The Hidden World Beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet | John Priscu | TEDxBozeman

Uh oh, it's been a cold honor, I guess, with a stream and a valley named after me, but I've been working in Antarctica for about 30 years and I started when I started as a junior faculty member at MSU and I still remember it . My first season in Antarctica and I had read all the accounts of the first explorers and everything was doom and gloom. I don't know if you've read any of them. There is a book back about the first exploration of the South Pole, but with all pessimism. and sad and lifeless, they were portraying Antarctica as a dead continent and as you will see on this map of Antarctica back here, this is what Antarctica looks like today in any textbook, it is not part of the planet blue.

It's white and that bothered me I come from a biological background and I couldn't imagine that so much real estate on our planet was dead okay and Antarctica is twice the size of Australia it's our fifth largest continent it's the largest continent highest, driest and coldest we have. On Earth, okay, the South Pole is 10,000 feet east of Antarctica, which is this part here, it's about 13,000 feet high, so it's pretty high, it's cold, the average temperature is -50 degrees. Okay, I mean, I guess I feel at home. Bozeman uh it's -50 degrees the coldest temperature on record is -130 degrees Fahrenheit okay and that's pretty tough so now you can see why the early explorers, many of whom lost their lives, thought this was okay, so another thing is that Antarctica is 99 percent covered in ice. of its ice averages almost two miles thick, seventy percent of our planet's fresh water is there, that's fine and if it's melting and it's melting, you'd deny it if you didn't think about it, that's another talk, it's well, it's melting and when it melts.

The sea level will rise about 200 feet and we will have to have scuba gear to tour the Statue of Liberty. Well, in 2000 I was at an international meeting in Tokyo and we put together a kind of group of specialists to observe. for life and understand if there is liquid water on this continent once and for all. It took a long time to get to that point, but we got funding to form this group and I was lucky enough to chair it, so, in this picture, here. See, this is what I posted in 2009, after a meeting in St.

Petersburg, Russia, we sat down with an illustrator and got this current view of Antarctica, where we have lakes, all the little blue dots, there are over 200 lakes that We believe they are there. boss lake stock is 3000 feet deep and the size of lake ontario and has less than two and a half miles of ice, ok look this is one of the fifth largest lakes on our planet we have never been there too There are river systems that I think rival the Amazon, that space there, that blue space that you can see, is about the size of the Amazon River Basin and some of these river systems are the size of the Amazon, we haven't been there yet.

Well, I want to tell you a story about The first exploration of one of these systems about two months ago was carried out by a team in which I was chief scientist and I think we have changed the view of Antarctica, so I will take you to this part of the continent and I'll tell you about a lake called wool lake, you'll see the little blue dots there and some rivers there, okay, just for over 10 years we just assumed they were there, okay, and I'll take you to that place, how do we know that? Why do we think there are lakes there?

Well, we teamed up with NASA and using satellite images we were able to see flat spots across the continent and this is where the ice

sheet

floats over these lakes. Well, that was our first impression of the lake. We could count them and we know there are some huge lakes out there. Now I'm going to show you a little clip that also transforms the way we see this Antarctic continent. It's not just this big block of stable ice. Let's see if we achieve our goal. little movie okay this will show you a slice and also using satellites we can see the ice surface rising and falling by measuring the satellite using satellite altimetry over time and we can define the rivers that flow under the ice

sheet

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If we have all this indirect evidence and we have these beautiful river systems like we would see coming out of the rocky mountains, we can get an idea of ​​the depth, so we have all this background data, but we haven't been there yet, so I want to take you and tell you how we did it just a few months ago, well, we went to this area of ​​Williams Lake and the first thing in Antarctica is that you have to take a lot of things out in the middle of nowhere. I think camping is hard, we camp big, okay, this is the biggest camping expedition you've ever wanted to do.

Well, we blew everything up and took icebreakers most of our stuff to the kill station down here, okay, where we could go in with icebreakers and big ones. plane, then we had to carry all our stuff 800 miles to the site on this lake, so we bought some tractors. We bought a bunch of crawler tractors, actually 14 of them and put everything on sleds and this photo here. I see a tractor there is another tractor there is another there is a pull and we put together a journey that was a mile long and it took two weeks to get to our field site so we started here and this is the route with their camps and then I got here , to our Willens site.

Here is the south pole, so we are getting closer to the south pole. What's interesting is that our path followed Robert Falcon's trail to the South Pole. He's the one who actually died on the way back, so. A little history on this, so we track him for a while, okay, anyway we get out and we're at the site. I didn't go on the tractor, my students didn't. I'm not going to sit on a tractor for two. Three and a half weeks, so we came in with a plane and we took the first plane and we're talking about now 10 years of planning and this first plane came in and landed on our ski slope and got stuck, well, that's how it was.

It wasn't fun and it took a lot of effort to get it out you can see it shoveling snow and it got stuck because the ice and the snow actually the snow in this case was warmer than normal the continent is warming so what we did just like when you go out in the morning to Montana you have to take your car out, we had to go out and take the skis off this plane and the pilot is there in reverse and he pushes back and forth trying to get it out, okay, that's how it went It took off and then I put these rockets on the side of four on each side and after five tries it took off and stopped at the south pole to get gas to go back to Mcmurdo, but we made it okay, which was okay, it's just part of the investigation.

antarctic

a so we built a small town in the middle of the

antarctic

ice sheet this is our field camp i just want to point out a few things here is our ski road to here for the plane our main camp and here is our little dwelling these are all tents we all had our own little custom tent to sleep in we spent three um three weeks working 24 hours a day because we had to melt a hole we have the science budget was ten and a half million for this project our drill was three million we have a special drill that drilled very quickly to the bottom and we worked 24 hours a day here are our drillers on the left and the scientists on the right collecting samples from the site so we worked 24 hours a day no one slept it was very exciting and Probably on the previous slide you probably noticed that we were wearing Tyvek suits because part of our protocols for sampling these lakes, part of our international plan was to do it environmentally in a clean sense, okay, so we had to show responsibility, so we dressed and we walked between our little fields, uh, tents dressed like this, this is walking between sites in a storm and we did this to keep the environment clean and our samples clean because big claims need big evidence behind them, that's right like We worked there for three weeks and I personally didn't.

I did two 23 hour shifts, almost back to back, it was a lot of work for an older guy like me anyway, so that's how we did it. I'm just showing you a picture going down the hole, we're almost half a mile down here and these little whiskers here help us know how wide the hole is so we know our tools can go down and there's the bottom and there was a lake there, okay, it took a long time, it was 30 years of ideas thinking this is not a dead place, okay, more than 12 years of deliberations suggesting its lakes there and rivers, and there's the bottom, okay, this it's January 28, 2012. not too long ago, okay, and this is the first photo, about two days later, organisms under there, okay, there is life under there and some of my students are here and took these photos .

They had a lot of msu grad students. Seven MSU colleagues were down. on the ice with me, so now there's life down below, this is the first glimpse of life, the DNA samples are coming back, they should arrive this week and we'll be able to sequence and tell you who's okay, so that made us "It got a lot of publicity, such It may not be Bozeman, but internationally, these are two articles from the New York Times In the short period between January 14 and February 6, we transformed the way Antarctica is viewed, so 30 years ago. We had a vision that it could be done." It will not be dead and now we prove it in this short time, so now it is like this, we and our continent should not be shown as this white block in the background of our earth of our planet, it is part of the blue planet itself, there are living ecosystems that play a role. role in climate change etc., well where do we go from here?

Okay, I'm very involved with NASA and now we have defined ourselves in studies. There are six moons here, this is Earth in the middle and they also have oceans under ice. In fact, there is 10 times more water in the outer solar system than on Earth. Okay, that's a living space. Those oceans have existed since the beginning of our solar system. There should be life there. There must be. We would deny it. I think it was wrong and we started publishing now and I'm focusing on Europe organizing a mission right now. We're at about a billion dollars that it's going to take to put a lander down and drill into that ocean to drill into the ice. to the ocean and discover where we are, so not only do we have to think outside the box, but we also have to go outside the box to make discoveries, thank you.