the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the
world’s most important places for
telling the story of a changing climate
Palmer station the u.s. research base
has seen winter temperatures warm up by
11 degrees fahrenheit in the past 50
years and the average year-round
temperature has warmed up five degrees
Fahrenheit those are enormous rates of
change that are on a par with the most
severe warming seen anywhere in the
northern hemisphere including the
Southwest us and the Arctic Ocean basin
our project the extreme ice survey has
been looking at receding glaciers in the
northern hemisphere for the last seven
or eight years and thinking about how
the receding glaciers are a
manifestation of climate change I always
wanted to come to the southern
hemisphere and this was an amazing
chance the Lindblad expeditions National
Geographic Explorer is a fantastic ship
for doing this kind of work it covers a
lot of ground it gets us to faraway
places that are otherwise very
time-consuming and/or expensive or even
impossible to get to what we’ve done is
we’ve taken 9 time-lapse cameras and we
bolted them to bedrock alongside these
glaciers the cameras shoot every hour of
daylight and that will produce roughly
4,000 frames in a year on each one of
these cameras I think of them as our
little robot eyes they’re watching the
world while we’re far away and they’re
working for us recording what’s going on
telling us the story of these changing
environments and they’ll be out there
through the winter through the spring
and we’ll get back here in late spring
hopefully about 9 or 10 months from now
and we’ll see what the cameras recorded
about the changes in these glacial
landscapes this is a really important
historical
documents that records a landscape that
is transitory that is changing and in
its current form will probably disappear
by the time my my 12 year old daughter
and my 25 year old daughter reached my
age you know that will be radically
different than what we see right now
today
world’s most important places for
telling the story of a changing climate
Palmer station the u.s. research base
has seen winter temperatures warm up by
11 degrees fahrenheit in the past 50
years and the average year-round
temperature has warmed up five degrees
Fahrenheit those are enormous rates of
change that are on a par with the most
severe warming seen anywhere in the
northern hemisphere including the
Southwest us and the Arctic Ocean basin
our project the extreme ice survey has
been looking at receding glaciers in the
northern hemisphere for the last seven
or eight years and thinking about how
the receding glaciers are a
manifestation of climate change I always
wanted to come to the southern
hemisphere and this was an amazing
chance the Lindblad expeditions National
Geographic Explorer is a fantastic ship
for doing this kind of work it covers a
lot of ground it gets us to faraway
places that are otherwise very
time-consuming and/or expensive or even
impossible to get to what we’ve done is
we’ve taken 9 time-lapse cameras and we
bolted them to bedrock alongside these
glaciers the cameras shoot every hour of
daylight and that will produce roughly
4,000 frames in a year on each one of
these cameras I think of them as our
little robot eyes they’re watching the
world while we’re far away and they’re
working for us recording what’s going on
telling us the story of these changing
environments and they’ll be out there
through the winter through the spring
and we’ll get back here in late spring
hopefully about 9 or 10 months from now
and we’ll see what the cameras recorded
about the changes in these glacial
landscapes this is a really important
historical
documents that records a landscape that
is transitory that is changing and in
its current form will probably disappear
by the time my my 12 year old daughter
and my 25 year old daughter reached my
age you know that will be radically
different than what we see right now
today
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