The past and future of climate change are preserved at 34 degrees below zero in a cold room at the Ohio State University, in the city of Columbus.
Paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson has been collecting ice samples all over the planet for 40 years, which he stores in meter-long tubes that would add up to more than seven kilometers in a straight line.
Faced with the apprehensive face of the visitor, who sees the doors of the three rooms that lead to the heart of the "ice archive" close, the scientist explains that the system is designed so that it is impossible to stay locked up inside.
“Besides, we would have about 20 minutes before we would freeze to death.”
It's only been 20 seconds and, frankly, it's hard to believe.
The aspect of the marriage formed by Lonnie, 73, and his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, 74, is also misleading.
Behind their look of venerable grandparents of science hide a couple of adventurers.
They have climbed the world's tallest tropical mountains or spent long months on remote Antarctic plains drilling into glaciers and deep ice sheets, collecting samples, and bringing them back to Columbus for analysis at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Polar and Climate), in which both have worked since the seventies.
From their study they obtain data on the behavior and meteorological alterations of the past that offer clues about current climate change.
Those chunks of ice, which are like timelines recording thousands of years of droughts, rainfall, fires, volcanic ash, greenhouse gases or even microbes, speak to them.
And what they are told is not reassuring.
“They are the best witnesses of life on our planet.
The glaciers have no political agenda.
They don't put pressure on anyone, but they are proof that the climate system is changing due to the effect of man”, explains Lonnie, to whom bad news does not only come through the microscope.
A member of the generation of scientists who literally discovered climate change, he has also seen how those ice masses to which he has dedicated his life have receded in these decades, with records ranging from 56% of Quelccaya, in Peru, to 93% in the Puncak Jaya, in Papua New Guinea.
“In 25 or 30 years they will be gone, and they won't come back.
Only evidence of its existence will remain in our freezer, ”he warns.
Ellen, for her part, explains that in Greenland "the effects of climate change can also be seen with the naked eye, especially in summer, when lakes of water form on the ice cap."
Also, that in Antarctica "alterations in the behavior of penguins" are already observed due to global warming.
Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, pictured at the Polar and Climate Research Institute at The Ohio State University in Columbus.Greg Kahn
Bjorn Stevens, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and president of the jury that awarded them the BBVA Foundation's Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in climate change (which they collect on June 16 in Bilbao), explains in a telephone conversation from Hamburg that their Colleagues know the Thompson couple as “the Indiana Joneses of the climate”.
“His most original contribution of his”, argues Stevens, “are the studies of tropical glaciers.
They were pioneers there.
Polar exploration was highly developed when they decided to venture into other latitudes, such as the Andes, the Himalayas and Kilimanjaro, which, in many cases, were very difficult to access and obtain the necessary permits to drill.
And then there was the difficulty of getting up there, with very small teams and at the cost of taking big risks.
That part has been dedicated above all to Lonnie, who estimates that he has spent about four years of his life in places of heights almost incompatible with life.
Ellen, by her side, has participated in 15 expeditions to Greenland and Antarctica, where in 1986 she became the first woman to lead a rig that she drilled in a remote plain during her third trip to the South Pole.
In addition to the different interests of the couple, the division of labor was also due to practical reasons.
“The expeditions to the tropics are organized in summer and to Antarctica in winter [to coincide with the southern summer];
that way, there was always someone to take care of our daughter,” she says.
Apparently, they also made a good tandem in that: today that girl lives on the outskirts of Washington and she is a high-ranking FBI official, where she is in charge of victim assistance.
The two met in 1969 at "a Marshall University Christmas party" in Huntington, West Virginia.
He was studying Geology.
She Physics.
They had been enrolled there for three and a half years, but had never crossed paths.
“Geologists really like beer, so the two of us were the only ones sober,” recalls Lonnie.
Ellen notes with amusement that she went to that meeting "with someone else."
More than half a century later, they are still together.
They work in two memorabilia-crammed adjoining offices at the end of a hallway at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, and yes, they find it hard not to take their work home.
Ice samples brought from all over the world are stored in Columbus in a cold room that is kept at a temperature of minus 34 degrees below zero.
One of the freezers has a small leak that allows the warm, moist air coming in to freeze and make snow.Greg Kahn
The place was founded in 1960, and later it was associated with the memory of the explorer Richard Byrd, who ventured into the southern and northern reaches of the planet.
They added the word “climate” to their name in 2015, as Ellen recalls, while she was the director and realized that almost all of their researchers were involved in one way or another in the study of climate alterations.
About sixty people work in the center.
“Many of them have been with us all our lives,” says Lonnie, just before Henry Brecher enters the scene, who has been “32 times to the South Pole” and will turn 90 in August.
Obviously, he's retired, but he shows up “virtually every day” for work in one of those windowless offices whose doors are hung with paleoclimatologist jokes like this: “I'm in Antarctica.
I'll be right back!"
The corridors and offices of the center are full of memories of adventures around the world, of photos of groups of smiling women scientists in the middle of the ice, silhouettes of mountains of overwhelming beauty and Tibetan mules or yaks loaded with material heading for their inhospitable peaks.
In one room, awaits the first high-resolution digital map of Antarctica, made with the center's participation from 187,585 satellite images.
And in a huge room bathed in natural light, is the American Polar Rock Depository, where Anne Grunow watches over an archive of 59,000 pieces.
"They also tell us things about the climate in ancient times," warns the researcher.
Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson work with an ice core at The Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center in Columbus.Greg Kahn
In the institute there are warehouses where they keep the equipment for the expeditions, such as a hot air balloon "unique in the world", designed specifically and released in 1997 in the Nevado Sajama, in Bolivia, as well as several laboratories.
In the stable isotope field, the new measurement devices coexist with the old ones (and always in pairs, to prevent a breakdown from paralyzing work for months).
Ping Nan-Lin was there the morning of our visit, examining data on the concentration of methane extracted from the ice.
Then, dressed as an Eskimo, he ventured into the cold room in search of more samples to analyze.
Lonnie Thompson, then a young man who wanted to be a scientist but "didn't know what kind yet," came to this university in 1971 to study coal geology.
Two years later she landed.
When they were successful a decade later, they began to receive offers from other more prestigious educational centers in the United States, but they have preferred to remain faithful to Ohio: “Whenever a proposal came, we asked ourselves the same question: Would they have the other universities something different to offer us?
And the answer was always 'no,'” she says.
Section of an ice core drilled in 2000 from the Puruogangri Glacier on the Central Tibetan Plateau.
The dark particles are part of an annual dust layer that is deposited during the dry and windy spring.Greg Kahn
Lonnie's early professional bent made sense for someone born in Gassaway, West Virginia, a town in a deep coal region of America.
But then the opportunity arose for him to enter polar studies.
Thus he discovered, in a box of aerial photographs, the existence of Quelccaya, a beautiful glacier in southeastern Peru.
"All the researchers were focused on Greenland and Antarctica, but it occurred to me to look elsewhere because, after all, civilization was not born in the polar regions," he recalls.
"70% of the world's population lives in the tropics, which also register the meteorological phenomena that most affect humans, such as El Niño or the monsoons."
She asked for funding and was denied.
“During that campaign, that of 1973-1974, I went to the South Pole,
where I received a telex”.
In it, the guy who handled the money told him that “after funding the 'real' science projects, there was still $7,000 left” for Thompson.
He accepted them and the following summer he headed for Peru.
Success was not immediate.
In a couple of attempts he ran into the inability to displace the heavy fuel and the inability of the helicopters to fly so high.
Lonnie had no more adventure experience at the time than having grown up as "a boy who liked the outdoors."
The first victory in Quelccaya came when he was about to throw in the towel and go into the economy.
It was in 1983, on an expedition, that he first used solar-powered drilling machines.
“That allowed us to reduce the weight of the equipment.
We spent three months up there.
At that time we did not have enough funding for porters, so we had to carry the material between the six of us who went, with the help of the horses.
There was no GPS or cell phones, there was nothing.
But we were lucky, that year the El Niño phenomenon occurred and the sun came out every day”.
For a scientist, Lonnie relies heavily on "serendipity," one of the words he used the most in the three-hour conversation with the married couple in his office.
“We chose Quelccaya [where he has returned 25 times] without knowing that it was the best possible choice: it turned out to be the largest tropical ice cap in the world, and it is located on the Amazon.
That place is like a book,” he says.
They came back with 6,000 samples.
Since then, they have drilled in 16 countries.
Tray with vials containing ice core samples being analyzed for their oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios using a PICARRO L2140-i ring cavity spectrometer.Greg Kahn
During the chat, the couple reviewed some of their most painful adventures with the cold.
Like when Ellen spent 21 days working on the East Antarctic Plateau (in a place whose place name says it all: South Pole of Inaccessibility) and one day the plane with the supplies had difficulty finding them: “When I returned, I had lost nine kilos, because it is impossible to eat so much to produce enough calories and not lose body mass”, he recalls.
Lonnie, for his part, clarifies that "the cold gets worse with age, although, luckily, the clothes have improved a lot."
He also says that in his case, that of a man who underwent a heart transplant at the age of 64, we must add the effect of the lack of oxygen typical of high mountain places.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson in one of the corridors of the United States Polar Rock Depository, where 59,000 pieces collected in the polar regions are kept.Greg Kahn
Although he almost prefers those tribulations to the logistics of shipping samples to Columbus from remote locations without them melting along the way (an entire shipment was once nearly lost to him at the Beijing airport, after successfully getting it through the Gobi desert).
Or the many obstacles of bureaucracy: “When you show up in a country and explain to the scientific attaché of the Embassy what you plan to do, he looks at you with wide eyes, and says: 'You know that if something happens to you up there You can't count on us to help you, can you?"
Lonnie remembers that early in his travels he also ran into local misunderstanding: “They couldn't believe we were going for ice;
they suspected we were looking for gold and silver.”
And he has had to deal with the fact that the inhabitants of those regions consider the glaciers sacred places, where "their gods or their ancestors" live.
“I always tell my teams that you have to be very respectful, that we are only the guests.
When the locals understand what we do, they end up respecting us.”
Although it has not always been easy.
He recalls a trip to Papua New Guinea during which they were attacked by members of a local tribe.
With the protection of the authorities, he summoned them to a high tension talk in which they threw it in his face that he was trying to steal the memories of the gods from him.
To which the scientist replied:
“That is precisely what we are doing.”
“I made them see,” he adds, “that soon only a trace of those memories would remain in a freezer in Ohio.
And then they let us continue with our work.”
His work has also taken him to other hostile habitats, such as the United States Senate, where he appeared at the invitation of a certain Al Gore, who would later become vice president and later a candidate for president of the Government.
It was in 1992, around the time that what they did went from being a “boutique studio”, according to Ellen, to becoming the center of one of the most important agendas for the future of humanity: climate change. .
Lonnie testified after seeing on the ground in Quelccaya that warming was a stubborn reality.
“I presented evidence that seemed so conclusive to me that I thought they would do something.
I was too naive."
Ten years later, he appeared again, and "then everything was doubt about that evidence and justifications for why fossil fuels were essential for our economy."
"By most standards, we've had a great career," he adds, pointing to a display case in his office with all the awards he's won over the years.
“But I look at them and I only see the evidence of a failure;
we were not able to change anything.
We are still the same.
Or worse: CO2 is increasing more than ever, and the climate is changing faster than we thought.
It seemed that the turning point had come in 2019,
with all those hopeful youth protests, but then the pandemic came and the priorities changed.
And then the war in Ukraine, which has shown how vulnerable we are to energy.”
Large rocks in the US Polar Rock Deposit, which is located at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.Greg Kahn
Despite everything, marriage is optimistic.
“If you had asked me 15 or 18 years ago,” Ellen clarifies, “I would have told you that she was hopeless.
The students of that time belonged to what I call the Me generation.
They cared about nothing but themselves.
Those of now are much more committed”.
Lonnie, for his part, believes that “the solution will come when fossil fuel companies become energy companies, wind or solar.
It is a change of model, and it will cost them, but they have no other choice.
I have verified it in my town;
coal is not going to be there forever, and people have assumed it.
The problem is how much time will pass, and how much humanity will suffer along the way."
These days, the couple is completing another project: a documentary titled
Canary
(for the canaries that warn the mine of a danger caused by toxic gases).
It is focused above all on him, and the idea came from his daughter, who told him a decade ago: "Dad, collecting another ice sample will not change anything, you have to make an effort to let the world know your message."
That scolding had such an effect that she even agreed to give a TED talk last year.
"The film," says its protagonist, "is a story of overcoming: how a boy who was born in Gassaway on the wrong side of the tracks became a scientist who has been able to live adventures around the world."
He also stops in overcoming the heart transplant in 2012.
"Recently, I went for my first 10 year check-up and it's going perfectly, he just turned 32, according to what the doctor told me: he's a young engine in an old car."
The first high-resolution digital map of Antarctica, built from 187,585 satellite images.
It is located at the Polar and Climate Research Institute at The Ohio State University in Columbus.Greg Kahn
After the operation, Lonnie made headlines for soon climbing back to the tops of the Himalayas or the Andes.
His last expedition was made in 2019 to Huascarán, a Peruvian massif of 6,757 meters, from where he witnessed from a bird's eye view the terrifying wave of fires that ravaged the Amazon that August.
"And luckily," explains Ellen, who said goodbye to field work in 2010. "On that trip they collected samples to keep the entire team entertained in the pandemic."
During that parenthesis, they have dedicated themselves to publishing valuable scientific studies, such as the first one in which they stop at microbes: after six years of analysis they identified 32 different viruses frozen from 15,000 years ago, 28 of which were unknown.
The fact that the ice came from drilling in the Gulya layer in China
When asked about her plans for the future, she replies that she will continue working, scrutinizing the secrets of the climate's past.
Lonnie, for her part, is looking forward to getting back on the field.
He will go to Quelccaya, if possible, in the summer of 2023. And if he had more time ahead of him, he has no doubt: he would travel to Mars.
Obviously he would go directly to the poles, because, he is clear, there is no better possible record than ice to understand that and any other planet.
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