Antarctica on the edge - earthrise

[Music] parts of Antarctica are warming faster than anywhere else on the planet this is having an effect on wildlife and is altering deep ocean currents which regulate the world's climate from the poles to the equator as Antarctica's ice melts we're seeing global sea levels rise and unpredictable changes to weather worldwide in this earth right special we visit the world's most remote continent to see the effects of climate change firsthand I'm Tarek Paisley and I'll be spending the next month on this research vessel traveling around Antarctica with a group of scientists who are trying to understand how the changes taking place there will affect us all I joined the expedition in Hobart Australia the Russian research ship Academy Katrina Kaif has been hired by the Swiss polar Institute to circumnavigate Antarctica it'll be a floating laboratory from which 55 scientists will do 22 different experiments David Walton has been visiting Antarctica for more than 50 years and as the expedition's chief scientist because the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean actually influence the whole of the global weather system and all the currents in the oceans it matters to everybody it also matters if the Antarctic begins to melt as far as world sea level is concerned it's the largest source of new water added to the oceans in the world so even if you live somewhere a long way away if you're low-lying and on the coast the Antarctic matters to you the voyage will take us two and a half thousand kilometres south from Hobart to the edge of Antarctica will then travel 5,000 kilometers east making stops at a number of islands then after a month that sea will return to port and southern Chile [Music] [Music] first we must cross what are known as the Furious 50s in screaming sixties latitudes known for their ferocious weather we face hundred kilometer hour winds and ten meter waves it's an early reminder of the potent energy of the oceans [Music] as we sail south the air and sea fast become colder then on the sixth morning we wake up to sea ice soon we're forced to navigate around icebergs some the size of a football pitch others are more than a hundred kilometres long then finally we arrive at the Mertz glacier in Antarctica just look at those secrets of icicles dropping off them and these amazingly powerful winds coming in off the glacier and dropping down into the sea this coast here is the windiest place on the planet at sea level and it's certainly playing up to that reputation today [Music] the Mertz glacier fascinates scientists because in 2010 an enormous chunk around 75 by 35 kilometers broke off after it was nudged by a large iceberg this has dramatically changed the flow of ice in the area it's also exposed large areas of ocean floor for study for the first time the weather comes right and the ship parks its bow up against the glacier this gives the scientists a stable platform to begin their work yeah exactly Geum sa is a biologist and in charge of an ambitious project yes yeah it's quite amazing I mean there is so much gear on it I call it the Swiss Army knife a suicide me neither a tightening discovery yes exactly okay so well I think something you must know is all these cameras basically we've got very high definition cameras so we've got digital still 1 HD camera 1 4k camera here basically we are interested in the ice column so very soon we'll die along the ice column along this the front of the glacier [Music] the team expects to see a vertical wall of ice dropping 500 meters from the surface but instead there's a surprise they discover a huge underwater cavern beneath this part of the glacier the seawater is warmer than expected and there's unusual evidence of melt we went really close to the ice and discovered that it was kind of a really rotten ice everything was kind of melting away with some kind of fur a lot of thought kind of holes in the eyes and yeah completely rotted we were not expecting that on the glacier really and not especially not at this depth and kind of so far into the glacier warmer ocean currents are now flowing further south towards Antarctica scientists believe the kind of melt we've seen here will contribute more than a meter to global sea level rise by the end of the century and up to 13 meters over the next 500 years bless ears are like rivers of ice so in the ocean water warms and they melt the remaining ice moves faster towards the sea a team of glaciologists want to see how this is happening and drill ice cores from next to the glaciers edge seven meters down they find something unexpected you see the bubbles in in the core I think those bubbles probably can least contain water I'll be quite salty water finding saltwater here suggests warmer ocean currents are having an impact possibly weakening the glacier from beneath the helicopters returned and the ice cores are loaded on board [Applause] back on the ship they're placed in a giant freezer the history of this ice is that a thirst falls it's not it went to the continent and then at depth the pressure of the the snow above it is compressing compressing at a depth of about 60 meters this will be so compressed that it forms solid ice one of the principles of icicle science is that while that's happening the air from the atmosphere that was that is in this snow when it fell is slowly being locked until you see these bubbles forming right and gradually as we get deeper under more and more pressure these bubbles get isolated and you see these little bubbles and that's you know when we get deeper into the ice ice cores and we want to look at carbon dioxide concentrations back thousands hundreds of thousands of years it's those little pockets of the atmosphere that we get into so you see that process starting here few ice cores have been taken from this part of Antarctica so there's little specific information about how the climate is changing but it's hope these samples will help fill this gap further east slide the Balinese islands for most of the year they're locked in sea ice but a visit like this in summer means a team of scientists can dredge the ocean floor and I've been drafted in to help a certain amount of the rocks and mud from the bottom have come up in the net so their technique is pretty much to use this fire hose to blast out all the rocks and the mud and then after that they can get it the various creatures that have come up with it of particular interests are those that take carbon from the environment by locking it away in their shells these then end up being buried in the seabed when they die over the last hundred years carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen dramatically largely as a result of our burning of fossil fuels the role these creatures play to counteract this needs to be better understood and incorporated in climate change models little star magnificent absolutely perfect we're gonna seem to meet her across entire skeletons made of carbon these guys here the encrusting worms and these tiny things here but there are hundreds of little carbonaceous animals there carving out into the skies and the doing oil it's creatures like these they're in some way providing a small amount of balance to the system and into the carbon system gonna play once sorted the creatures are taken to the lab and photographed the sea mouse is a notable catch so to this brittle star another uncurls itself measuring around 50 centimeters across many of these creatures will be preserved and after the expedition their DNA will be analyzed giving the researchers detailed data about their distribution and diversity so having picked over this and look through it for anything of interest there are still a lot of rocks left and there's only one thing to do on a ship like this you don't need extra ballast let's open the edge the robust team also turned their cameras on life on the sea floor at a depth of 900 meters they take samples of cold water corals and a wide variety of other species they also take sediment cores these will give them clues about what's being buried in the ocean floor and how it's changed over time but it's later in the dive that an extraordinary observation is made we have this ceased or more precisely a brittle star crawling on the sea floor which we believe in a mod or scavenger but suddenly you have a fish just crawling it just in the fish with a poison we don't know yet because that's just new whatever it seemed that before and it just an officious lay on the side and suddenly this brillo start just to roll it and start to eat the fish which can swim in it and a speed much much more much faster than any kind of of sea star who can crawl on the sea floor so that's quite amazing just to see that that's that that's totally new close analysis of the footage reveals 10 examples of this behavior these are two of the most abundant species living in Antarctic waters an interaction of this nature has important implications for understanding climate change all the carbon which is contained in to this fish then transported directly to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately buried there we do know quite a lot of organisms including marine organisms which are very efficient at poisoning their prey and I think this is the case but we still have to do a bit more research we've made a discovery but now it means that we have to do further research to really understand what we've seen here [Music] Antarctica has the cleanest air on the planet and at each stop on the voyage atmospheric scientist Julia Shamar Lee has used a mobile kit to take samples she's also packed a suite of instruments into a shipping container on board how's it going I found you on the big red box out here on deck thanks very much wow you got stuff packed in here why are you so interested in the air also actually in particular we're interested in the tiny particles that are in the air we call them aerosol aerosol particles and they are very important for the water cycle and because they form clouds without these tiny particles we would not have any clouds in our atmosphere so it would never rain earth would be a completely different planet to see if particles can can form droplets or not we use this machine and then a cloud machine here so we're making our own cloud in here it's very important for us to understand powdered clouds form before the Industrial Revolution before humankind actually started burning fossil fuels in large amounts because it makes a big difference for our climates for the clouds and for the hydrological cycle in general climate change models are generally better at predicting variations in temperature rather than precipitation let's hope the data from this experiment will I mean that as the ship continues east we come across more sea ice without crunching our way through the ice because we've come across these sea ice floes I'm gonna drop the camera down just so you can have a look what the bow is doing down there it's really quite remarkable luckily for us anyway the bow of this 12,000 tongue icebreaker rides up over the ice crunching there it is look at that the power crunching through the sea ice look here comes another enormous chunk let's see how this one fears under the boughs of the Academy contrition that called pushed out of this way the next stop is at one of the smallest islands on this leg of the voyage just five football pitches in size Scott Island is washed over by waves and in stormy conditions it's accessible only by helicopter it's too windswept for sea birds to nest here that lichen and moss do grow in the cracked volcanic rocks hopefully with the moss in the soil we're gonna find invertebrate Amanda right here how the animals have coped through not only I guess climate change in the past it's mostly natural but also how they may move and adapt in the you know facing the future before we can be flown off the island back to the ship there's a sudden change in the weather helicopters clearly been grounded on the ship they're not able to return to the island to pick us up we have enough equipment with us and our tent and and rations for four days so I don't think it's a great concern there but it does start here thinking about how you could possibly survive on an island like this so remote fortunately the weather lifts just long enough to fly us off the island and were saved from ever having to find out back on the ship the samples are dried it's hoped any living things will drop out this lichen is also examined and within it there's a discovery smaller than a pinhead this is the first time this tiny mite has been found here similar mites have been found in other parts of the continent but it's likely that this is a new species something our new DNA tests after the expedition can confirm the landscape here is incredibly old so you know I probably started off 180 million years ago would have been a tropical rainforest and it's now looks like it does outside and so these are some of the few things that have probably managed to hang on that long and so now there's some of the most successful organisms that live here the teams meet to discuss their next move from satellite images it appears the next Island on their route Peter the first is surrounded by sea ice this will make a visit difficult instead some of the scientists call for the voyage to divert they've spotted clear water around a coastal area which is normally docked and sea ice it's a rare opportunity for them to attempt to visit the ship's course is changed and we arrive at Mount Siple it's one of the continents tallest and most isolated volcanoes rising more than 3,000 meters from the sea we scout the area and find a large number of a daily penguins come to Antioch and over to see them in their natural environment you see what an extraordinary animal they are and just how incredibly until their landline is run and they walking their way up through these values and then nesting on the top of this block above us here by the time we return to the ship it's late in the evening but at this time of year at such high latitudes it doesn't get dark instead there's a long and spectacular sunset [Music] the following morning we fly back to Mount Siple less than 1% of Antarctica is ice-free making a place like this prime real estate for nesting many of the chicks have been left to fend for themselves while their parents go to sea to catch curl the pinkish colour of the shrimp like food often ending up staining their fronts as far as we know scientists have never visited this penguin colony before so the group we worth want to know how large it is and whether there's any other species living here we have behind me a whole lot of our daily penguin I'm just gonna turn around here show you this chap here he is looking a bit odd because he's losing his baby feathers he's just a few months old it's even safe he's very friendly when the parents return they're much in demand sometimes from their own offspring but frequently from other hungry Birds hoping for a feed it's late in the season and many are exercising their wings and preparation to leave other seabirds is they give you this sort of canary in the coalmine indication as to what's happening in the southern ocean and this is a significant colony it's big this colony appears to be thriving but on the Antarctic Peninsula to the east of here it's a different story the area is warming faster than any other place on the planet and colonies of a daily penguins like these have been abandoning their nesting sites and moving south perhaps in search of colder locations certainly upsetting many hundreds if not thousands of years of breeding behavior over the previous weeks we've been to some extraordinary places and seen dramatic evidence of climate change it's changed many of the scientists feel should be ringing alarm bells and the rest of the world in the same way that the Antarctic sea ice is actually changing in terms of its distribution and pattern the sea is warming off the Antarctic Peninsula the glaciers are retreating Arctic sea ice is at its lowest yet known these are all indications that the world as a whole is warming and that we need to be concerned about the future we certainly do know enough to say we need to act now we should have acted yesterday figuratively speaking there is not much time to postpone action into the future I think we're very clear about this we come back with a better knowledge we still have some work to do and we're already kind of planning for new experiments new expeditions to try and really understand what you've seen here [Music] the expedition has collected tens of thousands of samples and millions of megabytes of data for these scientists who will return to their labs around the world there's years of work ahead [Music] we're just scratching the surface to understand how Antarctica is so important so significant when it comes to the broader issues of climate changing and really where the earth is going to go where our climate is going to go in the years ahead the scientific findings made on this voyage will add weight to what's now overwhelming proof that our planet is warming and that climate change is posing a serious threat the sustainability of life on Earth the evidence is clearer than ever what's needed now is for people everywhere to accept the science engage with the problem and take action [Music] you

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Keywords: al Jazeera, antarctica, jazeera, environment, Earthrise, News, Al Jazeera English, climate change, science, greenhouse gases, greenhouse, global warming, esa, european, space agency

Id: gTPY8Q0raU4

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Invalid Date