BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Since University of Vermont geologist Paul Bierman in 2018 “rediscovered” deep ice core samples from Greenland, it has shown that the great ice sheet was far more fragile than scientists had realized.
In his new book, “When the Ice Is Gone,” Bierman traces the story of his research showing that Greenland’s ice sheet had melted naturally before, about 400,000 years ago and how losing the ice will catalyze devastating events if we don’t change course and address climate change now.
Katharine Huntley spoke with Bierman about the book and his ongoing research.
Welcome back. A University of Vermont professor has this new book out called When the Ice Is Gone. Examining what Greenland’s ice core might be saying about a changing Climate. Joining us now is author Paul Bierman. Paul, thanks so much for being here. So just to start, can you tell us a little bit about your book?
Sure. My books are the result of science that we’ve been doing for the last several years at the University of Vermont, actually starting in 2019, examining the first oldest ice core that was collected from Greenland by the U.S. military in 1966.
So a lot of this book is based on your personal experience in Greenland. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? The place not many people have been.
Yeah, it’s an amazing place. I didn’t get to go there until 2008 and we were working with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and we were privileged to be able to fly in a helicopter over much of southern and western Greenland to get to our sampling sites and collect samples. And then I went back and several years after that, several different times. And then we moved to looking at these ice cores from Greenland. So after the fieldwork, now we’re looking at things that people have collected, either 1966 or 1993.
So what do you think it means for the rest of the world as Greenland’s ice sheet continues to melt?
So as I like to say, Greenland has really long arms and those arms wrap around the entirety of the world, and they do that with sea level for the most part. So every bit of ice that melts in Greenland turns into a drop of water. Many drops of water flows into the global ocean. And so if all of Greenland’s ice were to melt, we would have a sea level rise of somewhere between 23 and 25 feet. And the way to think about that is imagine your favorite beach. And then imagine 25 feet more water over that beach and what wouldn’t be there? New York City, Boston, Jakarta, Miami, all underwater.
So after all this research, you know, what is your big takeaway from the book? And what would you like people to know about the status of climate change?
So the big takeaway from the book is that we’ve been thinking we as a country and scientists have been thinking about Greenland since the 1940 as strategically important environmentally important. The takeaway is that Greenland’s a massive piece of our climate picture, and so we really need to focus on how to preserve that ice and that means slowing and stopping carbon emissions and eventually getting carbon out of the atmosphere.
So is there anything else that really kind of surprised you when learning about this book?
There are two things that really surprised me. And this book is really an environmental history of Greenland. The first thing is the deep involvement of the U.S. military and their establishment. A base of 200 people inside the ice sheet that allowed this to happen. And then the day that we got our first samples from this core there, from the bottom of the core, it’s about 11 feet of sediment there. We melted it. And when we sieved it out, we found under the microscope little bits of plant fossils, insect fossils, fungus from the soil beneath. So we were looking at a place where once today there’s nearly a mile of ice. In the past, all that ice was gone. It was replaced by a Tundra ecosystem. And that’s the take home message, is that Greenland’s ice can melt because it’s melted in the past.
Great. Thank you so much. So when the ice is gone is available now. Paul Bierman, thank you so much for joining us.
Sure. Thank you for having me.