Meet the man saving a glacier (by putting it in his freezer)
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last month, Times science editor Tom Whipple stood on what used to be a glacier, on rock that used to be below 40 metres of ice. Then, glaciologist Matthias Huss hacked out a chunk of ice to take home. By the end of this summer, that may be the last remnant left.
This is the story of the glacier that no longer is – but which 15 years ago weighed a million tonnes – and a climate change milestone which is beyond dispute.
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Guest: Tom Whipple, Science Editor, The Times.
Host: Luke Jones.
Link: Tom Whipple’s new book is available at the Times Bookshop: The Battle of the Beams: The secret science of radar that turned the tide of the Second World War
https://timesbookshop.co.uk/the-battle-of-the-beams-9781787634138
Clips: BBC News.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Is anyone else kind of done with all the negative climate headlines? |
| 0:03.3 | Yet me, hands up, I know I am. It's not to say, they're not true. |
| 0:07.6 | Sometimes it can seem like it's all too late. |
| 0:10.8 | But we're on the cusp of a critical moment and the future of our planet isn't set in stone. |
| 0:16.0 | Join us for our Broken Planet, the new podcast from the Natural History Museum, |
| 0:20.0 | what we find out how we got here. |
| 0:21.8 | And look for solutions from nature and science to fix it. |
| 0:24.5 | Subscribe to our Broken Planet and Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:40.1 | I'm standing two and a half thousand metres up in the Alps. |
| 0:44.5 | Around me I can see little peaks poking through the clouds. |
| 0:48.9 | One day, early last month, your friend had mine Tom Whipple, |
| 0:52.3 | time signs editor, began a climb up a windy mountain in Switzerland. |
| 0:57.7 | And below me is a beautiful, absolutely beautiful, |
| 1:02.8 | almost artificially blue glacial lake. |
| 1:06.8 | And above me is the Pizzle Glacier, or what used to be the Pizzle Glacier. |
| 1:12.5 | There's a little patch of grey ice still there. |
| 1:18.0 | Probably it's been there for a hundred, two hundred years. |
| 1:22.4 | And it's what remains of what is no longer classed in Switzerland as a Glacier. |
| 1:28.2 | He was there to see the Pizzle Glacier, or what was left of it, |
| 1:32.0 | with a glacierologist who's been studying it for 15 years. |
| 1:36.2 | We are here in a, as part of a pilgrimage for ice to say goodbye to a bit of the Alps that's going. |
| 1:48.3 | So we can hear the sound of a rushing stream and that rushing stream is the last bits of the Pizzle Glacier, |
... |
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