Lee Hotz: Inside an Antarctic time machine

Come with me to the bottom of the world,

Antarctica,

the highest, driest, windiest,

and yes, coldest region on Earth --

more arid than the Sahara

and, in parts, colder than Mars.

The ice of Antarctica glows

with a light so dazzling,

it blinds the unprotected eye.

Early explorers rubbed cocaine in their eyes

to kill the pain of it.

The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent

sags below sea level, beneath its weight.

Yet, the ice of Antarctica

is a calendar of climate change.

It records the annual rise and fall

of greenhouse gases and temperatures

going back before the onset of the last ice ages.

Nowhere on Earth

offers us such a perfect record.

And here, scientists are drilling

into the past of our planet

to find clues to the future

of climate change.

This past January,

I traveled to a place called WAIS Divide,

about 600 miles from the South Pole.

It is the best place on the planet, many say,

to study the history of climate change.

There, about 45 scientists from the University of Wisconsin,

the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and others

have been working to answer a central question

about global warming.

What is the exact relationship

between levels of greenhouse gases

and planetary temperatures?

It's urgent work. We know that temperatures are rising.

This past May was the warmest worldwide on record.

And we know that levels of greenhouse gases are rising too.

What we don't know

is the exact, precise, immediate

impact of these changes

on natural climate patterns --

winds, ocean currents,

precipitation rates, cloud formation,

things that bear on the health and well-being

of billions of people.

Their entire camp, every item of gear,

was ferried 885 miles

from McMurdo Station,

the main U.S. supply base

on the coast of Antarctica.

WAIS Divide itself though,

is a circle of tents in the snow.

In blizzard winds, the crew sling ropes between the tents

so that people can feel their way safely

to the nearest ice house

and to the nearest outhouse.

It snows so heavily there,

the installation was almost immediately buried.

Indeed, the researchers picked this site

because ice and snow accumulates here

10 times faster than anywhere else in Antarctica.

They have to dig themselves out every day.

It makes for an exotic

and chilly commute.

(Laughter)

But under the surface

is a hive of industrial activity

centered around an eight-million-dollar drill assembly.

Periodically, this drill, like a biopsy needle,

plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice

to extract a marrow of gases

and isotopes for analysis.

Ten times a day, they extract

the 10-foot long cylinder of compressed ice crystals

that contain the unsullied air and trace chemicals

laid down by snow,

season after season for thousands of years.

It's really a time machine.

At the peak of activity earlier this year,

the researchers lowered the drill

an extra hundred feet deeper into the ice every day

and another 365 years

deeper into the past.

Periodically, they remove

a cylinder of ice,

like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell

from the barrel of a drill.

They inspect it, they check it for cracks,

for drill damage, for spalls, for chips.

More importantly,

they prepare it for inspection and analysis

by 27 independent laboratories

in the United States and Europe,

who will examine it for 40 different trace chemicals

related to climate,

some in parts per quadrillion.

Yes, I said that with a Q, quadrillion.

They cut the cylinders up into three-foot sections

for easier handling and shipment

back to these labs,

some 8,000 miles from the drill site.

Each cylinder

is a parfait of time.

This ice formed as snow

15,800 years ago,

when our ancestors were daubing themselves with paint

and considering the radical new technology

of the alphabet.

Bathed in polarized light

and cut in cross-section,

this ancient ice reveals itself

as a mosaic of colors,

each one showing how conditions at depth in the ice

have affected this material

at depths where pressures can reach

a ton per square inch.

Every year, it begins with a snowflake,

and by digging into fresh snow,

we can see how this process is ongoing today.

This wall of undisturbed snow,

back-lit by sunlight,

shows the striations of winter and summer snow,

layer upon layer.

Each storm scours the atmosphere,

washing out dust, soot,

trace chemicals,

and depositing them on the snow pack

year after year,

millennia after millennia,

creating a kind of periodic table of elements

that at this point

is more than 11,000 feet thick.

From this, we can detect an extraordinary number of things.

We can see the calcium

from the world's deserts,

soot from distant wildfires,

methane as an indicator of the strength of a Pacific monsoon,

all wafted on winds from warmer latitudes

to this remote and very cold place.

Most importantly,

these cylinders and this snow

trap air.

Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air,

a pristine time capsule

of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide,

methane, nitrous oxide --

all unchanged from the day that snow formed

and first fell.

And this is the object of their scrutiny.

But don't we already know

what we need to know about greenhouse gases?

Why do we need to study this anymore?

Don't we already know how they affect temperatures?

Don't we already know the consequences

of a changing climate on our settled civilization?

The truth is, we only know the outlines,

and what we don't completely understand,

we can't properly fix.

Indeed, we run the risk of making things worse.

Consider, the single most successful

international environmental effort of the 20th century,

the Montreal Protocol,

in which the nations of Earth banded together to protect the planet

from the harmful effects of ozone-destroying chemicals

used at that time

in air conditioners, refrigerators and other cooling devices.

We banned those chemicals,

and we replaced them, unknowingly,

with other substances

that, molecule per molecule,

are a hundred times more potent

as heat-trapping, greenhouse gases

than carbon dioxide.

This process requires

extraordinary precautions.

The scientists must insure

that the ice is not contaminated.

Moreover, in this 8,000-mile journey,

they have to insure this ice doesn't melt.

Imagine juggling a snowball across the tropics.

They have to, in fact,

make sure this ice never gets warmer

than about 20 degrees below zero,

otherwise, the key gases inside it will dissipate.

So, in the coldest place on Earth,

they work inside a refrigerator.

As they handle the ice, in fact,

they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven,

so that, when their work gloves freeze

and their fingers stiffen,

they can don a fresh pair.

They work against the clock and against the thermometer.

So far, they've packed up

about 4,500 feet of ice cores

for shipment back to the United States.

This past season,

they manhandled them across the ice

to waiting aircraft.

The 109th Air National Guard

flew the most recent shipment of ice

back to the coast of Antarctica,

where it was boarded onto a freighter,

shipped across the tropics to California,

unloaded, put on a truck,

driven across the desert

to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado,

where, as we speak,

scientists are now slicing this material up

for samples, for analysis,

to be distributed

to the laboratories around the country

and in Europe.

Antarctica was this planet's

last empty quarter --

the blind spot

in our expanding vision of the world.

Early explorers

sailed off the edge of the map,

and they found a place

where the normal rules of time and temperature

seem suspended.

Here, the ice seems a living presence.

The wind that rubs against it

gives it voice.

It is a voice of experience.

It is a voice we should heed.

Thank you.

(Applause)