Yeah, So the Kidney Glacier is 5 miles wide at
the very bottom,
about 25 miles long, goes up to
9200 feet. Two years ago,
flying above Alaska's expansive ice fields.
And see, this is all new right here.
This
iceberg broke off probably about two weeks ago.
You could clearly see the signs of climate change.
This is so beautiful,
but it's also just so sad.
We don't have decades.
We hardly have years.
Research now confirms these glaciers are on the brink,
some already past the point of no return.
If all of a sudden the snow line rises above
the top of the icefield,
you're not going to have any more snow income.
The tipping point in this case is
we don't have any more income.
I've
worked on 250 glaciers, every single one of them as
they're treating now,
and I sit on 27 different places that I've
taken measurements on that are now gone.
Mori Pelto has studied Alaska's evolving landscape over the past
four decades.
What are the changes that you've observed recently that are,
I imagine, quite different than than in decades prior?
From 1948 up to 1990,
it was
it was losing mass, but it was
you weren't going to panic.
And then it began to accelerate.
And then after 2010 is going to really increase.
Alaska's having a major heat wave trends that have already
triggered dramatic consequences on weather patterns.
It feels about 70° out and it's still warming up
entire ecosystems.
Risk of starvation as foods on land are not an
adequate replacement for seals on the sea ice
and local communities. There it goes,
There it goes.
Unbelievable.
Roads are crumpling, airports are are breaking apart,
homes are skewing because the ice that used to be
in the soil isn't there anymore.
And this alarming reality is playing out across the entire
Arctic.
What people don't realize is that the Arctic is changing
faster than pretty much anywhere else on the planet.
As we lose these really bright white surfaces,
it's actually making the Earth darker.
More of the sun's energy is being absorbed by the
surface underneath,
whether it's ocean or land.
It's known as the albedo effect,
and you've felt it if you've worn a black shirt
outside on a hot day.
Because darker colors absorb more of the sun's energy,
while white and lighter colors reflect more of the sun's
heat,
helping you stay cooler. While polar ice and glaciers work
the same way,
reflecting the sun's energy back to space.
And the more of it we lose,
the hotter Earth gets, just accelerating climate change.
Even these fundamental rules of climate change seem to be
breaking down in certain parts of the Arctic.
It's a kind of weird phenomenon that we're trying to
understand.
But they do offer some potential insights into the future
of of the Arctic in general.
Will Harcourt and his team just got back from a
research expedition to the remote Svalbard Islands in Norway.
Balbard is this is an area where there's a hotspot
of what we call surging glaciers.
So glaciers that suddenly speed up kind of without any
prior knowledge of it being able to do that.
I definitely don't want to say that climate change is
triggering surges,
but there is some inter interrelationship there that we're trying
to understand
an Arctic anomaly or forecast for the future.
One thing is clear, we're facing a rapidly changing and
unpredictable Arctic with far reaching effects.
Chase joins me now from Los Angeles.
And Chase, those effects on the world's climate are something
that you've been tracking this summer.
No exception, right?
Yeah, that's right, Valerie. If we look at Alaska and
just last week,
parts of central Alaska, we're seeing temperatures in the upper
80s and even
90°. And a lot of people in the lower 48
might think,
OK, gosh, that's not actually that hot,
right? But these temperatures are
1516° above average. And then we zoom out and look
back at just last year across the Arctic.
The Arctic Circle as a whole saw its 6th warmest
year on record in
2023. But when you look specifically at last summer in
the Arctic,
it was the warmest summer ever recorded.
And that's really important because that's of course the time
of the year where you're going to see most of
this polar ice,
these glaciers melting. And then if we zoom out even
further and look at back at basically the last century
or so,
what's been going on in the Arctic,
you see just how quickly it's warming.
I mean, the Arctic has warmed in just the last
40 years by nearly
6°F. That is four times faster than anywhere else on
on the planet.
And really the long term solution to this kind of
warming is that we've got to start reducing and eventually
eliminating fossil fuel emissions,
coal, oil and gas. The science is clear about that,
Valerie.