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    • Rights: Thin Ice/University of Waikato
    Published 30 March 2017 Referencing Hub media
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    Ohio State University’s Professor Lonnie Thompson is a glaciologist and also a senior research scientist at Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. He studies glaciers in tropical and subtropical ice fields. For the past 30 years, Professor Thompson has mapped changes to glacier ice levels.

    Jargon alert

    Cosmogenic nuclides1 are rare isotopes2 that form in surface rocks due to high-energy cosmic (solar) rays.

    Transcript

    Professor Lonnie Thompson

    My name is Lonnie Thompson. I am a University Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. I am also a senior research scientist for the Byrd Polar Research Center. I have spent my life looking at glaciers and looking at the history that is recorded in the ice as well as looking at what’s happening to ice through time as a result of increasing temperatures on our planet3.

    A glacier is a wonderful archive of our past, and I believe it is the best archive we have on Earth because it records not only climate4 – things like temperature5 through the stable isotopes of oxygen6 and hydrogen7 – precipitation8 – the net balance. In the tropics where we have a very distinct wet and dry season, every dry season, there is a dust layer. Measure the distance between the dust layers, you have a precipitation history, and very few archives will provide that to us. But on top of that, they also record the forcings of climate. They do record the tephra9 from major volcanic eruptions, the sulphates coming from those eruptions. We can look at the greenhouse gases10 in the bubbles in the ice. We can look at cosmogenic nuclides11 and find out how the Sun has varied through time, and we need to understand both the natural and the human-driven forces in order to understand what lies ahead of the 21st century.

    And ice is probably our best recorder. If you go to the low latitudes, of course, in order to find ice, you have to go to higher and higher elevations, and the higher you go the colder it is. The colder it is, the better the archive, and so we have made it our mission to go to the tops of the highest mountains on Earth to recover that frozen archive. In starting to look at these glaciers and then returning to many of these year after year, we could actually see how rapidly they were retreating in today’s world, and as we documented that and we started to map these glaciers, then we started becoming concerned about the rate that not only were they retreating, but they were accelerating in the rate of ice loss, and not only was that happening in the Andes of South America, it was happening on Kilimanjaro in Africa, throughout the Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains. So you get a global picture of this change taking place.

    And in the tropics, in the low latitudes, probably the take-home message is that 100% of the glaciers are retreating, and where we have this time-lapse data12, they are accelerating, and that gives us possible concern for our future and what will happen to these glaciers and the resource that they represent for the people who live in these areas.

    Acknowledgements

    This video is an extract from Thin Ice – The Inside Story of Climate Science, a David Sington/Simon Lamb film.

    The full documentary film is available by emailing thiniceclimate@vuw.ac.nz. The link for streaming is available free of charge. The DVD is also available to New Zealand schools for $20 to cover costs.

    1. cosmogenic nuclides: Rare isotopes that form in surface rocks due to high-energy cosmic (solar) rays.
    2. isotope: Different forms of atoms of the same element. Within the nucleus, there is the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, giving each isotope a different atomic mass.
    3. planet: In our Solar System, a planet is defined as an object that orbits the Sun, is big enough for its own gravity to make it ball-shaped and keeps space around it clear of smaller objects.
    4. climate: The weather conditions of an area averaged over a series of years, usually 30 or more.
    5. temperature: A measure of the degree of hotness or coldness of an object or substance. Temperature is measured with a thermometer calibrated in one or more temperature scales. Kelvin scale temperature is a measure of the average energy of the molecules of a body.
    6. oxygen: A non-metal – symbol O, atomic number 8. Oxygen is a gas found in the air. It is needed for aerobic cellular respiration in cells.
    7. hydrogen: First element on the periodic table –­ symbol H, with the atomic number of 1, meaning that it has a single proton in its nucleus.
    8. precipitation: 1. The formation of an insoluble solid (precipitate) from a given solution by altering either its temperature, concentration or chemical composition. 2. In meteorology, this term describes the formation of rain, hail, snow or ice in the atmosphere.
    9. tephra: Scientific term for the ash and rock vented from a volcano. Can accumulate on the landscape after an eruption, which allows scientists to track different eruptions from different volcanoes.
    10. greenhouse gases: A natural or manmade gas that traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere and contributes to the greenhouse effect. The main greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), ozone and industrial gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These gases in the Earth's atmosphere trap warmth from the Sun and make life possible. An overabundance of greenhouse gases leads to a rise in global temperatures – known as the greenhouse effect.
    11. nuclides: Different atomic forms of all elements, in contrast to isotopes, which refer only to different atomic forms of a single element.
    12. data: The unprocessed information we analyse to gain knowledge.

    Appears in

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      cosmogenic nuclides

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      2. Rare isotopes that form in surface rocks due to high-energy cosmic (solar) rays.

      climate

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      3. The weather conditions of an area averaged over a series of years, usually 30 or more.

      hydrogen

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      4. First element on the periodic table –­ symbol H, with the atomic number of 1, meaning that it has a single proton in its nucleus.

      greenhouse gases

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      5. A natural or manmade gas that traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere and contributes to the greenhouse effect. The main greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), ozone and industrial gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These gases in the Earth's atmosphere trap warmth from the Sun and make life possible. An overabundance of greenhouse gases leads to a rise in global temperatures – known as the greenhouse effect.

      isotope

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      6. Different forms of atoms of the same element. Within the nucleus, there is the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, giving each isotope a different atomic mass.

      temperature

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      7. A measure of the degree of hotness or coldness of an object or substance. Temperature is measured with a thermometer calibrated in one or more temperature scales. Kelvin scale temperature is a measure of the average energy of the molecules of a body.

      precipitation

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      8. 1. The formation of an insoluble solid (precipitate) from a given solution by altering either its temperature, concentration or chemical composition.

      2. In meteorology, this term describes the formation of rain, hail, snow or ice in the atmosphere.

      nuclides

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      9. Different atomic forms of all elements, in contrast to isotopes, which refer only to different atomic forms of a single element.

      planet

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      10. In our Solar System, a planet is defined as an object that orbits the Sun, is big enough for its own gravity to make it ball-shaped and keeps space around it clear of smaller objects.

      oxygen

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      11. A non-metal – symbol O, atomic number 8. Oxygen is a gas found in the air. It is needed for aerobic cellular respiration in cells.

      tephra

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      12. Scientific term for the ash and rock vented from a volcano. Can accumulate on the landscape after an eruption, which allows scientists to track different eruptions from different volcanoes.

      data

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      13. The unprocessed information we analyse to gain knowledge.

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