From Woody's Couch

This blog post is part of the Frozen Friday Series, an A-Z journey of the Polar Archives.  Each week, we will feature some aspect of the history of polar exploration with a blog post written by our student authors.

Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing one of four blogs highlighting portions of our interview with Dr. Lonnie Thompson, a leading glaciologist and outspoken climate scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Each post will focus on a theme from the interview and feature highlights of that particular section.  A full transcript of the interview can be found here.

This week, we are focusing on where Dr. Thompson’s research has taken him and why he does it.  The situations Dr. Thompson finds himself in might surprise you. Next week, we will be discussing Climate Change, specifically Dr. Thompson’s response to the lack of action being taken in Washington D.C.

How you ever encountered any trouble with people in other countries, be it a government official that’s being difficult or any less-than-legal groups?

Oh, yes. It comes with the territory. When we were drilling in New Guinea, we had all our official papers from the Indonesian government but the drilling team was attacked by a one hundred and fifty Amungme people. At the base of the mountain, there are four tribes and they’re at war with each other…Fortunately, we were drilling up in the clouds so they couldn’t find us. Then they went to break into the freezer, into Tembagapura, where we were storing the ice cores. The company we were working with got word they were going to break in, so the company took the cores and moved them to another freezer down on the coast. When they broke in there was nothing in there.

Then I get this call from the head of the mining operation and he asks me to come down and talk to these Amungme people. There are one hundred and fifty Amungme in a room and the security guards are around. I start to talk and explain to them who we are and what we’re doing and, when I am about twenty minutes into the lecture, they all stood up and they screamed. I looked at the translator, and the security guards say, “It’s okay, they always do that before they go to war” [laughs].

Dr. Thompson cuts an ice core on the Guliya Icecap,
Tibet in October of 2015.

I thought “Oh, okay…” But I come to find out that in their religion, the arms and legs of their god are the mountains and the valleys. The glacier is the head of their god and, in their words, we were drilling into the skull of their god to steal their memories. I told them, “that is exactly what we’re doing.” I also told them that “the day will come very soon, in a matter of years, when the only part of your god’s memories will be in a freezer in Ohio State University.”

There was a big discussion between the elders of the tribe and the younger people. The elders said “No, the glaciers will always be there. They are part of our tradition.” The younger people said, “Have you been to the glaciers recently? Have you seen what’s happening to them? They’re disappearing.” In the end, we were given permission to finish our project, take the ice cores, and go home.

Afterward we had this meeting and I asked the head of the mining company and said, “I came a year early. I always come a year early to give lectures to let people know what we’re doing and ask for their help. Why didn’t we meet with these people?” He said, “Well, it’s simple. There are four tribes and they are at war with each other. You make one friend, you make three enemies. They would not have given you permission, so it was better to do it and ask forgiveness.” [Laughs]

So every project has its own unique story about how you actually get the project done…The local people when we went to drill Sajama, the highest mountain in Bolivia –you have all your official documentation but it’s always a challenge. Bolivia was particularly a challenge. I think they’ve been a nation for forty years, or something like that. They’ve probably had about thirty-five governments. So you get your permits the previous year, as we did, but when we actually arrived, two weeks earlier the government had changed… Dealing with changing landscapes is a real factor in what we do.

Frankly, there are times when windows are open, you get into certain parts of the world and other times you cannot. You have to wait until the window is open so you can get in and do your thing, get the ice, and get out. Every country is different. Even in Bolivia, once we got permission from the government to go out and drill, there is a tribe, the Aymara tribe, that lives in a village at the base of the ice field and when we had to meet with them, the whole community was there and there was a medicine woman who was very deadset against us drilling. She said that we would anger the gods. In their religion the gods live on the mountaintops in the glaciers. And what are we going to do? Drill through it! She said the glacier will split and the climate will change. There’ll be starvation in the village…

Dr. Thompson inspects the result of his hard work on
the Guliya Icecap in October of 2015.

In the end, they decided to give us permission if we did three things: Donate five hundred dollars to the local library…Hire local village people for the logistics, moving things (we had planned to do that anyway). The third one was that “You will participate in an ancient sacrifice to the gods of Sajama, asking forgiveness for what you are about to do.”

I said, “Okay…what are we sacrificing?” It turned out to be a white alpaca and I said “Okay, that’s what happens to alpaca anyway, so we can do this.” There was a ceremony set up and the whole village came out, all of our drill team. The alpaca is blindfolded and they have two priests that ask forgiveness and they cut the throat of the alpaca, catch it in a cup and sprinkle it in the ground with their prayers. Then the animal is cut in half. The head of the village and the head of expedition (me), the heart is roasted in the fire and we split it. Then the animal is split between the drill team and the village…

So, the fact is, no matter where you get your degree, no one trains you to make this really happen in the real world. I always figure that we are the outsiders, this is their culture. It is not for me or our team to judge, but on the other hand we need their support in order to make the expeditions succeed. After that, we had great support. We could not have done it without the village people.

There is a reoccurring theme: glaciers are holy places. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Himalayas with the Tibetans or in the Andes in South America or over in New Guinea… I feel very fortunate at the time we came along that we are able to get these archives because in all cases now they are disappearing. In some places where we’ve drilled thirteen, fifteen years ago, those places are gone… In many ways, timing is so important…

So, you’ve eaten the heart of an alpaca, you’ve talked down an angry tribe on the brink of war, drilled into the mind of a god, dealt with turbulent revolutionary governments and you’ve endured high altitudes. Why? Aren’t there other, easier ways to study climate? Like, can’t you study clouds?

[Laughs] I think about that sometimes. Every time we write a proposal to do a project, initially you’re worried about “Okay, will it get funded?” Then it gets funded and you’re excited for about an hour. Then you realize… “Oh, I’ve got to do this. Oh my god” [laughs] …

Dr. Thompson holds a specimen on the Quelccaya
Ice Cap in June of 2016.

I would say that the human race, not just me, but the human race has a mad gene. [Laughs] You think about it, all the Polynesians that settled the islands of the Pacific, how many of them went out and never came back? Yet they still went out. Now we’re developing our space program and going out to Mars. Well, chances are, there are going to be problems. People aren’t going to make it.

But yet, that will not stop the human race from proceeding. Life and advancement has always been a function of risk and reward. I think that we forget that about human nature…It’s always been that you’ve got to have people that want to push the envelope. If you push the envelope, there will be risk associated with that fact. If you don’t take the risk, you don’t make the breakthroughs. It’s always a matter of balancing these two things. I think that probably at the end of the day, it’s probably a defective gene. [Laughs]

So that’s why you do it? You have a defective gene that makes you want to push the envelope?

I think it’s a characteristic in human beings that has been with us for a very long time. It has served us well in the big scheme of things…To me, this is one thing that gives me hope for the future is that as a race we are very innovative. We can find solutions to problems once we realize they are true problems. I would say that this is where we are with climate change. This is a large number of people, not the majority, but a large number of people who are currently in control will argue that this is not a problem. But this is a problem. This is physics and chemistry. Human beings are such that if there is any hope that if you do not have to deal with a problem, you don’t. But when your backs to the wall and you have no other choice, we’re pretty good about coming together and finding a solution. On the issue of Climate Change, the beauty of it is that we caused it. If we caused it, we can fix it. If we weren’t causing it, then we wouldn’t be able to fix it. To me it’s a matter of when we actually decide to do that.

Published by John Hooton.

This blog post is part of the Frozen Friday Series, an A-Z journey of the Polar Archives.  Each week, we will feature some aspect of the history of polar exploration with a blog post written by our student authors.

Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing one of four blogs highlighting portions of our interview with Dr. Lonnie Thompson, a leading glaciologist and outspoken climate scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Each post will focus on a theme from the interview and feature highlights of that particular section.  A full transcript of the interview can be found here.

This week, we are focusing on the difficulties he faced when beginning the Ice Core Paleoclimatology group at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Next week, we will be focusing on where Dr. Thompson’s research has taken him and why he does it.

Obviously, one might not expect to find a glacier in the tropics. How does that happen?

Dr. Lonnie Thompson at work in the
Institute of Polar Studies’ clean room
at OSU, 1977.

Well, it was one of our biggest issues even getting started in the lower latitudes. When I was a graduate student at what was then the Institute of Polar Studies here at Ohio State, there was a fellow, John Mercer, who was a geographer and he had made these atlases of the glaciers of the world (northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere) and he had these boxes of aerial photos. In one of those boxes we found this Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Andes of Peru….Our initial concept was very simple: they were drilling in Antarctica at Byrd Station and in Greenland at Camp Century and the idea was “Can we connect the climate history from Antarctica to Greenland through something in between in the tropics?” But when we went to National Science Foundation, to Polar Programs, which was the only place that funded ice core research, the program manager listened to us and he looked at me and he said, “You know Lonnie, that’s sounds very interesting but you know I can’t fund it because it’s not north of the Arctic circle or south of the Antarctic Circle.” There was no agency to fund that type of research.

I was at Byrd Station in Antarctica in 1973/74 and in February I got a telex from the program manager saying that he had funded all of his real science projects and that he had seven thousand dollars left… The following summer we made our first trip to the Quelccaya Ice Cap. It turned out to be a fantastic place: very remote, very difficult to get to. None of the logistics that had been developed for the Polar Regions would allow you to drill in these remote, high mountain regions. There had to be an engineering part of this to develop new drills, so we developed the first solar powered ice core drill to drill that icecap because the drills from Antarctica were a two day journey by horse from the nearest road. There was no way you could get one of those heavy drills from Antarctica or the generators from Antarctica to power it.

Dr. Lonnie Thompson shows off one of his ice cores
in 1980.

There wasn’t even an agency to fund that type of research but the science, if you think about it, the things that really impact climate on this Earth come out of the tropics, things like El Niños, things like the monsoons that affect so many billions of people on the planet…If you have a major eruption of a volcano in Alaska, it will impact the Arctic part of the globe, or if you’re down in South America in Argentina or Chile and there’s an eruption it will impact Antarctica, but if you want to impact the climate of the Earth, you put it in the tropics… The tropics make up between thirty degrees north and thirty degrees south, fifty percent of the surface area of the planet because we live on a sphere, and about seventy percent of the seven point three billion people on the planet live in the tropics, so it’s a place where we need to understand both natural and human driven changes. It’s part of a big system. We need those polar cores but we need to connect the system.

But you did receive some skepticism from the beginning.

Dr. Thompson radios from the
Coropuna base camp in 2003.

Oh, absolutely. I am a firm believer that it doesn’t matter what area you’re in, you’ve got to be willing to put in ten thousand hours (that’s about eight years of your life) and I’ve put in about eight and a half years trying to figure out how to drill the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Andes of Peru… Being young and naive, we just brought a drill from Antarctica and its power system. We made a contract with the Peruvian air force for a Bell 212 twin engine helicopter. No airport up there, we had to fly it thirteen hours to get it up to the area. We had to bring in fuel by boxcar on a train. We staged out of the back of a hotel in this little town of Sicuani. But at nineteen thousand feet this helicopter just falls. There’s no way we’d get near the surface…Of course, the first time we tried we failed…The second time, we tested some solar panels…we drilled not one but two cores to bedrock. One set of samples we sent to Willi Dansgaard’s lab in Denmark. He analyzed them and he was so excited. It was such a phenomenal result and he became one of our greatest supporters of why we should drill mountain regions…How did that eight and a half year process between the concept and actually being able to accomplish it is what launched all of our work in the low latitudes. It takes a special team…. It’s tough. There’s not very much oxygen. There are places very difficult to get into, very hard to drill and get the ice cores out while keeping them frozen. A lot of effort. And then, if you’re working in a place like Tibet, you need these permits to get in and be allowed to drill there and to take the cores back to your lab. We drilled in Tanzania, Kilimanjaro in Africa which is a national park, a World Heritage Site. We had twenty-four permits we had to get in order to drill. A lot of time and effort goes into just getting the ability to try. Then there’s all kinds of issues with things that could go wrong, why this could be a real big failure.

Published by John Hooton.