This Tiny Mammal Survived The Catastrophic Ice Age | Natural Kingdom | Real Wild

[Music] thank you [Music] for over a million years great rivers of ice have surged from their Arctic birthplace to clot the Earth with massive Frozen talons [Music] thousands of meters deep these Rivers were created from simple roofs in times of relative cold summer sun fails to melt winter snow [Music] accumulates until its own great weight compresses the layers below forming ice then gravity takes hold and the river begins to flow [Music] Canada is home to over 100 000 glaciers the most glaciated Terrain in the world to journey to a glacier is to travel back in time to a place where the story of the ice age is still being written and like oracles they trace subtle paths towards our future [Music] glaciers massive Majestic and mysterious are one of the last unknown Frontiers on Earth inspiring a frozen quest to Divine the secrets [Music] out here mankind seems small inconsequential and nature too powerful to comprehend [Music] eighteen thousand years ago Canada was consumed by the laurentide ice sheet ice as high as the oceans are deep it carved mountains gouged out the great lakes and scraped the Prairies flat eight thousand years later the ice had retreated yet today in the coldest recesses of Canada the last ice age still exists [Music] this is Saint Elias the way the world once was located in the southwest corner of the Yukon Saint Elias is the largest ice field in the world outside the polar regions [Music] towering above it Mount Logan the largest massive Granite on Earth Bears Silent Witness to a million years of History biologist David hick has come to Elias seeking the most Sublime and delicate of mysteries here in this land of immense relief a small furry creature holds the key to life within the ice the journey is a dangerous one when ice flows huge crevasses may open wide and his team must remain tethered and cautious in case the soft surface conceals a bottomless Castle beneath [Music] these could be the first tracks ever laid in this place their destination is a small Peak jutting from the ice like an island in a frozen sea [Music] called none attacks an Inuit word meaning land attached life exists here on a precarious perch plants and insects are blown in on the Wind Birds arrive blown off course during migration once here they may have no other option except to nourish this minute ecosystem with their bodies only one animal the colored Pica has traveled across the ice with a purpose it is this tiny mammal one of Nature's greatest survivalists that draws David hick to the ends of the Earth living under 10 meters of snow for 10 months of the year on grass stockpiled from an ecosystem the size of a blanket during an Ice Age 120 000 years in the making is the only life a pika knows my real interest in in coming to these nun attacks and looking for pikas and other plants and animals is really a curiosity of the limits of of of life just how far and how extreme and how remote can we find places where plants and animals seem to live and here on this none attack color pikas and the plants other plants and animals they don't just live here they Thrive here a cousin of the rabbit the Pika lives 200 kilometers inside the ice field the mystery is how did they get here did they live on an attacks before the last ice age cut them off from the rest of the world or did they migrate from the mainland seeking Safe Haven [Music] ten years ago there were no questions no one knew life existed here until David hick discovered Pica thriving on the none attacks since then he spent every summer studying life as it was twenty thousand years ago the evidence we have so far is that these pokers are able to disperse over very long distances you can imagine a little rabbit the size of your fist hopping across 10 kilometers of ice and not not only finding another place to live that has shelter and food but also a mate thank you a delicate Natural Balance prevails at the Saint Elias ice field on a once Frozen continent the Pika may be the only mammal to have survived the last ice age and understanding this tiny ancient survivalist might help us understand the modern mysteries of life as the planet heats up the Pika survived a cold world the question is can it survive a warming one [Music] those who pursue mysteries in the ice must Brave some of the harshest weather the world has to offer well we've eaten the dogs on Eclipse dome in the heart of the Saint Elias ice field a team of researchers had been pinned in their tents for five days by a vicious storm it's late August summertime in most of the team from The Institute of ocean Sciences in Victoria British Columbia has come a long way to Eclipse Dome to drill for deep and ultra clean ice cores they're searching for pollutants man's footprint in a pristine world [Music] the storm clears nature rests and it soon becomes apparent as difficult as it may be this is the best job in the world as Mount Logan Towers 6 000 meters above them there's time for an open-air meal and the first look at the world in nearly a week invisible to the naked eye the air mass is volatile here only 150 kilometers from the Pacific coast Asian European and North American air masses Collide directly over Eclipse Dome good ice domes form at high altitude in the open spaces between mountains where perennial snow builds up over a thousand centuries to dominate the landscape Eclipse Dome is the perfect place to drill for evidence of man's industrial impact on the planet ice is the one place where we've got a long-term chance to capture gases out of the atmosphere they don't get captured in the ocean or ocean sediments so you can get Co2 methane records and things like that from a long way back I mean it's kind of neat to think that you can infer what the CO2 levels were in the atmosphere 30 000 Years Ago by what can be nice like nothing else glacial ice provides an indisputable portrait of the past today it could provide a snapshot of the present which we may not want to acknowledge water here and electric drill operation Michael girimasso lowers the drill hundreds of meters down into the history of the world their searches from Mercury a natural but deadly toxin penetrating the Earth's water and Food Supplies in dangerous concentrations but if they looked Krakatoa Hiroshima Chernobyl and Mount Saint Helens could also be found here the world's farthest reaches have always maintained a communication with this place today to come here and it gets its Opportunity by drifting in air masses will eventually leave its imprint on the Sun in the springtime in the Arctic there's a phenomenon called the Arctic Haze and that happens particularly on the Alaskan Coast and I'm sure this this site would have an opportunity of sampling it from time to time and where does all the keys come from basically it's Eastern European air masses that move across the Arctic Ocean in a period measured in weeks [Music] [Music] the history of all human activity has been described in this ice including the tale of the Industrial Revolution I am convinced that there would be a lead record in here from our use of of lead particularly in gasoline back in the 60s and 70s in fact they started using lead and gasoline in 1927 and that record shows up all over the place we could look at sulfate that's a product of human activities there's probably a record in here of organochlorines I'm sure that if we collected enough material and we went and large enough volumes and worked at it hard enough we would find a DDT record in here we would find a PCB record in here we'd find a toxaphene record in here despite the fact that toxaphene has not been used anywhere near this place and the list goes on ice drawn from the belly of the glacier thousands of years old and a record of all that has transpired [Music] understanding the impact of human activities on the planet is the ecological riddle of our age [Music] but the biggest risk here is that McDonald himself will contaminate the core this is the glaciologist's treasure a frozen Time Capsule 200 centuries of the Earth's Collective memory embedded in ice [Music] a world of Terrible Beauty and remorseless power this is not a place man should come to make sense of his own Folly but the window on the world which glaciers opens is only now beginning to be understood the irony of eclipse is this industrialized man has polluted places he has never even been [Music] I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription or fire [Applause] thank you [Music] the Rocky Mountains Canada's most majestic range is home to thousands of glaciers [Music] this is Plato located on the southern edge of the Columbia ice field straddling the Continental Divide between Alberta and British Columbia it is one of the most southerly glaciers in Canada the mystery here is global warming glaciologist Michael demuth and assistant Terry Beck seek to reveal the glacier's 20 000 year history and through it understand recent dramatic changes in global climate [Music] in the world of glaciers Plato qualifies as small but in the world of science Plato is huge one of the longest studied bodies of ice in the world we understand more about this Glacier than almost any other [Music] Cato Glacier is part of a network of glaciers in Canada and North America and indeed globally that are used to monitor climate change and using that Network under the global climate observing system and the Royal Glacier monitoring service we're able to assess not only site-specific variations in climate but build more Regional and Global pictures of climate variability glaciers of ebbden flowed through these mountain valleys for almost 3 million years but it's now possible that within the lifetime of our grandchildren they may be gone forever [Music] in the flat accumulation Zone at the top of Plato where the glacier was born the Muth begins to drill what we hope to accomplish over the next few days is to hand auger down through the fern up here in the accumulation area and determine over the past few years perhaps as far back as 10 years the accumulation rate at this site how much snow arrived and what was left at the end of each year and collect an ice core which would have a chronology sort of like tree rings sort of like counting tree rings where we would have annual interfaces between which we could calculate how much moisture arrived at this site year after year after year okay easy easy as we recover the cores out of the glacier we'll be photographing them looking at the stratigraphy and I'm trying to identify visually the annual layers and this is simply accomplished by looking for dirty Horizons which normally are coincident with the late summer start of winter and there's 1998 summer surface with that dirt layer is the ice core opens a window to the past and through it the Earth's climatic history is revealed [Music] but Michael demute sees is a dramatic change in the local climate in the mid 70s there was a shift in the North American circulation pattern that created less snow in general in the winter in Western Southwestern Canada and Northwestern USA and this pattern of less snow in winter has led to some drastic changes in the glaciers here [Music] further down Pato below its receding toe geographer Scott Monroe is also studying the cause and effect of the glaciers melting overall we're losing ice in this area we have ice volume losses in the order of maybe 50 to 70 percent over the last century dramatic change over a short period of time requires answers and the sooner the better Monroe's work focuses on Glacier energetics how much energy from the Sun the ice is absorbing how fast the ice is melting and the rapid change of atmospheric conditions foreign the blue ice of Pato signifies old ice newly exposed and without a protective cover of fresh snow to Shield it from the Sun [Music] effect is cumulative and predictable the smaller the glacier the faster it will melt and Pato is melting rapidly [Music] we consider Pito Glacier in the con you know the worldwide context is it unusual um not at all this is a retreating Glacier it's smaller than it was we see the same picture in Europe in Asia large parts of South America while large parts of the Andes Southern South America this is a pretty pretty typical of what is going on worldwide the ice fields are emptying geographically the phenomenon is widespread historically it is without precedent but the mystery persists what part of the Earth's rapid warming is natural and what part is man-made so far no one knows well to what degree should we duplicate this one can really get a good picture of what's Happening Now to the glacier as compared to what has happened perhaps before humankind started influencing the earth's climate my calendar Alpine and Mountain Glaciers are losing mass at an accelerating rate that's perhaps broadly consistent we haven't confirmed this absolutely but broadly consistent with what we might expect with an enhanced greenhouse effect the greenhouse effect we all know about it but should we fear it millions of years ago the ice caps were temperate forests in 1996 glaciers gained more mass than they lost perhaps man takes too much credit for his influence on the planet perhaps nature is the greatest mystery of all [Music] back in the Saint Elias mountains in the southwestern corner of the Yukon glaciologist Gary Clark enjoys his walk to work on the Trap Ridge glacier right the ice here is unique and dangerous it may appear static but in reality it is dynamic like a dormant volcano waiting to erupt unknown forces and tensions churn invisibly beneath its surface trap Ridge is a surging Glacier capable of sliding hundreds of meters in a single season the mystery is how you think of the glacial time scale as being decades or centuries and we have fantastic events that occur in this Glacier in a matter of two minutes transforming the glacier from one state to another imagine a freight train with no brakes 10 kilometers long and weighing billions of tons rolling downhill completely out of control with no possible means of stopping it that is a surging glacier a massive cresting wave a barely contained power waiting until unpredictably it decides to move [Music] bless her to this place here was in 1945. what we're trying to do is instrument this Glacier and observe it when it clicks on for the next surge [Music] people are most fascinated by the surface of glaciers because that's what you get to stand on and photograph [Music] for glaciologists the really interesting stuff all occurs at the contact between the bottom ice and the bed beneath it because that's where the processes that control fast flow are active [Music] fast flow means fast movement Gary Clark has been studying trap bridge for 30 years and knows more about glaciers than perhaps anyone else on the planet yet Clark has still not got to the bottom of the problem how to predict the next surge this is our hot water drill the water is just a little bit below the boiling temperature it's coming out at uh 2500 PSI the pressure Jets through the glacier just melts its way down we can get about 100 meters an hour with this so it means we can get right through the ice in less than an hour our big approach to studying this Glacier is to fill it with instruments this is the most densely instrumented piece of ice in the world we drill 60 holes in it every year we put 200 sensors in Iran the glacier and record their information year round we've been doing this with this level of intensity for now more than a decade they've reached bedrock and lower a pressure gauge down into the glacier's Frozen belly Gary Clark seeks answers to the most important questions of our time lifting surges has impact far beyond this landlocked glacial Outpost the kinds of things that interest us are the sublease of water pressure which tends to be very close to the flotation pressure and this is in fact what gives rise to the possibility of fast flow when the glacier's flowing fast it's virtually a float on its own water melt water sinking through the ice can be trapped between Glacier and Bedrock if enough water collects and becomes pressurized the glacier can lift itself up and hydroplane down the valley in effect riding its own wave foreign is considered a small glacier but when large glaciers move fast as they have throughout history the effects on the earth's climate are immediate and immense [Music] larger story is more relevant to the question of global climate how do the large ice sheets behave what physics dominates their their flow their expansion their k over 75 percent of the world's population lives on or near Ocean coastlines exposed to any dramatic increase in sea levels [Music] Continental ice sheets surged six times during the last ice age sending fleets of icebergs the size of Manhattan into the sea ocean circulation patterns shut down temperatures Rose 10 to 15 degrees almost overnight and sea levels Rose dramatically the effect on the planet was nothing short of cataclysmic [Music] if all the Earth's ice sheets surged or melted today sea levels would rise over 70 meters flooding Inland by as much as 300 kilometers [Music] how did Ice Sheets surge in the past we again again and our human influences accelerating the possibility these are perhaps the greatest and most important mystery in ways we can scarcely imagine the world's great Glaciers are Central to our daily lives when a tap is turned on in Canada there's a good chance the water that pours out began its Journey here high in the Rocky Mountains this is snowdome the hydrologic Apex of North America from here melt water feeds three oceans the Arctic Pacific even the Atlantic five thousand kilometers away melting ice flowing down from snow Dome has provided the single most important condition of life for an entire continent water it all begins with water [Music] the change of state from solid to liquid is a moment of natural transformation an elemental Miracle only ice and water have shaped our Earth [Music] glaciers carved these valleys slicing through Rock with an inconceivable Force when they receded Great Rivers replaced them channeling torrents of melting ice down from the highlands and breathing life into the landscape along with deserts and sea floors glaciers like the ice age that spawned them are one of the harshest environments on Earth where life is a virtual impossibility [Music] twenty thousand years ago this Valley was filled to the brim with ice as far as the eye could see mountains thousands of meters in elevation were mere none attacks their peaks like arcs drifting in a frozen Wasteland the only possible sanctuary [Music] ten thousand years ago this is what the world became the glacier long vanquished from this Valley had left behind the necessary ingredients for nature to thrive here foreign Flats on The River's Edge provide Rich sedge grasses for a hungry grizzly on the edge of the former ice field dull sheep find Forage on steep slopes life here is as awesome as the force that created it cons Ruby range glaciers disappeared fifteen thousand years ago and the the great Ice Age survivalist watched them melt the mystery here is life after ice drawing biologist David hick down from the ice fields of Saint Elias glacial Boulder Fields shade the Pica from the Sun perfectly adapted to Ice Age life if their body temperature increases one degree they die isolated for thousands of years Pika are the most inbred mammal on earth creating a new age problem for the world's smallest farmer to survive the long Yukon winter a winter that in the past had no end Pica Harvest grass and flowers and ingeniously store them in Rocky Nooks to the glaciologist ice is a planetary barometer to the biologist so is the Pica what we're doing here today are collecting soil samples as well as samples of some of the species of plants that we've been working on closely for the last four or five years and what we've found is that they're able to compensate for the removal of leaves by the pikas during the growing season and by that I mean that through being grazed they extend their own growing season and produce more leaves or more stems so there's a positive feedback between the vegetation and and the foraging by the pikas by studying Pika in opposing ecosystems on the ice fields and in mountain valleys David hick attempts to understand the challenges of surviving in a changing warming world the plants and animals that grow here are really a function of the past glacial history and the current climate and the changes that might occur over the the next Decades of climate change are are difficult to predict but we can look at sites that for example here in the front ranges and compare them to the Ruby ranges which have a slightly longer growing season and and perhaps predict what these changes might be over time and one of the things we know about pikas is that they don't like high temperatures they their their thermal lethal limit is very close to their body temperature probably doesn't have very much snow cover you can see it's not very large either yeah again this one's not not active right now [Music] reach a bit further back and get a bit more out of this but well that looks pretty old well that's last seasons here it's last season but a lot of this is just Moss so eighty percent of the Ruby range Pica Colony died this year a direct result of global warming for the Pica adaptation to Rapid change may prove impossible the world is simply moving too fast forcing one of the great mysteries of life in the ice fields to vanish before David hick gets his answers [Music] Athabasca Glacier flowing out of the great Columbia icefield in the Canadian Rockies is one of the few glaciers in Canada you can drive to in summer over 6 000 people come here every day the power and mystery of glaciers arouses the imagination and like a magnet draws us to them in deference to a force greater than ourselves we seem humbled by the ice and fascinated by its sheer silent presence foreign throughout history people have always been drawn to these places on August the 14th 1999 three Hunters were traveling on foot through a glacial area within the tachen Cheney alsac Park in the extreme northwest corner of British Columbia when they came across some remains and artifacts a hat and a throwing spear Glacier had yielded its greatest secret an ancient man encased in ice it may be one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Canadian history [Music] the man carried with him a trove of well-crafted belongings a beautifully woven hat a stout walking stick a spear thrower and a Leather Pouch containing edible leaves and fish the Hat may be the key to the man's identity he lived and died about 600 years ago and was probably on a journey either to hunt or to trade with people's living on the glacier's other side when he disappeared glaciologist Eric Blake was a member of the team that excavated the site to hear that that uh some remains had been found was was amazing I must say one of my initial thoughts was was feeling sorrow for the fellow and presumably his family when he didn't come home the way that glaciers form is ideal in terms of preserving both the chronology and in fact preserving things in the ice it's always laid down in layers with fresh snowfall if you put anything on the surface it's going to get buried in the snow and it's going to be kept at a cold temperature so it's just great for preserving artifacts and or other organic tissue the body and artifacts were carefully tagged wrapped and transported to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria the discovery was made on the traditional lands of the champagne and asiac First Nation [Music] meaning long ago person found stories of traveling across Glaciers are common in their oral history and quarrydan sinchi brings them to life to science the remarkable Paradox of the discovery is that the glacier may never have given up its treasure if it had not been melting back to the level it was 600 years ago now the body is once again Frozen in Time safely stored in a freezer [Music] [Music] the world's Glaciers are melting and as they shrink more questions will be asked [Music] foreign the 1990s have been the hottest decade in a thousand years 1998 was the hottest year 1997 came in second time places in the Canadian Arctic have warmed 5.4 degrees this century the poles will grow hotter faster than the equator over the last two decades the global temperature curve is the only curve steeper than the rise in the stock market in 20 years the Northwest Passage the fabled route through Canada's Arctic Ice May Crack wide open for the first time in Millennia looking deep into the heart of a glacier speaks volumes about our own activities and their effects on the planet [Music] they provide the clearest picture of the planet's past and driving roughshod over it today in for the future [Music] as a frozen Time Capsule ice is a silent Oracle that speaks subtly about the Earth's natural history can the portraits glaciers describe of our past and present guide our passage into the future [Music] ice ages have been a part of the Earth's natural Evolution for millions of years today perhaps the real mystery is will the planet ever experience another one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Real Wild

Views: 6,838

Keywords: full documentary, wildlife documentary, wild animal, real wild, animal documentary, animals, pika, canada, ice age, frozen

Id: FWE05VWTRT4

Length: 45min 45sec (2745 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023