Montana, Joel explains their current conundrum. Over the last couple of years, they’ve drilled eleven poles into the Greenland ice sheet, each one attached to a sort of string holding dozens of little sensors, taking measurements deep under the snow and ice. Joel says the process of installing these poles is always fraught with the worry of how they’re going to find these precious needles in the frozen haystack of the ice sheet the next year.

JOEL: Yeah, so you know, you're standing there with a, you know, 12-foot pole and you have to make this decision when you install it, “OK, I want to drill it in deep enough so that over the next summer, because I'm here in May and it's going to melt a bunch, the snow will be melting for the next two months, I don't want it, you know, in at a shallow depth such that it would melt out and fall over. Because then I'll never see my instrument again. But I don't want to put it in too deep because they don't have enough sticking up and I won't find it next summer. So where do I put this thing?” That's always the decision. And, you know, over time we've kind of like found our comfort zone, but our comfort zone always kind of assumed that we would be back the next year.

MUSIC

AMY: The last time Joel saw his gear was in August of 2019, when he did a quick check to make everything was up and running correctly. It was, and he said: great, I’ll be back in about 9 months, in the spring of 2020. And we all know how that turned out. So now the question is when they can get back to Greenland and if they do, will they find their instruments. Joel says if they can get back to their site in the spring of 2021, he's optimistic that they'll find those data loggers.

JOEL: I think that we're gonna be okay.

AMY: And even if they don't find the poles, and they lose all of that data, it's not going to stop him and his team from continuing their project.

JOEL: You know, science is incremental. Everybody is trying to sort of simultaneously push some part forward. And, you know, our, we're working on one part of that right now. That's I think, an important part, because most of the ice sheet is like where we're working and revolves around the processes that we're working on.

AMY: I mean, there's just so much to be depressed about and worried about and scared about. Do you feel… 

JOEL: Yeah, it's it's hard. I mean, I teach climate science courses as well. I'm teaching an undergraduate course on Earth's changing climate right now. And boy, when you're immersed in it like that, you can really get down. And so to feel good, I think about. Yeah, sure. What I'm doing, I'm trying to do the research and I'm trying to educate the next generation as to the science part of the problem. And then I can get down on the fact that, well, yeah, but what good is that? I can teach everybody exactly how it works. But that's not going to fix it. Right. We need other people out there educating people on how to fix it. But I think any part of fixing it is understanding the problem. And so that's where my little piece comes in.

AMY: We put our masks on and head back into the lab.

JOEL: Here's Toby…

AMY: Hey! How are you?

TOBY: I’m good how are you doing?

AMY: I’m good! Good to see ya!

AMY: Toby Meierbachtol is a glaciologist who works on Joel's team. He was one of the leaders of the crew on my trip to the ice sheet back in 2017. He shows me a few examples of what happens to the data they collect out there in the field—charts and graphs showing details of what's actually going on in the physical world, which they can then feed into models they make to help predict how things might change in the future.

TOBY: We can start to put real numbers on how much meltwater is infiltrating and where, if that makes sense.

AMY: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: It's kind of weird for me to see Toby and Joel dressed business casual, sitting in front of computer screens in quiet offices. Since I met them out on the ice sheet, they live in my memory as kind of tough guys wielding ice axes and hauling heavy equipment around. But to do this work, they need a really diverse set of skills; engineering to make their instruments, programming to process all the data, scientific creativity to ask important questions and set up experiments. And they need patience as the answers slowly trickle in. 

AMY: And do you what do you think your odds are that you're going to find your equipment when you guys go back?

TOBY: That is an anxiety-provoking question. (laughter)

AMY: That's what I'm here to do, Toby. That's my job.

AMY: Like Joel, Toby says he's optimistic.

TOBY: I mean everything was operational in August. Right. And so now we basically cross our fingers.

JOEL: I will say that when we're burying the poles and trying to make the call on where to put them, I'm the one that's never certain of what to do. I'm the one with the biggest, the most agonizing.

AMY: This is Joel Harper again.

JOEL: Saying, “I don't know, guys, it might get buried...” And then we pull it up a little, and then, “I don't know, guys, it might fall over...”

AMY: Science! Science in action!

AMY: I'll be staying in touch with Joel and Toby to see if they're able to return to Greenland and find their gear. And although we’re joking around, there’s no doubt that the work here is serious for them. There’s so much at stake that you almost have to find things to laugh about, just to keep your head above water. No pun intended. And part of what makes their work feel so intense is this urgency to learn as much as we can as quickly as possible. Because all is not lost here. There’s still time to make a difference.

TWILA: So it's really people that have our hand on this knob.

AMY: Again, glaciologist Twila Moon.

TWILA: And if we turn that knob on to, to take action, we are going to see much slower sea level rise, something that's much easier for our communities, our economies, our infrastructure to adjust to.

MUSIC

AMY: How, how much time do we have to turn that knob to prevent the worst in terms of the Greenland ice sheet?

TWILA: Well, first, I want to be clear, there is not an expiration date on action. I feel like sometimes people might have a sense like, well, if we haven't done something by such and such a date, we should just put up our hands. You know, things things are going to go poorly and there's nothing we can do about it. So first, I want to be really clear that there's not an expiration date for taking action. But the flip side is that every action that we take and the sooner we take it is going to make a difference.

AMY: Twila, Joel and many other cryosphere scientists are out there, every day, managing their fear and sadness, doing the work of helping the rest of us understand this crucial part of our planet. And I’m going to think about them the next time I get overwhelmed. I’m going to picture Joel and his team, a few vulnerable humans alone on a mountain of ice, shivering in their tents as the wind buries them again and again in the snow. They basically have two choices: Lie there and let the heaviness close them in, or get up and start shoveling.

CREDITS

AMY: Threshold is funded by Montana Public Radio, the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the International Women’s Media Foundation. We’re also funded by you, our listeners. You can join our community at thresholdpodcast.org/donate.

The Threshold team includes Angela Swatek, Taliah Farnsworth, Eva Kalea, Nick Mott and Caysi Simpson, with help from Caroline Kurtz, Dan Carreno, Hana Carey, Kara Cromwell, Katie DeFusco and Matt Herlihy. Our music is by Travis Yost.