Tackling Extremes to Find a Climate 'Missing Link': Big Pic

July 01, 2010 -- In Indonesia, one of the world's last tropical glaciers is dying. Perched atop the 16,000-foot peak Puncak Jaya in Papua province, the glacier has shrunk in size by 80 percent since 1936, and most of that since the 1970s.

The plight of the ice there is not unique -- hundreds of glaciers around the world are similarly melting -- but its location is. The glacier lies on the border between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where the great monsoons that nourish a billion people mesh with the cycling hot and cold, wet and dry spells of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

For thousands of years, the glacier of Puncak Jaya has recorded the ebb and flow of these two vital climate systems. With the ice facing extinction, Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of scientists set out this spring to bring back samples from what has been called "an unexplored missing link" in our knowledge of how climate changes through time.

One of the most accomplished glaciologists on the planet, Thompson has led 57 expeditions to 16 different countries to drill and sample the world's glaciers. He and his teams have faced the most extreme conditions anyone, scientist or otherwise, could be asked to cope with. One snapshot of his journeys, from the journal Science in 2002 (PDF), reads like a Jon Krakauer book:

Getting to the drill site on 6048-meter Huascarán, Peru’s highest peak, meant dodging daily avalanches and crossing a 10-meter-wide crevasse on a narrow ladder. So in 1993 they hauled up 6 tons of equipment and camped next to the drill for 53 days straight -- perhaps a world record for high-elevation living. A gale hurtled Thompson’s tent, with him inside, toward a 3000-meter drop, until he jammed his ice ax through the floor. The drillers came back gaunt -- and bearing 4 tons of 9-centimeter cores.

In 1997 on Bolivia’s 6542-meter Sajama, the indigenous Aymara people feared that drilling would anger mountain deities. So before ascending, Thompson and the others took part in a long ceremony that involved chanting, smoking cigarettes, drinking high-test alcohol, chewing coca leaves, and sacrificing a blindfolded white alpaca. Only 2 weeks after bringing down the Sajama cores, Thompson headed to Tibet to core the even higher Dasuopu glacier, at 7200 meters still the world’s highest ice-core site.

One of Thompson's students died during the Tibet trip.

Upon returning from his latest outing earlier this week, Thompson offered a gloomy prognosis for the glacier at Puncak Jaya. Like many he has visited, he doesn't give it much time:

"These glaciers are dying," said Thompson, [...] "Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're looking at years."

Still, he remains hopeful that the core samples he secured from what's left of the ice will ultimately be valuable in teasing out past climate behavior, and predicting what might be in store for the future.

Image credit: AP Photo/Papua Project Freeport-McMoRan