Diplomacy on Ice: Climate science, glaciers and effecting change on the global level

Welcome everyone to this Sierra Club Maine webinar with Dr. Susanna Hancock. I'm Holly Snow. I'm a volunteer activist with the Sierra Club in Maine. And I'm going to introduce Dr. Hancock. Dr. Susanna Hancock is a glaciologist, climate policy expert, and polar skier. She graduated with an undergraduate degree from Connecticut College and holds three graduate degrees from the University of Oxford in the UK. She works with the International Cryossphere Climate Initiative, that's the ICCI, as the global mountains director, where she focuses on driving climate ambition and urgency within the UN process and across global governments. Susanna is also known for her glacier expeditions where she studies pollution in polar ecosystems and uses these findings to inform global climate policy. She is on local and international environment and polar research boards including Wolf's Neck Center in Freeport where she lives when she's here in the US. Thank you for being with us Susanna and it's all yours. Thank you very much and uh really appreciate Hoy for the invitation to join. And I'll just say that we'll hopefully have some time for Q&A at the end, but if there's anything that I say that sparks any questions or curiosities, please do interrupt and just unmute yourselves and say because I may not may or may not see a question and probably won't read it. Uh so just interject if it's relevant. So yeah, thank you so much. Uh so yes as Holly said I work at the nexus of climate science and diplomacy really. Uh basically this means that I try to take science and see how I can use it to affect change effect policy in both UN and adjacent systems. I have now been on seven expeditions mostly to the glaciers and the ice sheets. So the ice sheets are the big chunks of ice covering Antarctica and Greenland. Uh but also I just had my first expedition research expedition to tropical glaciers in January as well. And there we go. Okay. So tropical glaciers may seem a little bit of a misnomer. Most of us probably don't think about ice when we think about the Caribbean or Indonesia. Yet seven countries that are on the equator actually have glaciers. Uh these are in South America, Africa, and in the Pacific. Though this ice here is particularly vulnerable to the changing climate now and is really only surviving because of being at high altitude. So here, for example, this was my trip in January and I'm at about 17,000 ft in that picture in the uh upper left where I'm actually on the snow. And these other pictures were just marking the terminus of the ice in different different decades as it's melting really rapidly. This particular region has melted about 90% of its ice in the past 150 years. And the ice here is particularly relevant and important because it really feeds about 70% of the country's population. And we're starting to also look in, you know, climate issues, glaciers, ice, water resources. They don't respect national borders as well. So policies that are in one place really affect other places. So primarily I'm going to share a bit about my expedition last autumn across Greenland and what then a little bit of what I do with this because that's what Holly had asked me to do. But I'm happy to uh again if there's questions that come up please please do ask. So I'm going to start off with a little bit of group participation. Sorry I'm sure that's not what you all signed up for but uh just you know 30 seconds or so. Why why is you know what when you think about the Arctic or great glaciers or ice sheets what what stands out? Any any thoughts? Like why would this be an interesting area? Okay. Um so glaciers affect 85% of the world's populations. Sorry, the world's countries. Uh we talk a lot about sea level rise. Most of that's not from the actual mountain glaciers but from the polar ice sheets. little bit from the glaciers. Changes in vectorbor diseases around the world damage. We impact the base of the food chain. We have heat stress, increase wildfires in the Arctic. We have something called zombie fires. Zombie fires are fires that actually can overwinter and they continue to burn underneath the snow and ice into the perafrost and then they reemerge elsewhere in the spring. uh loss of biodiversity, food, water, political insecurity. So if you think about big conflicts around the world, there's often a climate point to them and even human trafficking. So these are sort of the big issues that we look about look at or I look at when we're talking about the loss of loss of ice. So this here is the Paramo and this again is a photograph I took in in Colombia. It also well it's it's also sort of one of those side issues of ice. You can actually see the tallest glacier in Colombia right behind it a little bit in the background. But this is basically a glacierfed ecosystem in the cloud forests of the Andes and it's one of the most biodiverse regions heavily endangered and it's directly downstream of the glaciers. So it it relies upon them and it is sort of a sponge for the country. It feed it supplies water from the glaciers and then these treel like things can actually absorb water from the clouds and it supplies water to about 70% of Colombians there. So just just an example of you know when we're talking about ice it's not necessarily exactly exactly the ice. That said, to me, icy regions really exemplify how interconnected we are globally, especially when I'm on some of the world's well, the big ice sheets. I feel very far away often. You know, there's no contrails in the sky. Uh no, certainly no phone connection, no internet, no, you know, no other people other than people with whom I am. Uh very very hard to get a rescue in many places if if one were needed. zero infrastructure and I don't know if my the I'll just change that if you were seeing all the participants. So, uh yeah, so I've been stuck on rapidly melting ice in the past. have had tent snaps, sorry, tent snapping, uh, with the poles breaking and, you know, weeks away from civilization, having to try to figure out how to pitch a tent again or repitch a tent if it's crashed in a, you know, category 3 hurricane, for example. Having to bury myself in the snow if if it's really much windier than that, deciding, you know, how am I going to handle multi-day blizzards and white out conditions when I'm in one of the most polar bear dense regions of the world. So, lots of lots of different things that come into play. uh in these places. But for me, you know, the Arctic is really just an incredible and fascinating place. So, this is Greenland, and this is Greenland specifically last July, mid July, uh right before I was going to head over there to ski across it. The red is melt. So, this is the part of Greenland that was actively melting at that time. Greenland's melt at this point was about 33 million tons per hour of ice. So to quantify that in case anybody is calculating that's about 17 milliliters of Martinelli sparkling cider per second. Um so really rapidly rapid melting. The Arctic itself, as I'm sure you're all aware, is a highly highly vulnerable melting area. On average overall, it's melting about four times faster than the rest of the planet. In some areas where I've been doing work more recently, it's about seven seven times faster. And we know that at this rate, you know, by by the end of the century, we're going to lose about half of the world's glaciers. And with that fresh water and water resources for billions, you know, for 1.2, to maybe up to two billion people around the world. In the high mountain regions of the Hindu Kush Himalaya where a lot of the land ice is. It's possible that we can lose as much as 80% of that if we keep keep our current emissions levels. So just a little bit of stats don't need to really read these too much. But the point is that we do know that we can save more than half of the world's glaciers if we keep temperatures to 1.5 degrees rather than our policy aligned pathways of 2.7. So this is just showing yeah different regions of the world and the ice and how much would remain. So we can see that, you know, even even some of the smaller places, Iceland, you know, the Rockies, Scandinavia, we're really committing to ice loss, you know, at at two degrees. So, so for Greenland, I have probably been obsessed with Greenland for maybe 20 years. And so, as I said, last fall, skied across it in what they call manhauling, which is basically pulling everything self-powered uh in a sled. So, there's my sled behind me that had everything I needed to survive for about 6 weeks. And if you think back to the picture of melt and you know that red area, that was July. This picture is September, end of midseptember. But you know, you're all you're all manners. You know what qualities of snow are and what they look like. You know, you can see a lot of moisture there. And so you'd be correct if you think that it's pretty wet. So Greenland is, you know, we were not expecting it to be as wet and warm as it was certainly in as much melt, but it is a place that we've already committed a lot of melt due to current destabilization of the ice sheet as a result of ongoing emissions. So what this means is that even if we were to stop all emissions already, they'd be gone. Uh we've already committed at minimum 3% of the ice sheet. And I know 3% doesn't necessarily sound like too much, but when you look at a place as big as Greenland, that's actually over 10 in on average of sea level rise around the world. And when we say 10 in on average, you have some place like Greenland that is actually going to see sea or seeing sea level decrease because the ice the land is sort of rebounding from the weight of the ice. uh you can add in your ocean physics and gravity and where you end up seeing the majority of sea level rise is in places that are already exceptionally vulnerable to it such as in the Pacific and the more tropical tropical regions. So this 10 in average is a global average. So some places might see 20 ines and some places are going to see you know a sea level decrease. Uh, so rivers. This was also a picture I took in midepptember. It's a little bit hard to, you know, scale there, but this river is probably 150 ft across this river sort of bank here and about 100 100 feet down to the water. And the water was moving quite quickly. So this is something that we were not expecting to come across these. And when you're skiing across, you know, we sort of mapped mapped our route a little bit, do a little bit old style style. Had a comp had, you know, some little manual compasses and literally just walking across the ice sheet following our uh little red arrow in the direction that we had we had established. But, you know, coming across a river like this that we were not expecting and we can't go through it. Some of the smaller rivers we can. I did try to use my sled as a kayak a little bit. It's with moderate success. May have fallen in the river at one point, but I won't talk about that. Uh, but that, you know, something like that becomes sort of could become a quite a big emergency because you get the risk of hypothermia and nothing dries in the really cold environments. So, you know, you end up having to we when you come across a river like this, we actually have to walk around it and you're trying to figure out where is the mouth of the where's sort of the start of the river, the tributary streams, but also where does it end? And these rivers usually end in what's called a mulan. And a mulan is a French word for mill. And it's basically a shaft in the ice where the the water finds a weakness and it goes down to either the base of the glacier or some intermediate areas to figure out what the easiest way for it to get to the water is. And when it gets down to the base of the glacier that lubricates the the ice and it accelerates melting as well and that can increase creasses and rip open the ice much more quickly. So in the crevases uh areas about the size of the pyramids of Giza are opening in Greenland every few days and this is and then you've got the accelerated melt of all of these gashes that can then water can then flow more easily down and it's contributing about half of the annual melt of Greenland is just through the creasses. So that's me in the middle there and then flanked by a teammate. We're trying to comp contemplate how to actually get off the glacier off the off the uh ice sheet. You can see the land in the background and felt a little bit like a rat in a maze trying to find some cheese trying to figure, you know, how we how we can get through and how how we can get around. Uh the benefit, I guess, of of going at this time of year in the fall is that we can actually see all of these carasses. Uh definitely I did step into one that I didn't see uh because we end up with snow that will cover kvasses. And in the spring when I've been on expeditions in the spring, we tend to be a lot more careful around kvasses because you don't know where they are. The snow covers them. And in the winter, early spring, it's sort of okay if there's enough snow. It's pretty safe to walk over them. But as the melt season really kicks off, the snow weakens and thins and you end up not seeing the crosses until really you've fallen through the snow into them. So we have a huge benefit of being able to see all of these, but it also makes it a lot more challenging to go around. And so con consequently in an area where we're very concerned about the potential for carasses, especially when we can't see them, you know, we're wearing harnesses har uh and ropes and really tied on to each other. So >> question Susanna. >> Yes. >> From the chat. Do you ever travel with a drone so you can see >> your surroundings from afar? >> Yes and no. Um yes, I've traveled. I've done a few trips with drones and I usually just do it for photography. >> I know I have friends who do it to scout out roots. I have always found it a little bit more fun to try to have to figure out the route for myself and to try to read the snow and figure out a path so that I'm going and it's sort of trial and error. I've liked that. But certainly there are people who will plan out exactly where they're going to go based on what what the drone is showing. I have that said certainly used satellite imagery and you know can get some direct satellite imagery as well and work with some meteorologists on that as well when trying to figure out if certain things are specifically safe. So when I've been out on the sea ice for example where where are we actually seeing sea ice where is it ending? I did that a lot when I did an attempt to get to the North Pole, for example, and we had lot huge questions about the sea ice and it was rapidly rapidly moving. So, I've done it when it's a sort of an important safety thing, but when it's a matter of convenience, I've tried to stay away from it, but that's just a personal preference. But absolutely, it there drones are used fairly frequently for things like that. I just don't like the mosquito buzz if I can avoid it. So, just a personal preference. Yeah. >> Um and then also because of the extreme warming uh melt, we you know, even into the fall, we would uh start packing up camp at about 2 in the morning to start skiing. So, here we are in the dark. This is Greenland. It does get dark in September. And so, we would start skiing in the dark for a few hours and then the sun would rise. And this meant that by you know midday early afternoon when we had put in a full say 10 hours of skiing we could we could stop and pitch pitch tense. The benefit of this was that at that time the snow under especially when it was we mainly did this when it was really sunny and the snow would get kind of sloshy and it would be a little bit sludgy to ski through. So it wasn't as much fun. We weren't making the progress we wanted to make. I'm out there and you know it's not it's not really warm objectively but we're doing a fair bit of you know heavy exercise for this. So overheating ourselves and it's just not very comfortable. Uh but the other benefit is that we pitch tents and they could bake in the sun for a few hours which could dry things out and also gave us a little bit of ambient heating. So you know your tent might get up to say 60° which if it's zero outside in the sun is is remarkably warm. Uh overnight we were getting temperatures of you know 40 below or so and so that's gets quite hard because you know you're waking up and trying to get yourself out of a cozy sleeping bag and and um get getting going in the dark in the cold u you know on the science same track you know importance of keeping hydrated just to feel well and performance I often had to get up and pee once or twice in the middle of the night really not much fun when again it's really cold outside and uh but I often had the northern lights in the middle of the night so that was that was really rewarding and so that kind of took took away that inconvenience a bit. So this is me in a karass intentionally this time. Uh but here this this was in Iceland and the other picture is of a friend of mine teammate in Falbard where we're both looking for POS. So something that's very familiar to us in Maine got POS all over the world. It was really a startling feeling for me to realize that I'm melting snow in you know 200 miles from the North Pole for example. Uh people aren't there no factories around whatever. and the snow that I'm melting actually is contaminated with POS and that's what I'm about to be drinking. It's like well snow here if it's in the middle of Antarctica isn't clean. You know where is so it was just really emphasizing to me if you how humans how much we've impacted really impacted the world around us and some of our worst bits are are really everywhere. Greenland itself nanoplastics really heavy in those about 13 nanograms of nanoplastics per milliliter of snow and sea ice seawater sediments collected from the ocean floor around Oops I took out that picture I was going to have pictures of some of that but I guess I I guess I took that out. So some of this is from local sources and some of it is from so local source is not immediate immediate local but say fishing in the area. So it might be a couple a couple um hundred miles away for example gets into the ocean fishing line decays in this place in Swallbard where I took this photo we um the birds were dying. there's a certain species of bird and about 90% of them are dying from plastic ingestion. So seeing a lot of that uh in it also transports in the air so black carbon from somewhere like Asia takes about a week or so to get to the high arctic and because of the ocean and atmospheric currents gets there and it and it pretty much stays for a bit. So uh yeah some plastic some pieces are these nanoplastics but some are also you know larger than I am for example. So uh I'll talk a little bit about what I do with some of this and how we get into the policy side. So as I said as was said earlier I work for this organization called the international grasser climate initiative uh both in glacier science and in policy and as part of that we host the secretariat for this group called ambition on melting ice which is a high level group looking at sea level rise and mountain water resources and this comprises members from all negotiation groups in the UN blocks apart from those that are pro oil and our big thing is as you can look from this these are sort of our core members right here but you know we've got Palao Vanuatu Liberia you know Samoa these aren't necessarily glaciated places or polar places so our big interest is looking at what are the impacts that we're seeing in these places in these polar and glaciated places so the impacts of well sort of the melt in these places but then what are those actual impacts on the rest of the world. So again when we're talking about glaciers we're not talking about just the countries that have glaciers we're talking about countries that are impacted by glaciers. And that again is as I said at the beginning 85% of the world's countries. So yeah you know so we're looking at not just the loss of ice in Antarctica but the 250 million people who are going to lose their houses in the next three and a half decades as a result of sea level rise. We're looking at um the destabilization of land as a result of changes in perafrost for example not just sort of the science of perafrost thaw. So these yeah these are the 25 countries we work with specifically closely but have another 15 that I'm pretty pretty tight tight with as well. So we do several things with us. One is we bring negotiators to the ice to these regions of what we call the cryossphere. So the cryossphere being the cold, frozen regions of the planet. So this was a trip to Iceland with several different countries represented there. And what was especially interesting here is that you can see on this picture we've marked out where the ice was say 20 years ago. So a lot higher and a lot farther out. And so this is just an area of rapid retreat. So just showing what's going on in different parts of the world. sort of pick a different region that's impacted in some capacity by ICE loss, whether it's in that region such as here or whether it's a downstream area and really make sure that negotiators and decision makers, presidents of countries are really understanding what's happening rather than just sort of a textbook knowledge where somebody said this is what's going on and therefore you should care about it. Much of our time here though is present is based on preparing for for the big negotiations. So here's a couple pictures of of those rooms. Uh these are from some of the big sort of UN COP meetings. So Brazil last November for COP 30 if that sounds familiar to anyone. These meetings happen twice a year. So there's the big COP meeting and then there's a spring meeting. And we have negotiation tracks across a range of different subjects. I'm personally involved in about or have been involved in about seven of them. Uh so we've got tracks in finance, adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage, earth systems responses, science, etc. And so as you can see here, these rooms often form an area where we are in various sizes depending on who's going to be there and how how many negotiators or ministers and whether it's one per country or two per country differentized rooms with big screens and often that's exactly what it looks like in that left picture. It's a word document and we are going word by word and editing that document and trying to get all 195 countries or those who have representation in these rooms to actually agree on the text which is a bit of a challenge. Uh so and I'll I'll talk a little bit about why that's a challenge more than it might appear to be a challenge first off in a minute. Uh the US has been absent. This is a picture I took at the spring meetings last uh last June. and also an updated form of the EPA which talks about climate change but talks doesn't mention anthropogenic impacts or oil or anything of that sort either but there was an empty seat from the US they had said they were going to show up and then they didn't which is the same thing that happened in the fall as well and but even though while the US wasn't there and now that basically we we Trump announced his decision to leave Paris but that decision takes a year to take in place. So we had there were two rounds of negotiations. The US still was full party to Paris agreement before it withdrew. So we're not allowed we couldn't go now but could have gone last year. So even though the US wasn't there, its presence still very much is felt and it certainly impacted party decisions and country positions. So the US works on a consensus model. Sorry, the US the UN the UN works on a consensus model for the UN climate only. So the UNFC trip, the UN framework convention on climate change. So it works on this consensus model rather than a majority model. And that means that they only really need one country to say that they're not interested or to nick something for it not to go through. And one of my negotiation tracks on mitigation, this has happened in the last six or seven rounds of these conversations. We get to I spend two weeks hammering something out. We get to the end and some country usually an oil is an oil producing country says nah not feeling it and they do what was called an article 16 which basically says we're going to scrap any conversation we had any progress that we made and start over in another six months. And so we've been doing that in this one negotiation track for a couple years now. And you know incredibly frustrating with that. So but it but it is in exclusively because we have this consensus model that other UN all other UN groups and many other groups um when they talk about climate or talk about other issues do not have. So it's a majority. One benefit of this I guess is that it gives every country an equal vote. So Fiji could shut something down just as easily as India or Saudi Arabia. It's just doesn't really happen that way too much. But this was sort of a agreement made in the very early days of the UN framework convention on climate change process 30 plus years ago led perhaps unsurprisingly by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC the oil producing countries. So this has led as you can probably imagine to sort of this weaponization of science where gets a lot harder to agree on text and what should be in there and what shouldn't be there. So I will just I think I've got a couple more minutes that I was told to speak. So I'll just show a little bit of what that we're seeing in that weaponizational science and how Yes. So this is from SB62 and SB62 the SBS are the non-COP meetings, the spring meetings. So this is from Germany last summer, last June. and just showing a draft text on the left there the 19th and then a finalized text on the 26th of June. And this yeah so basically this is also in the research and systematic observations. So the big the main science track which is usually the least contentious. So we just a couple things in these two paragraphs. One is the draft text that we started off with said subst which is the basically the chairs of this of the uh UN climate group for this conference noted with alarm and utmost concern and it was translated to noted the information so taking out any kind of urgency to that meaning. Then we have ocean heat content and sea level rise reached the highest levels in record with the an the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent were below average with increasing glacier mass loss and extreme events and that went to both slow onset and extreme events. So anybody who's really familiar with what they mean when they talk about slow onset and extreme events knows that that has to be ice sheets. That has to be something that has potential to have huge impact in the future. But we're not actually saying what the problem is. And then lower down every increment of warming goes to global warming. And then this section section uh about remains below the temperature remains below 1.5 degrees and therefore below the Paris agreement temperature goal went to a footnote saying that the estimate of level of warming of 1.5 degrees but we can't actually rule it out. And the point of not being able to rule it out has been part of this agre argument from the fossil fuel countries that if we're basically going to hit 1.5, why are we even bother talking about it? Just just throw out that whole goal and say that we've missed it and let's just, you know, move on. Whereas a real saying, well, all right, we've got to figure out what we're going to do about this overshoot or, you know, back up to 1.5 isn't two degrees or scrap it. it's, you know, 1.51 and then figure out how do we get back. So that's sort of when we talk about the weaponization of science and what we're seeing in these negotiations, that's really what we see. So you know, we try with the with the groups of countries that we work with is really strategizing strategizing this helping countries understand what these impacts are, what the relationships relationships are. So, um, yeah, I think in this mitigation track, which is, yeah, I said this, this one here is the science track, but in mitigation, which is the one that we've stalled out for the past couple years, every six months, we actually last June at the same meeting had a 45minute let's all get together and define a safe space. What does it mean for us to be able to talk to each other? because there was just so much disrespect and countries that were just talking over people and shouting at people and trying to prove everybody wrong and it's just you know really not really not great but it meant that it's just been a really hard negotiation track to move forward. So it was decided in June that we really need to have this parallel process and say that okay we're not actually making progress here. do we need a another negotiation track to talk about sort of the just directly cut right to the phase out of fossil fuels or do we need a separate process and it was decided let's have a separate process at least to get started. So, um, you know, and it's especially hard for me in these areas because, you know, I'm seeing the downstream impacts. I'm seeing the up, I guess, the upstream impacts of this rapid melt and seeing it very personally and, you know, having to call for rescue because the sea ice is literally disintegrating much more quickly than I was expecting. Uh, but seeing the impacts of that, but also seeing how it's causing disasters. I've been in areas where we've been monitoring for these disasters, developing warning systems for these disasters, especially recently in the Himalayas and or in the past year I've been in them in the Himalayas and the um mountains in Central Asia and the Caucuses looking at these because we'll have basically glacier outburst floods that can wipe out villages and infrastructure without almost any warning. you know, something that happens maybe within an hour or two and very poor warning systems to let people know. So, um yeah, and certainly sea level rise that's already impacting a lot of people. So, uh this is back to Colombia here. It's just some pictures I took when I was there. uh so I went and said and went on this expedition but part of the other reason for the expedition is that at that exp at the meeting last year in June when we're talking about big frustrations on the mitigation and the need for the parallel process was they decided to ho to have a what they're calling the first conference on first international conference on the transition away from fossil fuels and it's going to be co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands will be part of a forthcoming series. Tuvalu is currently in in sort of a tripartate relationship with Colombia and the Netherlands to host the second one likely next spring, but that's very TBD at the moment. Uh, and the idea is basically to figure out, okay, this co-consensus model isn't working. Everybody's frustrated. How do we actually get invol? How do we pull together the countries who really want to make progress on this and move forward? So luckily I believe all of my countries that I work with are part of that. So I'm working with them on this but went down to Colombia for this expedition but also to start working with the government on this just because I have all those the political ties in the government. So they invited me down to help form what they're calling this coalition of the willing. So that's 97 countries that have been invited so far to come together and figure out what needs to happen for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. How can that happen in a way that's inclusive? Because different countries have different capacities, different abilities, different interests. Many countries that are most impacted have fewest resources or very few resources. So can't necessarily do this on their own without larger support. and it's been opened up to NOS's to join in other organizations. They initially asked whether I would lead that whole NGO organization side and try to figure out how do we connect the NGOs's to to this. They were expecting maybe 50 from around the world to express interest. 2,608 did within the first period of expressions of interest to this event. So completely scrapped what was going to happen and they're now having this whole other thing for civil society. So now I'm back in the diplomacy side for this. But we're really trying to figure out what this road map is is moving forward to get off of fossil fuels and whether it goes back to the UN process or not remains to sort of be an outcome of this. So uh yeah this is just yeah two pictures of on the glaciers or getting and then two pictures of the paramo paramo ecosystem that's just highly vulnerable uh that as said it's you know covers 3% of Colombia but feeds water for about 70% of the country. So I think I will leave it there. It's probably just over my half hour, but I will open it to questions. >> That's great. Thank you, Suzan. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So, uh, we have a question on sea level rise implications >> and to what degree are we really taking glacial melt projections into consideration in Maine's local coastal flooding projections? Are you man do you do any consulting here in Maine? >> I don't >> aside from with us. >> I don't do too much. Uh but I do a little bit uh in some places of the world certainly. So uh with with some mostly national governments, but we're trying to get more we're interested more getting into the subnational governments. So yes, do do some of the consulting around the world. have been working on a project with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and Northeastern University on local sea level rise. >> We're piloting it right now mostly in the greater Portland area, but it's something that we have we have all the materials to make it across the coast. It's just three of us who are working on this are all local and we were like let's do a really local thing so that it we can figure out how it can be used and who wants to use it and if we can make something at the hyper local level so that's accessible to people who say might want to buy a house or you know having a business and is it okay if I have you know this water pump in this exact location. So we're we're trying to see how local we could really make it and then can expand it. Uh we know that the Gulf of Maine is particularly vulnerable. It is for a handful of reasons. It's shallow. It's se-shaped. We're getting changes in the Labrador currents. Uh we, you know, Greenland's the melt of Greenland is directly affecting us with a lot of freshening of water. It's changing the density. It's changing our food systems. So, it's a very vulnerable spot that we're we're seeing and seeing a lot of changes. So there is a lot of interest in that area and it's a pretty cool body of water because it is changing really quickly. But uh so yes, glacier impacts are are there could be more but they everybody they're pretty well known what those are. And it and could you make any references to possible mitigations as far as slowing down uh the melting of the glaciers and planetary heating? Have you come across >> fuels would be a start? >> Yes, of course. Yeah, I think we all agree with that. >> Yeah. >> I mean mitigations that are potential. Okay. on a on a level that you find yourself working at a lot of the time. >> Yeah. So, we're looking there there a couple different things that I'm looking at specifically. One is yeah sort of getting getting the world's large economies or at the large scale getting us off of fossil fuels because many of us who want to be off fossil fuels on a personal level don't have the capacity to because we're in this bigger system. So there's certainly that that I'm working on a lot. I'm also working on some of the sort of what we call nature-based solutions. >> So you may have heard of you know planting mangroves in certain areas to protect against coastal erosion and sea level rise. But something like mangroves actually they do a lot and they do they're very great in many parts of the world but they actually only work for a certain amount of sea level rise for example and we can easily overpower those and we're on track to do so very quickly. So here locally we talk a bit about the marshlands and having having marshes and water uh sorry grasses in the water that can have you know huge benefits but are also only good for a certain period. So ultimately I think the the big big one that we need to have is the rem getting off of fossil fuels. >> Yeah exactly. Okay, Cliff, you have a question. You've raised your hand. >> Yes. Um, appreciate your time, Susanna. Um, >> which areas on regions of the planet would you say are the most climate sensitive to any human impacts? >> Are the most sensitive? are the most sensitive? >> That's a huge question and it's question because most sensitive >> to human impacts. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is I mean you have something like you know Antarctica that's hugely hugely sensitive but also you know it's got about 57 50 something meters of potential sea level rise in it as well. So the impacts that it has on the rest of the world are obviously huge as well. >> So that's an extreme. You're talking about an extreme place. Yep. >> Yeah. No, no. Exactly. Exactly. >> So maybe the extreme places, >> but it could be it could be some of the extreme places. You know, they're they're changing very rapidly as a direct result of humans without really humans necessarily really being there. um but changing very rapidly. So >> So this is a two-part question. The second part would be through your studies, it's quite obvious that you've discovered or the world now knows uh the Arctic and Greenland is heating three to seven times faster than the rest of the planet. Is there a reason why that's happening for the polar regions in the northern hemisphere? What what would you see some of any do you see any human impacts that might have had an effect in those regions? >> So over the years, >> yeah, so there's there's several that's a that's a good question as sort of why the polar regions are particularly vulnerable from from human impacts. And you know, one is quite simply, and one reason that they're quite important, and I probably should have said that, is that they are in many ways sort of our global refrigerator, so to speak, they're generally white. Uh, one of the big issues with the Arctic ice melting is that it's we're getting what we're call darken, sort of the darkening of this area. White surfaces reflect a lot of light. They're great to keep things cool. You know, talk about wearing a white shirt on a summer day or people who are painting their roofs white to reflect sunlight. It's great to keep things cool. When the white ocean ice is replaced by a dark ocean, it absorbs water and it absorbs heat. So, it can actually accelerate warming. So, we end up with we have several of these positive feedback loops that the more ice that melts, the more heat is absorbed and therefore more ice melts. And we see this with perafrost thaw as well where perafrost thaw has the capacity to be on par as an as a net emitter with a country like China for example and we don't talk about the capacity of something like perafrost to thaw and release these decaying microorganisms that are in the soils but it's huge and the more we warm this up the more thaw that happens the more emissions that happen and therefore the more that we warm. So we get these we get these cycles. So that's one of the reasons that these regions are such a big player. And we also, you know, one of the things we talk about something like black carbon, which is just soot. So that can be soot from a passing ship. It can be soot from a wildfire. It can be soot from whatever car exhaust. But you know, when that gets into the Arctic, which it does through air, air and water air currents mainly, it is black material on white surface. And that creates the absorption of heat and that creates melting. So we lose the ice from something like that. And you know, we're able to track soot. So if we see it somewhere, we're able to figure out exactly pretty much where it came from. And we're able to do that with microplastics that we find in some coral reef somewhere. We can know exactly which bottling plant that came from. Uh which is contentious because, you know, you're starting to hold people accountable that way in ways that groups don't necessarily want. But uh we are able to say that you know this wild you know we could track how much a couple years ago we had big wildfires in Canada how much ice loss in Greenland that that actually led to for example. Um so uh it's probably one of the reasons that when we talk about something turning green and the more greenery growing there is actually we talk about actually as a bad thing. So, I'd like to think that green areas are nice and forests are nice, but when they happen in places that should be white, it has a huge warming impact on the world. So, I don't know if that answers your question a bit, but >> that's the beginning, but >> All right, >> I have a lot more, but um I know other people may have questions. >> I just sent in a question. Yeah, go ahead, Maryanne. >> Oh, um, there are rivers that flow into the Arctic from dams and the water released from the dams is warmer as a result of, you know, collecting sunshine during the the year or whatever. What is the thinking about how much impact that might be having on the Arctic? >> Yeah. Um, so I hesitate to say with too much abs uh absoluteness because I'm not 100% certain, but certainly generally in favor of well it it does have an impact. It has an impact in that the water is different temperature. The the water definitely usually has you know has changed itself in the fact that it's it's warmed. So, you know, certainly, you know, we're seeing changes in fish populations, for example, in damned rivers. Not just the absence of fish, but the ability of fish to survive in warmer waters when they are damned, uh, the different species. So, we are seeing in some areas changes in fish populations, uh, fish spawning abilities in some of these either Arctic places or glaciated rivers in other parts of the world as a result of damning. Uh so that is that is something we are we are seeing and we're seeing sort of a net negative impact having the dams and seeing that when the dams are removed that that is a positive thing for keeping the ecosystem stable. >> Yeah, that's a tough road to hoe. >> Yes. >> Getting dams removed. Suzanne, I want to ask you about Sorry, Mariana. >> I said or not built. They're there plans for more and more. >> Yeah. And it's it's also it's also an interesting one because in some areas where they have a lot of rivers, they see dams as a they define dam or hydroelect electricity as a renewable resource. And >> one of the areas where I've been probably most involved in that is we have what we call as I mentioned these glacier lake outburst floods where you'll have some events and it could be a perafrost thaw leading to a landslide. It can be just excessive pre precipitation, lots of lots of different things, some extra melt and you get these glacier lakes that are basically near relation. they will suddenly burst and run down this river and wipe out wipe out a dam for example. And you know somebody I was talking with in one of the major world bank one of the major development banks last a couple months ago and they were saying that usually in the development world you talk about dams as you know the risks to dams forgetting any we don't they don't even talk about the biodiversity impacts but the risks being um either having too much water and overflowing the dam or not having enough water and basically having it being dead water. And they said, you know, when you talk about when you start bringing in the glaciers or the Arctic aspect of that, would you start you suddenly have to bring in these outburst floods and then you're talking about now the risk isn't too much water or not enough water. Now the risk is you've destroyed the whole thing and you've destroyed and partially as a result of having it been there. You you destroy communities below it as well. And they invest in the money in having these, but they don't invest in warning systems. They don't invest in they're not necessarily built cor built well enough to withstand these impacts but also if they were built better they might be more resilient to these impacts but they would also be better for the environment biodiversity as well. So they were kind of using the Arctic and the glacier side as a reason not to have the dams because it's just the the risk of catastrophe is so much higher. I heard they're planning to build a dam in uh Greenland that would uh take advantage of melting glaciers, which sounds pretty horrible. >> Yep. >> Okay. Coming back to you in just a second, Cliff. I wanted to ask Susanna first about what you think are the most effective educational media, educational uh vectors, um educational organizations around to get a message like what you're sharing with us here out to more people because it's I mean some of the things that you've mentioned mentioned are pretty I never I never knew that you know 85% of the world's population you know is affected by what's going on with the glaciers. That's that's remarkable. >> Yeah, I can I can share some links with you. I want to make sure that I get some names. >> Okay. >> Correct. So I can I can certainly follow up. But there's some there's some really good there's some good materials. There's some good podcasts out recently. >> Um, there is a push in trying to make m educational material a little bit more chunk sized and accessible so that it's it's not having to read big reports. But I think one of the big interests that I have and in my work is that I get to play on the ice and I get to do a lot of the actual analysis and science and writing. I've had a couple papers that I've had out fairly recently that are sort of classic scientific papers. But then saying, "No, I want to do something with this." Because one of the big frustrations for me with science is that, and this is, you know, this is part of grant writing. This is part of how our whole science tends to work is that you write something and then you you publish it and you put it out somewhere and it sits on the shelf and it doesn't actually do anything. It doesn't really affect policy. It doesn't change the way that we live or work. So being at that nexus of the science and the policy for me is really quite interesting because I feel like I get to actually do something with the science and try to figure out how to how to turn science into something. And being in that sphere, I've been able to work with a handful of people who are educators and are communicators and translate that. And there's some really fantastic work that has been done that targets that exactly. uh but in ways that don't require you to go look up some random paper somewhere >> on >> Jtore. So, >> okay. Thank you. >> You're welcome, >> Becky. >> Susanna, I have laryngitis, so I hope you can understand me. >> All good. Thanks, Becky. Um, you know, I I am, you know, we've, you know, that we've been working um about the Canadian uh dams for some time because you and I have talked about it in the past. Um, I'm curious. There are two things. One, um, there's a plan for another dam on the Grand River that um, at Gull Island that is already, you know, causing a lot of consternation. Um, and I just wonder that particular dam, you know, has got to be impacting the Labrador current. Um and I'm just wondering as all of them are um I'm wondering have have you has there been any discussion about that kind of impact to you know the whole ecology of the ocean in your you know in the policy areas or is there any you know movement towards controlling some of this advance of the of controlling all the rivers? I mean, so many of them are already damned. So, anyway, >> yeah. No, thank you, Becky. Uh, there I haven't nothing has escalated to sort of the higher echelons of of that conversation. >> What was the last word you said? >> There should be people that I can think of who should be talking about that and should be doing something and they might be, but it hasn't percolated above that. So, I I would have some ideas of who I would talk to if I were to wanting to want to know how something like Gull Island is is being discussed, but I haven't been included in those conversations. So, >> well, you know, it would be great for us to uh have access to some of those people. We may not be able to have access, but we can certainly try. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I we can follow up. >> Great. If >> you want to. >> Great. >> That would be great. And I haven't Yeah, I'd have to Yeah, we can follow up. >> I guess my other question was just about the blackness of the enormous reservoirs in the Arctic and the you know the impact not only of water vapor but also just the heat sink that those provide. >> No, that that that's a huge concern and that's one of the I mean whether that's damned or whether that's not I mean that's that's just bringing more dark color to an area that we really want to reflect light. uh and that's opened itself up to a fair bit of some of the geoengineering proposals that are a completely different topic. But there has been there has been a lot of work look looking into just the impacts of large areas that are dark such as river reservoirs and that's quantifiable. So >> yep, we're going to Elizabeth Lee next and then we'll probably wrap up with I see Cliff has his hand raised again. Okay, thanks very much. Um, I'm I'm from Canada and I have lived and been everywhere across Canada. BC and Alberta are the ones I can really say that what I found out recently that all the northern rivers across Canada and all their tribut tributaries have been damned. So that tells me that there's no such thing as this wild river that we talk about so much. It used to be. And um when I heard they were expanding on what's on the Gal Island, like the apparently how the money goes, nobody's I don't know who's benefiting because it's certainly not Newfoundland, but I do know in the Peace River watershed, it's got three dams on it now. And it's all about for energy. It's for big business. And who else all knows? But in that in that area that impacted the indigenous people horrendously and to this day they pay them to get a tractor out and to where the river used to be is like all sediment. And so they have this tractor that makes it so it doesn't just blow constantly to uh Fort St. John. And it it it it's just insatiable. This whole thing about electricity and cheap energy. Well, it's not cheap at all. It never has been cheap. I have never if like I have seen wild rivers and I don't care if I I don't go to look at dams. I saw them as a child and I saw them once and I said I thought they were the most terrible things I'd ever seen. And what Canada has done it just because that's what Canada does. >> It's got no brains at all. I'm sorry. It's just I it it broke my heart when I heard that. Can you all the tributaries too, not just like the um like in in in example when they did the last one at the uh not the one that just did site C, but the one before that when they did it, they it was it took away the spring melt that was scientifically for the delta, the Aabaska delta, and it was dying the delta. And so they um and BC wouldn't wouldn't do it. So finally now they have a little bit of a melt goes and instantly the delta came back to life and that and so there's no even well we do this but we'll make sure we'll help you if something goes wrong. No, it's it's it's like the fossil fuel. They don't care. It's just that simple. >> No, and I think I think I don't know that I have too much to add to that. I mean it's so much of this is climate colonialism and you know seeing that around the world who has power who has money and we've been in I've been in a couple conversations and high level conversations like lawsuit type things about about yeah people with power who can do something and they need an area to test something out. So where do they choose to test it? They choose an indigenous land. Um why? because nobody lives there as they say and they can get that through and somebody gives them money to do it and they go ahead and do it and they don't necessarily be honest they're not necessarily honest about what they're doing. Um, we're seeing, you know, kids who are coming who are, you know, being diagnosed, three-year-olds, four year olds who are being diagnosed with skin cancer because, you know, somebody's changed the atmosphere right over them. And um yeah, it's it's there there's so many moving parts, but I think you also mentioned about the delta coming back and you know the all of these ecosystems are so resilient to a degree of course that when we can remove when we can remove dams when we can even get a little bit we've seen it you know I spoke a lot about Greenland melt when we get just a little bit more snow or the melt is delayed by even a week or so it has huge huge impacts. So, you know, little little benefits whether it's, you know, just a single dam removal or more. Obviously, I mean, they can have just they can pay off dividends quite well. But I think it's it's that bigger picture also of taking advantage of people. And I probably after about a week or two of being in Greenland on the ice, all I wanted was fresh vegetables and some milky tea. Uh, and I I got to the other end, got to a little town and basically Greenland, I mean, as many of you know probably with their relationship with Denmark and what the US is trying to take advantage of that is is very contentious relationship. Denmark controls a lot of access to their food that's not subsistence feeding, but it's hard to have subsistence hunting when the ice is melting and it's not safe for the animals aren't there. So, I walk into this market and they had signs on the freezer sort of freezer doors saying that they were expecting food a month ago. It's not here. Don't ask us about it. We have no answers for you. And at the same time, so they didn't have any fresh food. They didn't have any fresh vegetables. Uh they had some, you know, canned veg if I wanted it. Um and at the same time, they have liters and liters. I mean, not not not liters, five gallon jugs of what we would maybe think of for a jerry can for gasoline of of of Coca-Cola. I mean, that's what you get. I mean, I my friend and I walked in there, we thought it was blue windshield washer fluid. It was blue soda and it's just these jerry cans of this. And that's what, you know, we pass off as food. And we can do that because we have these, you know, these relationships, these power structures. And so we're seeing that just across the board, whether that's with the damning of rivers, uh, who who can make money off of other people. So, yeah, huge issue. And I I'm excited that a lot of you are passionate about the dams here, too. >> You can bet on that. Thank you. >> I've heard a bit about it from Holly and Becky. So, >> and you'll hear more, I'm sure. Uh, we're going to wrap up now. So I want to say thank you very much Susanna for sharing this with us your work your trips uh your perspective on everything and um we hope we can continue the conversation at another time. >> Yeah. >> And I look forward to hearing from you. >> Well, thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Thanks everyone for coming. Thanks Susanna. >> Thank you. It was very It was very informative. Thank you. >> Yeah. Thank you so much.