4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
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0:00.0 | You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
0:05.0 | Jessica Mejia's office looks a little different than most. |
0:09.0 | So the only way that we can get on the glacier to do our field work is we have to fly via |
0:15.0 | helicopter. Yes, Jessica is a glaciologist. She's a postdoctoral fellow at the |
0:20.9 | University of Buffalo, but her study subject is a couple thousand |
0:25.0 | miles away on the Greenland ice sheet, a frigid mass that covers around 80% of the country. |
0:31.0 | Looking out over it in southeast Greenland, it's very jagged mountains on the edge of it. |
0:36.9 | And then you see the glacier kind of cascading over these steep cliffs. |
0:42.1 | And as you keep on flying flying you fly kind of away from this whole |
0:45.8 | cracked area that's kind of steeply sloping and then you just see the horizon that's |
0:51.2 | just flat with ice. |
0:52.5 | And that is where the helicopter drops Jessica's team. |
0:56.0 | And he was like, see you in a month. |
0:57.8 | Good luck. |
0:59.6 | Their first step is to set up camp, which |
1:02.0 | means shoveling out a flat space, pitching tents, and |
1:05.1 | building a wall of snow for protection from the wind. Basically, they have to create a |
1:10.0 | space in which they can survive on this glacier that takes its name, Hellheim, from Norse mythology's |
1:17.0 | frozen world of the death. |
1:19.0 | It's almost kind of like another planet when you're out there because you are the only people out there. |
1:26.1 | You know you're very much alone, you just hear kind of the wind or if the wind dies down, |
1:30.3 | it's silent. These glaciers are melting due to climate change and that's causing sea levels to rise. |
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