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e walk into a room and I tell someone I'm a glaciologist and usually someone looks at me and says, Well, soon you'll be a historian because the ice is going away way have the ability to turn this around, and I think we're going to We just have to start moving in that direction Now the more we know about ice, the more we can get on board saving it.
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My name is M.
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Jackson, and I'm a geographer and glaciologist and National Geographic Explorer.
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We have got great data that saying the majority of the ice worldwide is melting.
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It's responding to climate change with negative mass balance.
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There's a lot of different mechanisms, but very generally we can say our temperatures air getting warm.
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That's having a negative effect on the ice, and the ice is getting smaller.
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Theo work.
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Ideo really tries to address the question.
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What's gonna happen as the world's ice melts?
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Embedded in that question is, what can we do?
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Yeah, so that's why I work along this whole south coast of Iceland region largest ice cap in Iceland and all of Europe that new yoga is right here hundreds of years ago, when say, I don't know, the Taj Mahal was being built.
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It was snowing here and that snow was turning into glacial ized.
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Okay, so when you're looking this what you're licking is snow that fell hundreds of years ago.
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And the town of hop is located where all of these glaciers drained down and so we can see the town right here.
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And then you have all of these different glaciers that are draining down into the lagoons that surround hop.
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And what we see here is that there's a lot of complex physical impacts of glacier milk, and there's a lot of social impacts of glacier mouth whenever we want to visualize sea level rise and glacier mount.
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Oftentimes we are removing all the variables, and we're just visualizing if all the oceans rose 10 ft 100 ft 200 ft and the way that usually looks at its uniforms.
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But that doesn't take into account geography places where maybe the land is subsiding into the ocean, or places that are marshes or a really important one for anywhere that there are glaciers, land that is rising up.
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It's rebounding way.
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See a huge change happening in the harbor.
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So if you imagine in your hand a sponge and you press that sponge down when you take your hand away, that sponge is gonna just spring right on back up.
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That is what is happening here.
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All of this ice.
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It's here.
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It press the earth's pressed down and press the island of Iceland down.
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And so today, as that ice is melting away, Landis springing back up.
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This is called Isis Static Rebound, glacial rebound, These little islands that are springing up that's really great for the town.
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They pop a house right on their town got bigger.
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But what about the fishing?
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Fishing is a huge part of the Icelandic economy, but there's just this one harbor in this whole area that's getting shallower and shallower and shallower.
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Let's have to sit outside of the Harper and wait for high tide.
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What's gonna happen to the fish packing plant?
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What's gonna happen to the biggest industry in this town?
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Tourism is the second growing industry.
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You.
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They're usually no really wizard tourism here, and suddenly people from all over the world, they're coming to see the glaciers before they're gone.
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But also they're coming to be inside inside.
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E think they didn't really have a business in the winter.
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They know how blobs in the winter there, guiding into these ice tastes.
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They're making Lindsay and widely, even with.
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But the hard bit about this is that a lot of these ice caves are made because glaciers are melting quicker.
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That's the paradox.
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E look, a all of that physical geography, aspects of ice, and I add all the social aspect.
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We put it together.
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We get a whole picture of what's happening.
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The oceans are so, so vast, but they are often controlled and shaped by glaciers.
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So if you are standing looking at your coastline during our last ice age, the ocean was about 400 ft lower than it is today.
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That's because those glaciers they held mawr of that water in the form of ice.
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The flip side of that is today.
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Those glaciers were melting and they're releasing.
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It is the nature of a glacier melting glaciers.
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They're always melting.
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They've always melted throughout history.
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But what is so different today is the rate of milk.
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Never in human history have we ever single acres milk as quick as they are melting today on that's gonna make the sea levels rise.
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So how do you get connected to these glaciers?
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If you're living, say, in New Jersey or you're living in Florida or Washington State, there's gonna be more precipitation, which means in some places, more snow or in other places, more rain, which means more volume in our rivers and our lakes and marshes.
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The more I started to study glaciers, the more people would ask me questions that placed that glacier in a context of people.
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I started a have to have conversations about fish.
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I started to have to have conversations about forests and sheep.
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I had to have conversations about rivers shifting.
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I can look at how people understand what is happening here, the ice today, and I'm able then to understand.
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How do people respond to change so many of the young people that I work with?
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They are yes, Climate change is happening.
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Yes, the glaciers are melting.
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And yes, I individually have the power to affect a positive change.
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Out of that, it excites me.
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I will totally be honest with you.
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It really, really does excite me.
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Climate change is really, really hard.
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So I work with young people and it re energizes me.
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And it makes me excited on off stump, back out in the field, reenergized.
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I love I love being out on glaciers E really do think that if we lose our ice way, lose something of our humanity, we're gonna lose a part of who we are if we take away those places where we say, wow, where we say, or more importantly, where we don't say anything at all because we were just so blown away.
