• Day 4: How to sleep outside in Antarctica and live to tell about it

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    By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent

    There are ways to appreciate what Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton and other explorers achieved in their time in this environment. I joined some 30 or so other hearty souls for a night on the ice, thinking perhaps sleeping outside would help us better understand the forces of nature they battled. Of course, the ice on which we chose to set up shop was firmly over land, and it was a safe distance from the glaciers.

    I decided it would be best to enjoy the fresh air and twilight of the short nighttime with a bivi bag instead of a tent.  If you’re unfamiliar, a bivi bag is basically a sleeping bag inside a giant Ziploc bag. The outer shell keeps you dry, and the sleeping bag -- at least in theory -- keeps you warm.  Since you’re on ice, and so much of your heat loss is through the ground where you sleep, we put down camping mats (fancier versions of yoga mats) as well.

    What none of us anticipated was the rain followed by snow.

    I was fortunate to have had some camping experience and  understood the value of having a waterproof backpack. I slipped my outerwear into the pack and gingerly tip-toed, so as not to soak my socks on the snow and ice. That can lead to wet and very cold feet overnight.

    Karine Bengualid / NBC News

    Kerry Sanders waking up after a night spent in a sleeping bag.

    In my long-johns, I wiggled into my bivi bag and settled in for the evening. I used my waterproof boots, one tucked into the other, as a rubber pillow. With my head protected by a fleece ski mask, I laid on my back staring up into the clear sky. Then the rain came.  Drop after drop hit my face, so I turned to my side, and as the rain turned to snow, I finally fell asleep.

    What I could immediately appreciate is how this one night, with our modern camping gear, compared to the perils faced by the explorers of the early 1900s. We have fleece and waterproof mittens. They had canvas, wool, and an early rubberized boot. Many developed trench foot, when the sweat in their boot mixed with the cold air. In contrast, my toes stayed toasty warm.

    Also, I spent about nine hours on the ice. They spent months.

    NBC's Kerry Sanders meets up with the decedents of legendary polar explorers Sir. Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott.

     

    I slept well, awakened only by the occasional boom of a glacier calving. The process sound like a bomb going off in a war zone. And while anyone in the path of a calving glacier would feel the same destructive force as a bomb, we were thankfully camping a safe distance from where any tonnage of crushing ice might give way.

    And thankfully, no Leopard seals came to shore that night with curiosity (or menace).

    Finale: Antarctica isn't just for scientists

  • Scientists say Canada's glaciers are headed for unstoppable thaw

    Sean Kilpatrick via Reuters

    Lowell Glacier rises from waters in Kluane National Park, near Haines Junction in Canada's Yukon Territory.

    By Alister Doyle, Reuters

    OSLO, Norway — Canadian glaciers that are the world's third biggest store of ice after Antarctica and Greenland seem headed for an irreversible melt that will push up sea levels, scientists said Thursday.

    About 20 percent of the ice in glaciers, on islands such as Ellesmere or Devon off northern Canada, could vanish by the end of the 21st century in a melt that would add 1.4 inch (3.5 cm) to global sea levels, they said.

    Governments are trying to understand every possible centimeter of sea level rise caused by global warming, to plan how to protect cities from New York to Shanghai or low-lying coasts from Ghana to Bangladesh. "We believe that the mass loss is irreversible in the foreseeable future," assuming continued climate change, the scientists, based in the Netherlands and the United States, wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

    Lead author Jan Lenaerts of the University of Utrecht told Reuters that the trend seemed unstoppable because a thaw of white glaciers would expose dark-colored tundra that would soak up more of the sun's heat and further accelerate the melt.

    A total melt of the glaciers would take several centuries. Climate change is warming the Arctic faster than the global average.

    Most past estimates of Canada's glaciers, based on less precise data of their size and melt rates, pointed to a smaller contribution to sea level rise of perhaps three-quarters of an inch (2 centimeters) this century, Lenaerts said.

    The U.N. panel of climate scientists has projected that world sea levels will rise by 7 to 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) this century, or more if a thaw of vast ice sheets in Antarctica or Greenland accelerates.

    Canada's glaciers are little-studied and often lumped into the panel's estimates with ice in Alaska, Patagonia, Russia and Svalbard off north Norway.

    "These glaciers are a significant part of the whole equation and of future sea level rise," David Vaughan, head of the ice2sea program for studying global warming based at the British Antarctic Survey in England, told Reuters. "We can't afford to ignore them." Vaughan was not among the authors of Thursday's study.

    "Most attention goes out to Greenland and Antarctica, which is understandable because they are the two largest ice bodies in the world," Michiel van den Broeke, a co-author of the study at Utrecht University, said in a statement. "We want to show that the Canadian ice caps should be included in the calculations."

    The experts used satellite data of the extent of Canadian glaciers over the past decade to work out a model to project their decline. The projection of a 20 percent loss of volume was based on a scenario in which world temperatures would rise by 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) this century and by 8 degrees C (14.4 degrees F) in the Canadian Arctic. That's well within most U.N. scenarios.

    Copyright Thomson Reuters 2013. Check for restrictions at: http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp 

  • Bucking trend, some Himalayan glaciers are actually growing

    By Reuters

    Some glaciers in the Himalayas mountain range have gained a small amount of mass between 1999 and 2008, new research shows, bucking the global trend of glacial decline.

    The study published on Sunday in the Nature Geoscience journal also said the Karakoram mountain range in the Himalayas has contributed less to sea level rise than previously thought.

    With global average temperature rising, glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets melt and shed water, which contributes to the increase of sea levels, threatening the populations of low-lying nations and islands.

     The research at France's University of Grenoble estimates that the Karakoram glaciers have gained around 0.36 feet to 0.72 feet per year between 1999 and 2008.

    "Our conclusion that Karakoram glaciers had a small mass gain at the beginning of the 21st century indicates that those central/eastern glaciers are not representative of the whole (Himalayas)," the experts at the university said.

    The study appears to confirm earlier research that had suggested the Karakoram glaciers have not followed the global trend of glacial decline over the past three decades. The mountain range's remoteness had made it hard to confirm its behaviour.

    The Karakoram mountain range spans the borders between India, China and Pakistan and is covered by 7,700 square miles of glaciers. It is home to the second highest mountain in the world, K2.

    "We suggest that the sea-level-rise contribution for this region during the first decade of the 21st century should be revised from +0.04 mm per year to -0.006 mm per year sea-level equivalent," the study said.

    The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps and feed many of the world's great rivers, including the Ganges and Brahmaputra, on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

    The world's glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets have shed around 1,000 cubic miles from 2003 to 2010, experts suggest, which is enough to raise sea levels by 12mm over that period.

    Stephan Harrison, associate professor in quaternary science at the UK's University of Exeter, said the new research had showed there is "considerable variability" in the global climate and in how glaciers respond to it.

    The Karakoram glaciers are also unusual because they are covered with thick layers of rock debris, which means their patterns of melting and mass gain are driven by changes in that debris as well as in the climate.

    Much of their mass gain also comes from avalanches from the high mountains surrounding them, Harrison said.

    "Overall, the impact of melting glaciers such as these on sea level rise is known to be negligible, but it does mean that there is much more to be learnt about exactly how the world's glaciers will respond to continued global warming," he added.

    A separate study in February found that Himalayan glaciers and ice caps as a whole were losing mass less quickly than once feared, offering some respite to a region already feeling the effects of global warming.

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