Why Melting Polar Ice Caps Are Showing Up In Canada | Angry Planet

As global temperatures rise, the polar ice caps are disappearing at an alarming rate. As a result, more and more icebergs are showing up in the warmer waters of Canada. Tracking the growing number of icebergs is crucial because understanding how they move and how they disintegrate is the key to understanding the melting of arctic ice. I'll see how it's done. From above, the waves are just shooting high up into the air up against the birds. From below, and from the very top of an iceberg on the moon. I'm gonna place the beacon. Melting ice is Earth's warning signal and icebergs are sounding an alarm bell about our climate's future. In Newfoundland, Canada on the Atlantic coast, the iceberg capital of the world, every spring thousands of icebergs travel from the arctic down the 1600 mile stretch of ocean called Iceberg Alley. One percent make it as far south as St. John's. These icebergs are really amazing. Most of them are formed off of the glaciers on western Greenland. They're born when the glaciers calve into the Davis Strait and a lot of them end up floating south. It's a three-year journey from the arctic. Circling counterclockwise around Baffin Bay, the icebergs flow into the Labrador Current which propels them past Newfoundland and Labrador all the way down to the southern tip of the province. They arrive here every year but their increase in numbers is an ominous indicator of what's happening to the Greenland ice sheet. It's the second largest ice sheet in the world and it's melting fast, shrinking 47 cubic miles a year. David Barber has been studying the arctic for 30 years. Well there's lots and lots of evidence all pointing in exactly the same direction that climate change is very much alive and well in the arctic and it's really affecting the marine cryosphere in general. From snow cover to ice sheets, the cryosphere is the term scientists use for frozen water on the surface of the earth and right now it's in a precarious state. The melting is leading to a rise in ocean levels worldwide, a big threat to coastal communities. Warming waters are also affecting global weather patterns and that's not all. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating the production of icebergs. They're massive, they're very dense and if you're in a ship that hits one of those it's going to cause a tremendous amount of damage. Nowhere else in the world do icebergs intersect with major shipping lanes and fishing zones. Collisions can be deadly. It's up to the International Ice Patrol and US Coast Guard to make sure that doesn't happen. And last year was a really crazy year apparently. Yes last year was it was the sixth most severe we've had on record since 1900. We had over 1500 icebergs drift south. Today I get to see their high-tech iceberg monitoring gear in action. This year almost 900 bergs have been spotted and we're only halfway through the season. On the plane here today we've got the pilots, we've got co-pilots, we've got someone operating the radar and two guys and all their job is is to spot icebergs. Icebergs are an extreme hazard. Obviously just over 100 years ago the Titanic, probably the most famous shipwreck of all when it comes to iceberg collisions, went down not too far from here. There have been several instances over the last couple years where ships have deflected off of an iceberg. None of them were damaged so badly that they sank. There have been just over 50 collisions since 1980 causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. Tracking buoys with sensors are deployed from the back of the plane. They're designed to read the currents which help determine where the icebergs are going and how fast. I see them crashing the waves just shooting high up into the air up against the bergs. From up here looking down it's really hard to tell just how big these icebergs are. Icebergs can vary in size from that of a small car to ones the size of Manhattan. The Ice Patrol is collecting some of the most detailed information for this area. It's entered into a database and shared internationally with climate scientists studying what happens to icebergs in warmer water. Of course the Arctic and Antarctic regions are the places on the planet that are most affected by climate change right now. Global temperatures there in the polar regions are about double what they have been and as temperatures rise the speed of the glacier will actually increase and of course the faster that glacier is moving the more of that ice is going to end up in the water each year. Melting Arctic ice disintegrates spectacularly into icebergs. The Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland caught the world's attention in 2010 when satellite images captured a 100 square mile ice island breaking off. Just two years later another one 50 square miles also fell away. Scientists are trying to get an idea of what will happen in the future. Brad de Young is a professor of oceanography at Memorial University. What you're always looking for are the big changes but to determine those sometimes you have to separate out the kind of the year to year variability. The variability one might expect to see decade to decade but the other is the larger scale kind of climate story. In order to understand the rate of change oceanographers are now studying icebergs in more detail because the way icebergs break up down here mimics the disintegration of the ice shelves in the Arctic. What we want to do is to is to make measurements on different kinds of bergs in different situations and also we look at a particular iceberg and ask what's happening to it and so make repeated measurements of the same iceberg right see how its shape changes over time it's melting. Melting ice shelves are very bad news. Ice shelves are dense floating sheets of ice at the end of a glacier sometimes up to 3,000 feet thick. They're vital because they act as a huge doorstop pushing against the glaciers slowing their flow into the ocean. Without ice shelves the glaciers would melt more rapidly into the sea causing a rise in global sea levels. Today I'm in Conception Bay at the southeast corner of Newfoundland. I'm taking a closer look at icebergs that have made the 1,600 mile journey from Greenland. I want to see how they travel through these waters. If we've got changes in the environment such as warmer waters, different currents, different wind patterns, it's going to affect how these icebergs travel through Iceberg Alley. So the mission is to get out and actually climb onto one of these icebergs and place a satellite tracking beacon on it. I'll then be able to track it over the next few days. Cotton! Iceberg! Head ahead! The cold and the beautiful. Without any warning these birds can flip roll over or break apart. This will be a climb unlike any I've tried before. Holy crap! I want to get up on the berg and place a beacon on it to track its movement and melt rate. But it's not going to be easy. Holy crap! Not that one! That's scary. What was once this towering berg is now this pile of thousands of Look at this effervescent sound. All these air bubbles coming up out of the ice. It's degassing. Wow! Zero warning. It really drives home how dangerous these things can be when you're up close to them. A bit shaken we move to one that looks promising to climb. That is a beautiful, beautiful iceberg. We'll do a circumnavigation. If this iceberg were to roll that way, this piece of ice would come up underneath us. Okay Rick. I'm going to place the tracking beacon as high as possible as I want to see how long this berg stays intact and how far it goes. Okay. Information like this helps scientists understand the breakup of icebergs. The ice is, it's a little softer than I was expecting because it's all melting. All right. Continuing up. There's water spray coming up, pressurized up over here. Bird feathers up here. Oh, the angle on this is perfect. It's nice and gentle. What a view. I want to get a little bit further over. I don't dare go any higher up. Too dangerous right here where I'm standing. Here's a good spot right here. All right. Just putting a nice screw in right now. The wind's really picking up here. I'm securing the beacon and tying it off with rope so it can be retrieved later. Okay. The rope is in the water. The tracking beacon is retrievable. I'm going to start working my way back. This thing has traveled probably several years down from the Greenland Glacier. Now, let's see where it goes from here. Tracking icebergs is one way to study climate change, but I want to explore other methods that'll take me into dangerous waters. Icebergs offer valuable clues about the melting Arctic ice that spawned them, and it's not just the increase in their numbers that's concerning scientists. It's a coupled system. You can't really look at one part of the thing without looking at all the other parts that are interconnected because they all operate with each other in a very sophisticated harmony. Scientists are noticing that sea ice, the frozen seawater, is also melting fast and raising the temperature of the water around it. When you think about the sea ice, we're thinking right now we're going to have a seasonally ice free Arctic. That stuff that's left at the end of the summer will actually shrink and disappear, you know, somewhere between 2030 and 2050. Disappear completely. Disappear completely in summer. That's scary. The sea ice keeps the oceans cool because when the surface is covered in ice, it's white, so the energy from the sun is reflected back into space, keeping the Arctic cold. But when the ice melts, the heat from the sun is absorbed into the sea, causing it to warm. And when water heats up, it expands, raising sea levels. But that's not the only problem. Melting sea ice and glaciers also change the ocean's currents. In the oceans, we have what's called the thermohaline circulation, the movement of warm water from the equator northward. All that sea and glacier ice melting and mixing together is disrupting those currents. The amount of fresh water that are coming from these things is going to change the circulation patterns of the ocean, because the fresh water is very buoyant, and so it tends to come to the surface and the salt water underneath it, which then affects the currents. Scientists predict that 210,000 square miles of polar ice a decade will melt into the ocean. Changing currents will affect world weather patterns, causing more ferocious storms and extreme snowfalls. The next morning, I head back to Conception Bay. My mission today is to explore the underwater part of these bergs. The base of an iceberg is rarely ever seen, but how it deteriorates in warming water helps scientists understand future melt rates in the Arctic. We hear the phrase, tip of the iceberg, all the time, meaning that there's a lot more hidden underneath. 90% of an iceberg is underwater. For the largest bergs, that can be as big as a five-story building. If all goes well today, I'm going to get to show you what it's like below the surface. A tricky dive, lots of variables, very cold water, so this should be really interesting. Dive master John Olivero is an experienced iceberg diver. There is going to be a little bit of cracking and popping. I'm concerned if any of the noises just start swimming away. If you see anything coming down at you, weigh in down. Yeah, it's only dangerous if something goes wrong. Yeah. Here we go. There's a couple of icebergs out in the bay right now, so we're going to try and find the best one to go diving on, get in the water, and actually see these things from underneath. It can be hard for scientists to study these giant moving blocks of ice as they're so unpredictable. We need to find one that looks stable enough to dive near. George, I like this one because if it breaks, gravity is going to take it that way, so you guys got lots of chance to With the berg chosen, we get suited up. Johnny drops a safety buoy, but right away, there's trouble. We reposition further out, and I hit the water. This berg is massive, at least 100 feet deep. It's an incredible sight. The scars of erosion can be seen everywhere, including these cracks and pockmarks all over. Wind, waves, and warm sea temperatures melt away the icebergs, slowly breaking them up. In examining the rate of decline, scientists are also looking at whether or not ocean water changes the way the iceberg melts. The deep icebergs, if they're melting at the bottom, then there's a plume of fresh water that's coming up, and so we want to look at whether the interaction of that with the ocean water changes the way the iceberg itself melts. So, is the iceberg kind of influencing its own environment in a way that changes how the melting takes place? If scientists can understand these processes, they can make more accurate predictions for the future of the ice cap. It's a real challenge diving in these conditions. Something's gone wrong, and there's much more at stake now than just our research. I'm diving under an iceberg, getting images of its erosion, but I'm having some serious trouble. I have to call the dive off. The conditions were really difficult down there. Despite all the struggles I was having underwater, it was still a sight to behold, seeing this massive berg underwater. He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day, so I still got a lot of fight in me, but not so much more today. After a night of rest, I join a crew on a ship looking for icebergs, but it's not for science. These 10,000-year-old ice blocks happen to contain some of the purest fresh water in the world, and the demand for it is growing. It is very early in the morning, up at 3.30, meeting up with the iceberg cowboy, Ed Keen. What we're going to do, he's going to push it around, then you guys just whack it out, and he'll go around it, right? Just take our time. We're not in no big hurry. We are, but we've got to take our time. He's an iceberg wrangler who sells iceberg water. The water's very pure because it's ancient, tens of thousands of years old, and there's a market for it. The crew heads out to capture a berg. We lasso it. We take a rope in the speedboat around and tie it off, and then we use a winch to pull us tight to the iceberg. Nobody owns the icebergs, so it's legal to catch them and break them up before they would naturally melt, but it's a dangerous job. Yeah, you got to treat them with respect. Some big icebergs with pinnacles and overhangs on them and just too dangerous. Big barge like this is really difficult to maneuver, so they use the small boat to give it a bit of a nudge to get it perfectly positioned to get the machinery in there to get the ice. We needed to get the barge away from this shelf that's underwater. If this iceberg flips right now, it'll take the barge, the motorboat, and all of us along with it. These guys have learned that lesson the hard way. Last year we had one roll on us. It was pretty bad. Iceberg ice has been compressed for thousands of years, so it's incredibly dense. Ed positions the cranes so the excavator can take the first bites. Iceberg ice has been locked in ancient glaciers, which formed before the industrial age, making it free of contaminants. So right now he's dropping the ice directly into those front tanks and then they use the grinder if they want to send it to the tanks at the back and shift the weight. We force water, iceberg water, from the tank in and it flows down into the other tanks. And how many liters of water will you gather in one season? We're looking at probably a million two or three this year. These guys have been at it for about four or five hours now and they've put a serious dent in that chunk of ice. By late afternoon they wrap it up and head back to shore with their haul. It's been an adventurous week for me in Iceberg Alley, but before I head home there's one more place I need to go. I'm going to check on the status of that iceberg I was tracking. So it's been about three days since I put the transmitter on the iceberg up here at Bay Diverg and an interesting thing has happened. We've had strong winds from the north, which as you might expect has pushed that iceberg to the south about halfway into Conception Bay. And last night it stopped transmitting. The iceberg has probably broken up and the transmitter is sitting at the bottom of the bay. It traveled almost 15 miles in three days. It really does go to show how much these things move around out here. As icebergs continue to flow into these waters off Newfoundland, they're a mixed blessing. They offer scientists a chance to further understand the process of arctic melting, but they're also an unmistakable warning about the dramatic decline of our ice sheets. Continuing the detailed research and sharing it worldwide will enhance our ability to combat climate change. Keeping the planet cool by just one to two degrees would help preserve this frozen world. It's going to cost us a lot more not to do something about this problem than it is for us to do something about this problem, so let's keep our habitat so that it works for us as a species. Scientists have spoken. Now it's time for governments and individuals to take action.