– I walk into a room and I tell someone
I’m a glaciologist and usually someone
looks at me and says,
well soon you’ll be a historian
because the ice is going away.
We have the ability to turn this around
and I think we’re going to.
We just have to start moving in that direction now.
The more we know about ice the more
we can get onboard saving it.
My name is M Jackson and I am a geographer
and glaciologist and National Geographic explorer.
We have got great data that’s saying
the majority of the ice worldwide is melting.
It’s responding to climate change
with negative mass balance.
There’s a lot of different mechanisms
but very generally we can say,
Earth temperatures are getting warm
and that’s having a negative effect
on the ice and the ice is getting smaller.
The work I do really tries to
address the question,
what’s going to happen as the world’s ice melts?
Embedded in that question is what can we do?
So, that’s why I work along this
whole south coast of Iceland region.
Icelands largest ice cap
The largest ice cap in Iceland
and all of Europe, Vatnajökull, is right here.
Hundreds of years ago, when say, I don’t know,
the Taj Mahal was being built, it was snowing here.
And that snow was turning into glacial ice.
Okay, so when you’re licking this,
what you’re licking is snow that
fell hundreds of years ago.
Glaciers draining down
And then town of Höfn is located
where all of these glaciers drain down
and so we can see the town right here
and then you have all of these different glaciers
that are draining down into the lagoons that surround Höfn.
And what we see here is that is a lot of complex
physical impacts of glacier melt,
and that there’s a lot of social impacts of glacier melt.
Physical and social impacts
Whenever we want to visualize sea level rise
and glacier melt, often times
we are removing all the variables
and we are just visualizing if
all the oceans rose 10 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet.
And the way that usually looks is it’s uniform.
But that doesn’t take into account geography,
places where the land is maybe subsiding into the ocean
or places that are marshes,
or a really important one for anywhere
Glacier rebounding
that there are glaciers, land that is rising up.
It’s rebounding.
We see a huge change happening in the harbor.
So if you imagine in your hand
a sponge and you press that sponge down,
when you take your hand away that sponge
is just gonna spring right on back up.
That is what is happening here.
All of this ice that’s here,
it pressed the Earth’s crust down,
it pressed the island of Iceland down.
And so today as that ice is melting away,
the land is springing back up.
This is called isostatic rebound, glacial rebound.
These little islands that are springing up,
that’s really great for the town.
They pop a house right on there, town got bigger.
But what about the fishing?
Fishing’s a huge part of the Icelandic economy
but there’s just this one harbor in this whole area.
It’s getting shallower, and shallower,
and shallower.
Boats have to sit outside of the harbor
and wait for high tide.
What’s gonna happen to the fish-packing plant?
What’s gonna happen to the biggest
industry in this town?
Whats going to happen
Tourism is the second growing industry.
There used to be no real glacier tours in here
and suddenly people from all over the world,
they’re coming to see the glaciers before they’re gone,
but also they’re coming to be inside these ice caves.
Icelanders didn’t really have a business in the winter.
They now have jobs in the winter,
they have guiding into these ice caves.
They’re making livings and livelihoods with these.
But the hard bit about this is that
a lot of these ice caves are made
because glaciers are melting quicker.
That’s the paradox.
I look at all of of that physical geography
aspects of ice and I add all the social aspects.
We put it together, we get a whole picture
of what’s happening.
Oceans
The oceans are so, so vast,
but they are often controlled and shaped by glaciers.
So if you are standing, looking at your coastline,
during our last ice age the ocean
was about 400 feet lower than it is today.
That’s because those glaciers,
they held more of that water in the form of ice.
The flip side of that is today.
Those glaciers, they’re melting
and they’re releasing.
Whoa
It is the nature of a glacier to melt.
Glaciers are always melting,
they’ve always melted throughout history,
but what is so different today is the rate of melt.
Never in human history have we ever seen
glaciers as quick as they are melting today.
And that’s gonna make the sea levels rise.
So, how do you get connected to these glaciers?
If you are living, say, in New Jersey,
or you’re living in Florida, or Washington state,
there’s going to be more precipitation,
which means in some places, more snow.
Or in other places, more rain,
which means more volume in our rivers
and our lakes and our marshes.
Studying Glaciers
The more I started to study glaciers,
the more people would ask me questions
that placed that glacier in a context of people.
I started to have to have conversations about fish.
I started to have to have conversations about forests.
And sheep.
I had to have conversations about rivers shifting.
Conclusion
I can look at how people understand
what is happening here with the ice today
and I’m able then to understand
how do people respond to change.
So many of the young people that I work with, they are yes,
climate change is happening,
yes, the glaciers are melting,
and yes, individually have the power
to affect a positive change out of that.
It excites me.
I will totally be honest with you.
It really, really does excite me.
Climate change is really, really hard.
So I work with young people and it re-energizes me
and it makes me excited and I can stomp back
into the field re-energized.
I love, I love being out on the glaciers.
I really do think that if we lose
our ice, we lose something of our humanity.
We’re gonna lose a part of who we are
if we take away those places where we say,
wow, where we say, whoa, or more importantly,
where we don’t say anything at all
because we’re just so blown away.
(slow piano music)
