What's hidden under the Greenland ice sheet? | Kristin Poinar
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2017
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
The Greenland ice sheet is massive, mysterious -- and melting. Using advanced technology, scientists are revealing its secrets for the first time, and what they've found is amazing: hidden under the ice sheet is a vast aquifer that holds a Lake Tahoe-sized volume of water from the summer melt. Does this water stay there, or does it find its way out to the ocean and contribute to global sea level rise? Join glaciologist Kristin Poinar for a trip to this frozen, forgotten land to find out.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features glaciologist Kristen Pointer, recorded live at TED 2017. |
| 0:08.0 | When I was 21 years old, I had all this physics homework. |
| 0:13.3 | Physics homework requires taking breaks, and Wikipedia was relatively new, so I took a lot of breaks there. |
| 0:19.7 | I kept going back to the same articles, reading them again and again, |
| 0:23.7 | on glaciers, Antarctica and Greenland. |
| 0:28.9 | How cool would it be to visit these places, |
| 0:31.5 | and what would it take to do so? |
| 0:33.9 | Well, here we are on a repurposed Air Force cargo plane operated by NASA flying over the Greenland ice sheet. |
| 0:41.7 | There's a lot to see here, but there's more that is hidden, waiting to be uncovered. |
| 0:47.6 | What the Wikipedia articles didn't tell me is that there's liquid water hidden inside the ice sheet, |
| 0:53.7 | because we didn't know that yet. |
| 0:57.2 | I did learn on Wikipedia |
| 0:58.8 | that the Greenland ice sheet is huge, |
| 1:01.2 | the size of Mexico, |
| 1:02.5 | and its ice from top to bottom is two miles thick. |
| 1:06.1 | But it's not just static. |
| 1:08.1 | The ice flows like a river downhill towards the ocean. |
| 1:12.7 | As it flows around bends, it deforms and cracks. |
| 1:16.9 | I get to study these amazing ice dynamics, |
| 1:20.0 | which are located in one of the most remote physical environments remaining on Earth. |
| 1:24.9 | To work in glaciology right now is like getting in on the ground floor at Facebook |
| 1:29.2 | in the 2000s. Our capability to fly airplanes and satellites over the ice sheets is revolutionizing |
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