JAKARTA, Indonesia — Lonnie
Thompson spent years preparing for his expedition to the remote,
mist-shrouded mountains of eastern Indonesia, hoping to chronicle the
affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific.
He's worried he got there too late.
Even as he pitched his tent
on top of Puncak Jaya, the ice was melting beneath him.
The 3-mile- (4,884-meter-)
high glacier was pounded by rain every afternoon during the team's
13-day trip, something the American scientist has never encountered in
three decades of drilling ice cores. He lay awake at night listening to
the water gushing beneath him.
By the time they were ready
to head home, ice around their sheltered campsite had melted a
staggering 12 inches (30 centimeters).
"These glaciers are dying,"
said Thompson, one of the world's most accomplished glaciologists.
"Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're
looking at years."
Thompson has led 57 such
expeditions in 16 countries around the planet, from China to Peru.
But for him, the Papuan
glaciers, because they lie along the fringe of the world's warmest ocean
and could provide clues about regional weather patterns, were an
unexplored "missing link."
It is this region that
generates El Nino disturbances and influences climate from India's
monsoons to the Amazon’s droughts.
As such, it is one of the
only "archives" about the story of the equatorial phenomenon, said
Michael Prentice of the Indiana Geological Survey, who has long been
interested in the area. It also could point to what lies ahead for
billions of people in Asia.
The ice that covered much
of Papua thousands of years ago is today just 1 square mile (2 square
kilometers) wide and 32 yards (meters) deep. Deep crevasses crisscross
the dirty ice.
Glaciers worldwide are in
retreat, with major losses already seen across much of Alaska, the Alps,
the Andes and numerous other ranges. What makes Puncak Jaya different,
aside from its location in the Pacific, is just how little is known
about it.
Research permits to work in
Papua are difficult to obtain, in part because Indonesia's government
is hugely sensitive to the region's long-simmering insurgency. Foreign
journalists are barred and humanitarian groups are restricted.
It is also one of the most
isolated corners of the sprawling archipelagic nation.
The U.S. mining company
Freeport-McMoRan, operating nearby, helped airlift the team to Puncak
Jaya's heights by helicopter, along with four tons of equipment — from
electromechanical and thermal drill systems, to radars needed to map the
underlying rock, said one of its employees, Scott Hanna.
There was a winch and
cables, high-altitude camping gear and boxes to preserve ice samples,
which will eventually join 70,000 yards (meters) of tropical cores being
kept in cold storage in Columbus, Ohio.
There, glaciologists will
help analyze the ice layer by layer through centuries past.
Flecks of dust, falling
seasonally, enable them to count down the years, much like tree rings.
Isotopes of oxygen, in minute air bubbles trapped in the ice, vary with
temperature helping researchers understand how ancient weather shifted.
"I just hope we weren't too
late," said Thompson, 62, adding that in addition to melting from the
top, water likely seeped in to the base of the glacier, leaving them
with limited records from a section of time.
"But still, the have
horizontal layers all the way through, so I think we were able to
salvage at least a little bit of the climate history," said Thompson of
Ohio State University, who co-coordinated the expedition with Dwi
Susanto of Columbia University.
Among other things, the team expects to find volcanic
ash from past eruptions — the 1883 blast of Krakatau and Tambora in 1815
should help serve as timelines — soot from wildfires, pollen, plant
debris and maybe even frozen animals.
Satellite images and aerial photos have long shown the
glacier in rapid retreat.
The mountain has lost about 80 percent of its ice since
1936 — two-thirds of that since the last scientific expedition in the
early 1970s.
Thompson says he thinks temperatures are rising twice as
fast in high altitudes as at the earth's surface, which, if true, could
have broad implications on people who depend on glaciers for water
during the dry season, such as in the Himalayas.
Geoffrey Hope, a professor at Australian National
University who took part in the 1971 expedition to Puncak Jaya, noted
that Papua has the wettest mountain region in the world, so high
precipitation levels didn't come as a great surprise.
Still, his own experience was markedly different.
"The roof of our marque tent fell in on many evenings
due to the weight of the snow," he recalled, "and all water coming from
the glacier would freeze by 8 p.m. each night."
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