Renowned paleoclimatologist Dr. Lonnie Thompson has been on over 60 expeditions to collect ice core samples from glaciers around the world. These samples hold precious clues to understand human-caused climate change.
Renowned paleoclimatologist Dr. Lonnie Thompson has been on over 60 expeditions to collect ice core samples from glaciers around the world. These samples hold precious clues to understand human-caused climate change.
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Lonnie Thompson:
I was actually at Byrd Station in February when I got a Telex from the program manager that said, "I have funded all of my real science projects and I have $7,000 left. What could you do on that tropical glacier with $7,000?" And I thought about it and I said, "Well, I think we could get there."
Shelby Stanger:
In the 1970s, geology, glaciology and climate science research had some revolutionary breakthroughs. A scientist in Europe discovered that taking small samples of polar glaciers could tell us a lot about temperature history at the North and South Poles.
Lonnie Thompson was a university student at the time, and he was obsessed with this research. He wanted to be on the front lines, gathering samples from glaciers, but technology and funding were limited. So Lonnie came up with a wild idea that greatly impacted the field of climate science.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studio's production.
Lonnie Thompson has been described as the Indiana Jones of climate science. He's gone on more than 60 expeditions all over the world to take samples of glaciers. Those samples have provided unique data on temperature and precipitation change.
For his work, he's received several prestigious awards, including the 2005 National Medal of Science. In the early 2000s, Lonnie was a prominent voice in Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. In that documentary, there was a famous picture of Mount Kilimanjaro that showed how much the mountain was changing due to global warming. That was Lonnie's picture. In an age where climate change has become such a political issue, for Lonnie, it's pure science.
There's a new film that just came out about Lonnie's work called Canary. I recently watched it and it completely blew me away. So much of what we know about climate change comes from Lonnie's research, and he's dedicated his whole life to this cause.
How does one get into studying climate change? I mean, you grew up on a farm.
Lonnie Thompson:
Yeah. I think sometimes when I look at that, the history, it's choices that you make that you have no idea of where they're going to lead when you make them. But my first interest in science was actually a sixth grade teacher I had, Mr. Underwood, who was very interested in weather and calculating dew points, and I really got interested in that.
And it led to, I actually put a weather station in my barn, and I would record temperatures and wind speeds in the morning and evening. And at that time, you could actually get from NOAA a national weather map, and I would look at all the patterns on that map. And I got really good at predicting what the weather was going to be and actually got my lunch money at school by betting my fellow students that, yeah, it's going to rain tomorrow. And I think lunch was about a quarter a day back then. And so, it worked out well.
Shelby Stanger:
So you didn't grow up with parents who were professors. They didn't have a huge education beyond eighth grade, and I was just so impressed that you were able to figure out a way then to study this full time. And then, why glaciers? Take me there.
Lonnie Thompson:
Okay. Well, first of all, let me say that I've always felt that we are all, the opportunities that are available to us at that time dictate a lot of things. It has nothing to do with our basic intelligence. And while my mom and dad had eighth grade educations, they were extremely smart. And my mom particularly, from first time I can remember, was telling me, "You got to get an education. The only way you can change your life is to get an education." And so that was kind of drilled into me from a very early age.
And so growing up was difficult because we were poor, in a very poor part of the country, but also we had a lot of opportunities there because it's outdoors. I mean, back then, you could leave the house in the morning and you tell your mom you're going to be back in the evening for dinner. And you'd go out and climb the mountains and hang out with your friends from school. And so being outdoors was just part of growing up in that part of the world. In some ways, it was an idealistic way to grow up, but from a financial point of view, it was very difficult.
My dad passed away when I was in high school. And back then, typical family, the father made the money and the mother took care of the family, the kids. And so my mom had no work experience and she had three kids. But in spite of that, all three of those kids went to college. And unfortunately, my sister died in a car accident, her second year in college.
So one of the things I learned at an early age is life is not guaranteed. And if you want to do something, you need to get on with it.
Shelby Stanger:
With the realization that life is short, Lonnie decided to pursue his passion of studying glaciers. A few decades earlier, a prominent scientist in Europe had discovered that researchers could drill down into glaciers and take a long cylindrical sample, called an ice core. The cores were about 10 inches in diameter, and scientists would sometimes drill into the glacier several thousand feet to get them. That sample could tell them a lot about the history of the earth's temperature.
While completing his PhD, Lonnie was looking closely at these records and he wanted to gather samples from places other than the North and South Poles. He contacted a scientist who was using aerial photos to make maps of glaciers around the world. As Lonnie was going through those photos, he found the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Southern Andes Mountains in Peru. Lonnie was certain that this was the place to go.
The leading researchers disagreed, and his program manager at the National Science Foundation denied him funding. Luckily, Lonnie didn't let that stop him.
Lonnie Thompson:
So I was kind of disappointed. But I was going to Antarctica in the fall of '73, '74, when I got a Telex from the program manager that said, "I have funded all of my real science projects and I have $7,000 left. What could you do on that tropical glacier with $7,000?" And I thought about it and I said, "Well, I think we could get there." And so the next summer, four of us met in Lima and we made our very first trip to the Quelccaya Ice Cap.
And I remember how stunned I was when I went across this last mountain pass to see this ice cap that stretched from horizon to horizon, that set right above the Amazon basin. Just to see that in the tropics, I mean, gee. But we were already up at 17,000 feet and air is very thin. And the transport at that time, it was a two-day journey by horse from the end of the nearest road. So all your cargo, all your gear has to go on horses, and then you have to set up your camp. And then, you go up to the summit of the ice field, which was 18,600 feet.
And how are you going to ever get a drill in there? And how are you going to get an ice core out of there? I mean, the challenges were huge at the time. So here we are, with this big drill from Antarctica. Only way there is horses and you can't put that stuff on a horse. And so, that was our first failure at trying to drill that ice field.
Shelby Stanger:
Lonnie returned from the Andes disheartened but not defeated. An engineer suggested that his team tried building a solar power drill, which would be easier to transport to the summit of the ice cap. Now you have to understand, at this time in the 1970s, solar power was so new that even the National Science Foundation was skeptical about its efficacy. But Lonnie decided to try it anyway.
Lonnie Thompson:
We didn't have resources for porters or anything. We carried the drill and the panels ourselves, and set up the drill, and it was just fantastic. So we drilled one quarter of bedrock. I mean, they'd come up these glassy cylinders. You could see everything. We could actually see every annual dust layer, so we could date it back a thousand, five hundred years.
And we finished that. And this is, we were up there three months. We only said we'd drill one. And so I talked to the team and I said, "You know, we're out of food and we've done what we came here to do, but it would be great to have another core just to duplicate that record." They all looked at me and said, "Sure, let's do it." And so we drilled not one but two cores.
And back then, we did not yet have developed the refrigeration technique for the core. So we had to cut those cores into 6,000 individual samples using a hand saw, and then melting them and putting them to bottles sealed in wax, so there would be no exchange during shipment. And shipping those water samples back to the US.
So it was an interesting three months, but I would say probably the most exciting in my life because we were doing something everyone had told us, "You're not going to do it. You're going to fail."
Shelby Stanger:
Needless to say, the mission was not a failure. The samples that Lonnie's team brought back to the United States were the first long core samples from the tropics. Quelccaya accumulated so much snow that the glacier had thick layers, providing detailed climate records over the last 1,800 years. Lonnie knew there was more to discover at this location, and he's returned to the Quelccaya Ice Cap again and again. Over the years, his samples have confirmed that glaciers in the Andes, as well as those around the world, have been melting at a record pace.
When we come back, Lonnie talks about what it's like to explore and dig for these ice cores around the world, how he keeps his samples cold enough to preserve and research, and how his own health issues nearly ended his expeditions.
Lonnie Thompson is an explorer, mountaineer, and scientist who is passionate about the future of our climate. He spent months at a time in the mountains, drilling ice cores from ancient glaciers. As our glaciers continue to melt, scientists like Lonnie are racing against the clock to collect as much data as possible.
Lonnie and his team have gone on dozens of expeditions to the highest mountains in South America, Asia, and Africa, where access to technology and other resources is limited. To haul their equipment up the mountain, his team generally uses yaks, horses and porters. Once they get to the ice cap, the scenery is incredible. Lonnie and his team trek along the edges of the glaciers, where the ice is grainy and textured, with clear layers that show time, almost like the rings of a tree.
And you didn't have mountaineering experience. What did you use for gear and how did you learn how to get up the mountain and survive? And not just survive, but thrive and do your science and work there?
Lonnie Thompson:
Well, that's an interesting story in itself, because on my return trip from Antarctica, my very first trip to Antarctica, there happened to be a mountaineer on the expedition with me. And he talked me into climbing Malte Brun in New Zealand on my way home. And okay, he talked me into it. And so I go, and my first experience on a mountain glacier.
And climbing up this mountain, and you get up at three in the morning and you're crossing crevasses and you're roped together. There are only two of you. And you get up there on this top of this mountain and there's just this little walkway. And I slipped. And I was hanging on this rope over the side and I said, "God, get me off this mountain. I'll never climb another mountain in my life."
But fortunately, I got off the mountain and I did climb more mountains later. But that was my first introduction to mountaineering. And so I've been very careful to make sure I have a good mountaineering team that joins our expeditions now, to ensure the safety of our people in climbing up to these high mountaintops.
Shelby Stanger:
Could you just give us a little bit more detail? What kind of things do you need to have on an expedition like that to study an ice core, just the mountaineering part of it, and then the actual scientific equipment to study ice cores?
Lonnie Thompson:
Back in those early days on Quelccaya, we were just learning, and we were learning every day, new things. First of all, to do an expedition like that, you need about six tons of equipment, and how are you going to move six tons of equipment from an end of the road where there's no transport except horses, if you're in South America? And then you have the fact that you're taking people into this environment. All kind of issues, medical issues that occur at high elevation. And so you have to develop a medical kit. And the medical kit came from experience, experiencing things that we found we weren't prepared for. The next time we were prepared for it, because nobody's going to come and get you if something goes wrong. You have to be able to handle just about every situation.
So we can do temporary fillings if we need to. We can give morphine shots if the drill, if someone breaks a leg or something like that. But for drilling, you got to have drills. And if you're working in high elevations, you've got to have lightweight portable systems. You've got to have an energy source. And the energy source cannot always be the same, because some places it's cloudy in the seasons that you can go in. But by far, solar is best because you are not polluting the environment.
Then, how do you get an ice core out of these places? Initially, yes, we had to cut, bottle. But we knew this was not the ideal way to bring an ice core back. You want to keep it frozen.
Shelby Stanger:
But how? Do you have these giant box coolers?
Lonnie Thompson:
We have insulated boxes and we have tubes, that when the cores come out of the drill, they go into a plastic sleeve and they're marked with depth. And so all this stratigraphy is recorded that you can see in the ice. They go into the tubes and the tubes go into these insulated boxes. And you get six meters of ice into one of those boxes. And generally speaking, we drill five to 600 meters of core so you have to have lots of boxes.
And then, how you transport those? Every country is different. For example, if you are drilling in the Himalayas, just to give you an idea just on the logistics of the ice itself. We drill. Initially when we're drilling, we drill these, dig these pits into the snow surface, the cores are actually stored underneath the surface. So if you're in the Himalayas, at the end of the project, you make a contract with Sherpas and porters to actually carry these.
If you're drilling at 23,000 feet, I mean, cold and they can actually put these in a backpack and carry the tubes down to the edge of the glacier. But when you get to the edge of the glacier, you're still 4,000 feet from where you can bring in a freezer truck on the Tibetan plateau. And so you got to get the ice from the edge of the glacier down to those freezer trucks. And if you're in the Himalayas, you got to use yaks. That's the only transport up there.
And so, on a yak, you can get two of these core boxes, so that's 12 meters of core. So you have five to 600 meters, so you have to have a herd of yaks. And if you have a cat, the mentality of a yak is very similar to a cat. It's very hard to get them to go in one direction. So you have to have a special yak herder who whistles a song that keeps them calm and gets them down to the trucks.
Once they're in the trucks, we have a dash to Lhasa, where there are freezers where we can split. In the case of China, we divide our cores in half. Half stay in China, half then go air cargo to Beijing. We have to go through Chinese customs to get them shipped out of China. Then we have to bring them in to Chicago, where we have to go through US customs to get them into the US. And then we have freezer trucks waiting outside, and those cores go into those freezer trucks, and then they are trucked down to the freezers here in Ohio State.
That whole journey can take a month. And so there's a lot of things that can go wrong in moving an ice core from the other side of the world, that could result in the loss of everything you worked with.
Shelby Stanger:
So you make it all the way to get to the ice core, then you have to climb 18,000 feet or more, then you have to survive in 18,000 feet or more for months. You get the ice core and sometimes you could lose it. That is so wild to me.
Lonnie hasn't lost any ice cores, but he's cut it close. Once when he was in northwestern Tibet, the freezer truck that they were using broke down. Lonnie bought all the ice cream from a local shop so that he could store his ice cores in their freezer. But don't worry, he didn't let the ice cream go to waste. Almost every kid in town got a treat that day.
When you go on as many expeditions as Lonnie has, you learn a thing or two about problem solving on the fly. When I talked to him, Lonnie was about to go on his 65th field expedition. In the new film, Canary, Lonnie talks about his dedication to this work and the local, regional, and global impacts of what will happen as these glaciers melt.
Just knowing what you know today, I guess, what's something that we should all know about having studied these ice cores?
Lonnie Thompson:
Well, first of all, I would say that the archives are extremely important because we will lose most of the mountain glaciers on this planet, no matter what the future holds as far as finding new alternative energy sources and cutting back the carbon. The problem is we have 25 to 30 year time lag in our climate system, and in that period of time, we are going to lose most of these glaciers.
And one of the things that we have found, that when we started over 40 years ago, the basic things that we measured in an ice core were much different than what we measure today because the technologies have improved. And we have new projects now working with our microbiology colleagues where we're looking at bacteria and viruses, how they have evolved through time, how do they change with climate on this planet. But these ice cores, these glaciers have been recording that for over 20,000 years, and all we have to do is measure it and read it, and reconstruct what that history was.
There is no other time in human history where it would have been possible to do what we have done. I mean, having the technology, having solar panels and having a transport system that will allow you to move from one part of the planet to another in a very short period of time. And we had no idea that these glaciers were going to disappear so fast. When I was a student, the speed of a glacier was something very slow. Well, not anymore. It is now changing so rapidly that you can almost sit there and watch the glacier retreat in today's world.
Shelby Stanger:
You're 75 years old. You're going to go climb 18,000 feet back up the Quelccaya Ice Cap.
Lonnie Thompson:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I was at 20,000 feet in 2019, so this was our first time out since the pandemic, which I can't wait to get back on the glacier. But in 2012, I had a heart transplant, and this also was a lesson in life.
We were running expeditions, usually one or two a year at that time. And I knew I had an issue, but I thought it was asthma, exercise-induced asthma, difficulty breathing. But I was on an expedition actually to South America, up in the Cordillera Blanca, and I was up there two months. At the end of the expedition, my feet swelled. They were three times the normal size, my legs. And I still had to walk off that mountain.
And then when I got back to Lima, there was a, actually it was a Bolivian medical doctor that I had befriended several years earlier because he was a high elevation doctor. We always went out to dinner, and he came over and he looked at my feet and he said, "Lonnie, there's something going on here that we need to know about." And that's where I've got my very first echogram and found out that my heart was about 20% bigger than it should be. And he said he didn't even know how I was conscious at 6,000 meters.
And so I get on an airplane and get back to Ohio, and I went to my cardiologist. And sure enough, he was right. And I was told that I had one option and one option only, and that was to get a heart transplant. And I remember looking at the doctor and saying, "You know, you're crazy because I've climbed all these mountains. This heart has been up and down." I said, "It's been working just fine."
So I fought him for two years, running expeditions. But I was on a drilling project over in the Alps, and one day I couldn't even walk from my tent to the drill site. I mean, I just couldn't breathe. And so I got out of there, came back. And I was going through the New York airport, you know you have to go through customs, carrying all my carry-on luggage.
And there were five ladies who had just come back from seeing the pyramids in Egypt, and they saw that I was suffering. And they said, "Can we help you with your bags?" I said, "Yeah." So we went along, and one of them looked at me and she said, "You can't get on an airplane like this." And she called 911. And I ended up in the hospital in Queens, New York. And I was there overnight and they didn't have rooms. And I finally talked to the doctor and I said, "If you can just give me a permit to get on an airplane, I can get to Columbus and my cardiologist will take care of me."
And I got out of New York, and sure enough, I went in the hospital and it went down really, really quick. And so I ended up getting on a heart transplant list. But in order to survive, they had to put me on an LVAD, which is a left ventricle assist device. So it was an interesting period of time.
So I lived on that for six months. And toward the end of that, I got a call that they thought they had a match and I needed to come in the hospital. And by eight o'clock that evening, I was getting heart transplant.
And so the heart, that's an important part of, it's like the engine for a car. And when I went into the hospital and they did the transplant, and you know, there's a lot of risk in a heart transplant. And in fact, my wife and daughter had asked me, I was doing well on the LVAD, I could have stayed on that for 15 years. And they wanted, "You sure you want to get a transplant?" And I said, "I had 63 great years, wouldn't change anything. And if this is successful, I will get a few more great years."
And so I got the transplant, and then I started getting all these letters and emails from people wanting to know if I got their loved one's heart. And of course, I didn't know. But through this organization, I was able to write a letter to the family, which I did six months after the transplant, and said that I would thank them first for what is the ultimate gift that one human being can give another. And to tell them that when the time was right, I would like to meet them. I would like to find out about the donor. And I was told that only about 25% people ever hear from the donor's family.
And so time passed, years passed. And then, seven years later, I get an email from the father and he said, "You don't know how many times I've sat down to write this email, but I just couldn't talk about my son." And well, it turns out that the heart was 22 years old when they put it in. So the heart is now 33 years old. And so, yes, I am 75, but the heart is much younger.
And one of the nice things about Canary is that it's dedicated to Evan Wright, who is the donor of the heart that I have.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, you sure know how to make me cry. That's incredible. I watched that part of the movie. It's the very end. And Evan was an adventurer. What a gift.
Lonnie Thompson:
He was a bull rider. And yes-
Shelby Stanger:
It's so appropriate.
Lonnie Thompson:
And one of the things we did when we met the family is that we made a album of all the places that Evan's heart had been since the transplant, which at that time was seven expeditions. And we're able to give that to the family. And so we stay in contact and they can't wait to see the movie.
Shelby Stanger:
Lonnie has put his heart into climate science in every way. I highly recommend that you watch the film Canary, which was produced in association with REI Co-Op Studios. I'm not kidding when I say it's one of the best films that I've watched this year, and I cried during this interview. It was a first for me this year.
Lonnie, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living. I love how you never take no for an answer. Thank you for putting so much work and effort into climate science.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce Mintzberg of Puddle Creative, and our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Motala and Joe Crosby.
As always, we appreciate when you follow the show, rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.