Six Degrees Could Change The World (15 of 36)

Six Degrees Could Change The World

[Narrator] That's what an intrepid team of scientists does once a year, fiy into Greenland's interior to listen to the ice.
Swiss camp is a scientific research installation buiit directly into the glacier to track climate change.
Dr.
Konrad Steffens leads the team that has to dig out every spring.
Lateiy, he's found areas of the glacier that hadn't melted in thousands of years, covered in water every summer.
[Steffens] I checked the weather station.
Guess what? - What? - It's not getting colder.
Why not? We have record temperatures again in early January.

[Narrator] Some experts predict two degrees of warming could be enough to dismantle the glacier completely, but that would take thousands of years.
Steffens suspects we could reach a tipping point much more rapidly, within the next 50 years, when melting would become unstoppable.
To find out, he must venture even further out across the ice sheet.
Steffens has erected 23 full-service weather stations that take a complete range of climate measurements every 15 seconds, updating global warming computer models all over the world.
[Steffens] The ice sheet is very old.
It's over 150,000 years old.
If you start to remove it, then you actually start a process that is unknown to civilization.
We have never seen Greenland disappearing.
Watch it, watch it, watch it.
[Narrator] In 1992, 3.5 miles of glacier was slipping into the sea and disappearing.
Ten years later, that number more than doubled to 7.8 miles annually.
Steffens wouldn't understand how warmerweather affects the speed of glaciers, until he came upon one of the strangest and most dangerous features of this forbidding landscape.
Rivers of melted ice are cascading straight down into the glacier, creating huge tunnels called moulins.
The team lowers a fiber-optic camera.
Their hypothesis: That melt water has cut ali the way through to the bedrock a quarter of a mile below, and is lubricating the underside of the glacier, propeliing it faster and faster into the sea.
[Man] Fifty meters.
Sixty meters.
- Seventy meters.
- [Man 2] Seventy meters.