0:01

The Quest for the North Pole is a production

0:03

of I Heart radio and mental floss. I'm

0:11

seven hundred and fifty miles above

0:13

the Arctic Circle at the very

0:15

place where explorers had launched

0:18

their quests for the North Pole more than a century

0:20

ago. Before

0:23

me lies the huge Greenland Ice Sheet,

0:25

the world's second biggest expanse of ice

0:27

after Antarctica. It's

0:30

covered in a layer of spotless snow

0:32

and rises from where I stand up to

0:34

the horizon, where it meets a bank

0:36

of clouds. Behind

0:40

me, the bare terrain slopes for several

0:42

miles to the sea, where I spot

0:44

teeny little icebergs dotting the waters.

0:48

The only signs of civilization are a couple

0:50

of shacks and a gravel road that leads

0:53

to the U. S. Military's Tully Air

0:55

Base, hidden behind some hills,

0:57

about eighteen miles away

1:00

from my vantage point. It's easy

1:02

to imagine that not much has changed

1:04

since the explorer's time, but

1:07

climate records show that it has

1:09

changed dramatically. The

1:12

Greenland Ice Sheet is losing two

1:14

hundred and eighty gigatons of ice

1:16

a year due to the warming climate.

1:20

A metric gigaton is one

1:23

billion tons, two

1:25

hundred and eighty billion tons is

1:27

equivalent to more than five million

1:30

Titanics. It's

1:33

hard to see an impact so massive,

1:36

but that's why I'm here. I've

1:38

come with two scientists from the Geological

1:41

Survey of Denmark and Greenland, or

1:43

gay Use, who have invited me to

1:45

see how they gather the data that reveals

1:48

the future of the ice sheet, and by

1:50

extension, US. Glaciologist

1:53

William Colgan and electrical engineer

1:56

Christopher Shields are harnessing

1:58

themselves to a pair of sleds filled

2:00

with sensors, tools, and boxes

2:03

of lead batteries that each way

2:05

more than I do. Despite

2:08

the six inches of fluffy snow, we

2:10

still wear crampons over our waterproof

2:12

boots. Our destination

2:14

is an ice sheet monitoring station fift

2:17

undred meters away, all

2:19

uphill. I

2:21

have the easiest job, just bringing up

2:23

the rear while the guys man hall

2:25

the sledges in true nineteenth

2:28

century explorer fashion. But

2:30

I still find myself huffing and puffing

2:33

in the cold, dry air and terrain

2:35

as slippery as a sand dune. More

2:39

than one years ago, explorers

2:42

like fritch Off Nonsen and Robert Perry

2:44

traversed this Greenland ice

2:47

their expeditions tested the boundaries

2:49

of geography and human endurance.

2:53

As I flounder of the icy slope and

2:55

Chris's sled tracks, I begin to

2:57

understand the extreme physical

2:59

challenge is they faced in their quests. Our

3:03

mission may be less strenuous, but

3:06

perhaps more important. Leam

3:08

and Chris will replace environmental

3:11

sensors on the monitoring station and

3:13

download two years worth of ice sheet

3:15

data. This information

3:17

is key towards understanding how the ice

3:20

sheets doing now and what kind

3:22

of catastrophes might occur in the future

3:24

if we do nothing to halt climate

3:26

change.

3:37

From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio, you're

3:40

listening to the Quest for the North Pole. I'm

3:42

your host Cat Long, Science editor

3:45

at Mental Floss and this is

3:47

our final bonus episode live

3:49

from Greenland. Just

4:07

getting to this remote part of Greenland

4:10

was an adventure. After

4:12

flying from New York to Copenhagen

4:14

by way of Raikiavik and racking

4:16

up three negative COVID tests, I

4:19

met up with Liam and Chris the following

4:21

morning at the airport. We

4:23

boarded an Air Greenland flight to Kangarloo,

4:26

Sack, Greenland's major international

4:28

hub. Then we transferred to

4:30

a much smaller plane for our flight to Tuli

4:33

air Base, about nine hundred and

4:35

fifty miles from the North Pole. The

4:38

base would be our research headquarters for the week.

4:42

From the plane, the barren terrain of

4:44

western Greenland spread out below

4:46

my window. In the southwest

4:48

of the country, Countless lakes

4:51

speckled the glacier scoured rock. A

4:54

bit farther north, we flew past the Jakobshavn

4:56

Icefield, one of the world's fastest

4:59

moving aschers, which appeared to

5:01

litter the sea with icebergs. The

5:04

terrain shifted from weathered rock to

5:06

snow covered hills, and then

5:09

finally the Greenland ice sheet,

5:11

which covered the land except for a

5:13

narrow level strip at the coastline.

5:16

That's where we were headed. Canude

5:20

Rasmussen, a Danish Greenlandic

5:22

explorer honored with a bronze bust

5:24

at the Kangarloosoak Airport, connected

5:26

this area to the ancient legends

5:29

of Tuli when he set up a trading post

5:31

here in long

5:34

before that, this area served as

5:36

a crossroads of people and ideas.

5:39

Waves of Arctic settlers migrated

5:41

the short distance across Baffin Bay

5:44

from present day Canada to Greenland,

5:46

between b C and

5:49

twelve hundred C. They

5:51

found a treeless land rich in

5:54

food sources. Thanks to the confluence

5:56

of Arctic, Atlantic and glacial

5:58

waters. The seas

6:00

support a vast web of marine

6:02

life, from the tiniest fish

6:04

to the fattest walruses, as

6:07

well as Arctic foxes and musk

6:09

ox, which were common sights during

6:11

my visit. The

6:13

plentiful game supported a village

6:15

in the shadow of a tall, flat topped

6:18

mesa, both of which were named Umanac,

6:20

which means heart shaped. In

6:24

earlier episodes of The Quest for the North Pole,

6:26

we mentioned how John Ross and William

6:28

Edward Perry were the first European

6:31

explorers to meet the in white here in

6:33

eighteen eighteen. In

6:35

the century following that meeting, more

6:38

explorers and whalers dropped their anchors

6:40

at the foot of Umanac. In

6:43

eighteen forty nine, HMS north

6:45

Star was on a mission to resupply

6:47

ships searching for the missing Franklin expedition.

6:51

The North Star got iced in and its

6:53

crew was forced to spend the winter just

6:55

offshore, which gave its captain,

6:58

James Saunders, plenty of time

7:00

to bestow British names on all of the

7:02

surroundings. On

7:04

a map today, you'll find north Star Bay,

7:07

Saunders Island, and Mount Dundas,

7:10

the British name for the MESA. Robert

7:13

Peery made the area his headquarters for his

7:15

attempts to reach the North Pole, though

7:17

his main camp at Eta was about a hundred

7:19

forty miles north of Umanac, Canud.

7:22

Rasmussen lived in Umanac while operating

7:25

the training post and conducting his seven

7:27

TOOLI expeditions across the Polar Wilderness

7:30

between nineteen twelve and nineteen thirty

7:32

three. His colleague

7:34

Peter Ferkin's house still stands

7:36

among the small cluster of brightly painted

7:39

shacks on the edge of North Star Bay.

7:43

When I visited the village, now usually

7:45

called Dundas, it was eerily

7:48

quiet. In fact, it

7:50

was abandoned. The

7:52

U. S military had removed the twenty

7:54

seven families who lived here in the nineteen

7:56

fifties to a new settlement sixty

7:59

miles north because the

8:01

Americans were building a top secret

8:03

air base on the other side of the bay.

8:07

It was called Operation Blue Jay.

8:13

We'll be right back. At

8:27

the height of the Cold War, the

8:30

US invested heavily in building

8:32

air bases to create a network of defenses

8:34

against the Soviet Union. Because

8:37

the Soviets could theoretically launch ballistic

8:39

missiles the short distance over the North

8:42

Pole to the US, American

8:44

military leaders realized they needed an

8:46

Arctic based system to detect

8:48

those missiles. After

8:51

securing agreements with NATO and Denmark,

8:53

which administered Greenland, the

8:56

U. S Army launched Operation Blue

8:58

Jay to construct totally base.

9:00

In nine More

9:03

than seven thousand construction workers

9:05

and engineers departed from Norfolk,

9:07

Virginia to build the base, but

9:09

the mission was so secret they weren't even told

9:11

where they were going. The Tully

9:14

airstrip opened in September, followed

9:17

by sleddog patrol units and

9:19

a lot more. The specially

9:21

designed construction materials proved

9:24

so sturdy that most of the

9:26

barracks and offices dubbed flattops

9:28

at Tulli today are the original nineteen

9:31

fifties facilities. In

9:35

nineteen fifty two, the military went

9:37

public with Operation Blue Jay.

9:40

A few years later, the US built camps

9:42

nearby to experiment with cold

9:44

weather defense and nuclear technology.

9:47

One was Camp Tuto, an acronym

9:49

for Tulli Takeoff. It

9:53

served as a staging area for transporting

9:55

equipment to Camp century, a

9:57

nuclear reactor base dug inside

10:00

the ice sheets. Inland

10:02

there were red plywood buildings with

10:05

snow all around them. So

10:08

someone would be like a mess hall. Another

10:10

would be the latrine, another would would

10:12

be the library, and the library was great.

10:16

That's Jim Finnel. He was trained as

10:18

a weather observer in the Army and

10:20

served at Camp two to into

10:22

And what

10:25

were your duties during your weather observations.

10:28

There was a standard sheet that you

10:31

had to fill out every hour, which was

10:33

of course the temperature, wind

10:36

speed, direction, and then you

10:38

go out and estimate that cloud

10:41

heights and the types and the and

10:43

the visibility. All these things were done, of

10:45

course without any radar

10:48

or any thing is that people used today.

10:50

Uh. The only mechanical thing

10:52

that we had where the wind speed

10:54

and direction a little looked

10:56

like a little airplane that was spent around and

10:59

that would it out on a

11:01

printer in a in a weather station. I

11:04

remember the one thing that most stood

11:06

out was I recorded a low temperature

11:08

for and that was

11:10

minus sixty three of

11:12

the Camp century. That's

11:14

minus sixty three degrees fahrenheit.

11:18

By recording the weather conditions at Camp

11:20

Tuto and century, Jim became

11:22

part of the earliest organized climate research

11:24

in this area of the Arctic. To

11:27

me, it was more of an adventure. I

11:29

didn't get to go to Germany,

11:32

I didn't get to travel in Europe, but I

11:34

at least got a fight break from staying in the US

11:36

all the time. These

11:39

camps were abandoned roughly a decade after

11:41

they were built. The Army

11:43

dismantled Camp Tuto's red buildings,

11:45

but left the long gravel access

11:48

road from too Lea Air Base out to the edge

11:50

of the ice sheet. And

11:52

that's where I found myself in September,

11:56

bouncing along in the back seat of a red

11:58

pickup with Liam at the seal,

12:00

Chris on the passenger side, and

12:02

sea shanties blasting from the stereo. The

12:06

terrain, as far as I could see, had been

12:08

bulldozed to create material for the road.

12:12

The light layer of snow gave the plantless

12:14

brown land a sugar dusted look.

12:17

As we neared the end of the road, the

12:20

edge of the ice sheet came into view. The

12:23

smoothly sloping mountain of ice

12:25

broke off in a slushy lake on

12:27

one side of the road. On the other,

12:30

I could see that the ice had receded

12:32

and left behind a field of rounded

12:34

boulders. The remains

12:36

of the road leading to Camp Century

12:39

rose about a hundred fifty feet above

12:41

the surface of the ice sheet. Though

12:44

it was no longer safe to travel on, we

12:46

used the old ramp as a landmark on our

12:48

slippery truck up to the ice monitoring

12:50

site. The

12:52

station is not a building or large

12:54

structure. It's a tall steel tripod

12:57

and T shaped metal bar with

13:00

sensors to measure wind speed and direction,

13:02

air temperature, solar radiation,

13:05

and snow height to other

13:07

sensor arrays were installed within the

13:09

ice to measure temperature and pressure at

13:11

different depths. They're all

13:13

connected to a box, which Chris described

13:16

as a station's brain, that transmits

13:18

the data by satellite to the Internet.

13:21

Anyone can view the status of the Greenland

13:23

ice sheet in real time. This

13:26

site is paired with another identical

13:28

site higher up on the ice sheet. The

13:31

eight pairs of stations scattered

13:33

around Greenland make up gay Uses Program

13:36

for monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheet a

13:38

k A pro mice. As Liam

13:40

explains, these

13:43

stations one lower and one higher. Their

13:46

goal is to measure ice and climate

13:49

parameters, and so that means things

13:52

that we need to know about how the ice

13:54

sheet is responding to climate change, and

13:56

so we have to measure all

13:58

the things you might need in a climate

14:01

model, for example, we want

14:03

to actually measure them, as we say,

14:05

in situ or out in the real world, so

14:08

we can compare what our climate models sees

14:10

or thinks is happening versus what is actually

14:12

happening. No

14:14

one had visited this station since May.

14:18

Thanks coronavirus, Liam

14:21

and Chris had to lay the whole station on

14:23

its side to replace the sensors, and

14:25

that required digging the tripod out

14:27

of a year and a half of accumulated

14:30

ice. Then each sensor

14:32

had to be unscrewed from its amount and

14:34

a new one screwed in. Knots

14:37

of frozen wires had to be untangled.

14:40

Easier said than done when it's about

14:42

seventeen degrees and snowing sideways

14:45

like it was during our visit. This

14:47

is why you get like frostbite on your fingers

14:50

because you're you're doing this really fine

14:52

detailed work, like splicing a

14:54

wire in and then trying to like close the

14:56

cap back on and like doing these little screws,

14:59

and you know, something like that it'll

15:01

take forty five minutes to troubleshoot and solve.

15:04

The pain is worth it. Two Glaciologists

15:07

like Liam because it leads to a better

15:09

understanding of the ice sheets mass balance,

15:12

the measure of how much mass the ice sheet is

15:14

accumulating through snowfall and

15:16

how much it's losing through melting or icebergs

15:19

breaking off. The

15:21

idea is if we can get a handle

15:23

on the mass balance, the inputs and the outputs

15:26

through time through space, then we can understand

15:28

how the ice sheet health is changing through

15:30

time and space today or at least

15:33

in recent years. When we look into

15:35

the climate projections that the UN talks

15:37

about, we can look at the different climate

15:39

pathways and try to say, hey, this is

15:41

what the ice sheet health is going to be under each pathway

15:44

based on our knowledge of these processes

15:46

today, and so what is the health

15:48

today that you're looking at. Um

15:52

The ice sheet is in a

15:54

state of persistent decline

15:57

or poor health today. It has a negative

15:59

mass balance, which means the

16:01

output that is

16:03

the melt water runoff and the iceberg

16:05

having the outputs are much greater than

16:08

the inputs. And as the climate warms,

16:11

you know that has a direct effect on

16:13

how much the ice sheet melts. Remember

16:16

those five million titanic's worth

16:18

of ice lost each year that I mentioned at

16:20

the beginning of our story. That's

16:23

equivalent to about eight

16:25

or nine thousand metric tons

16:27

per second, which is also an

16:29

almost inconceivably large number, But

16:32

maybe it also helps to contextualize it when

16:34

you just think of thousands of tons of mass

16:36

loss per second, you know

16:39

that's that's the annual average. That's day

16:41

in, day out, around the clock, around

16:43

the year. All

16:45

of this is actually changing gravity.

16:48

Essentially, as Greenland loses ice,

16:51

it becomes lighter, which means

16:53

it can exert less gravitational pull.

16:56

Because of that, it can't hold ocean

16:58

waters as close to it as four The

17:01

waters are released to slosh around

17:03

the earth and collect elsewhere, meaning

17:06

that places thousands of kilometers

17:08

away are more affected by melting

17:10

ice than places nearer to the poles.

17:14

Another mind boggling effect of Greenland's

17:17

loss of ice is called post glacial

17:19

rebound. For millennia,

17:21

Greenland's land has been pressed down

17:23

under the weight of the ice sheet, but

17:26

as the ice sheet melts, it gets lighter

17:29

and the land below it springs upward

17:33

at a monitoring station near the fast

17:35

moving Yakopshoven Glacier. The

17:37

bedrock is now ten ft higher

17:39

above sea level than in nine That's

17:43

ten times the average. Other

17:46

Greenland glaciers have experienced one

17:48

foot of rebound in that time period, which

17:50

is still a lot. Knowing

17:53

how different Greenland looked back then, I couldn't

17:56

help but reflect on the many ways the

17:58

explorers experiences differed from

18:00

mine. The glaciers

18:03

and icebergs and snowpack they witnessed

18:05

no longer exist. The

18:08

Greenland ice sheet near the Tudor Road terminates

18:11

in a lake instead of land. Just

18:14

the fact that I, a regular New Yorker,

18:17

could visit this part of the world, was an indication

18:19

that times had changed. Instead

18:21

of sea boots and woolen mittens, we

18:24

wore layers of down and fleece.

18:27

Instead of hauling thousand pounds sledges

18:29

over the ice, we carried only

18:31

the gear we needed for each day's work. And

18:34

instead of spending months or years

18:36

in the Arctic wilderness, we went

18:39

back to the air Bass hotel each night. We

18:41

even had a beer at the top of the World Club

18:44

the local bar. Our.

18:46

Days were hard, they were

18:48

tough, they were long, they were cold

18:50

and windy, But if you

18:52

back up almost a hundred

18:55

years, you know, now we have you

18:57

know, cortex and like goggles and

18:59

stuff. I can't imagine what

19:02

it would be like to be sledging across

19:04

the ice sheet in anything

19:07

colder than full polar summer.

19:09

You know, must have just been super

19:11

tough. I

19:14

was encased in

19:16

multiple layers at all times

19:19

on of my entire

19:21

body for this entire week.

19:26

So for all the obsessing

19:28

and reading and historical analysis

19:31

I've done of the Arctic, this was my

19:33

first time actually going

19:35

there and I survived and that's okay.

19:38

And I didn't even have to eat any pemmican, So

19:41

no, I mean, by Arctic standards, this

19:43

is the first week that the snow has started to collect

19:45

on the ice sheet, so it was still Arctic summer here

19:47

last week, and now the snow

19:50

is starting to collect, and we're in single

19:52

digits negative temperatures, so it's

19:55

cool. I can't

19:57

help but notice that throughout the whole

19:59

week in Greenland, you never once

20:02

wore a scarf. Can you discuss

20:05

how this is possible? So,

20:09

uh, well, I didn't pack a scarf. It was colder

20:11

than I expected, but it wasn't It wasn't

20:13

that bad to

20:17

me. This trip really capped off

20:19

the story of the Quest for the North Pole.

20:22

I was able to see the dramatic effects

20:25

of climate change on a place that explorers

20:27

believed would be frozen forever. It

20:30

drove home the idea that what happens

20:32

in the Arctic does not stay there. Its

20:36

future is our future too. The

20:51

Quest for the North Pole is hosted by me

20:54

cat Long. This

20:56

episode was researched and written by Me,

20:58

with fact checking by Austin to Simson. The

21:01

executive producers are Aaron McCarthy

21:03

and Tyler Clang. The supervising

21:05

producer is Dylan Fagan. The

21:08

show is edited by Dylan Fagan. Thank

21:11

you to Jim Fennel, Liam Colgan,

21:13

and Chris Shields for

21:16

transcripts, a glossary, and to learn

21:18

more about this episode, visit Mental Flaws

21:20

dot com slash podcast. The

21:24

Quest for the North Pole is a production of I

21:26

Heart Radio and Mental gloss For

21:28

more podcasts from my heart Radio, check

21:31

out the I heart Radio app, Apple

21:33

podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

21:49

For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit

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