February 11, 2009 5:07 PM
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The Age Of Warming
One of the reasons you work so hard to get to a place like this is because it is just about as remote as one can imagine – there is dead silence. 60 Minutes was on the Warsaw Plateau, which is about 1,500 feet or so from sea level on King George Island in Antarctica.
The other reason one comes to the Warsaw Plateau is to see some of the most dramatic evidence anywhere in the world of climate change. Over the past 50 years, this region, the Antarctica peninsula, the northwestern part and the islands around it has been going up in temperature about one degree every decade and that makes the region the fastest warming place on earth.
Mayewski is on the plateau to drill an ice core because, when ice is laid down, it captures everything in the air. Drilling down is drilling through time.
"The ice cores are really the only way we have of demonstrating what greenhouse gas levels were like prior to their first measurement by humans," he explains.
By chemically analyzing the core, he can see what was in the air thousands of years ago. Back in Maine, Mayewski has a vault of hundreds of ice cores. He once led a team that drilled a glacier core two miles deep. He and his colleagues have found some of the most powerful evidence that man is changing the climate.
What do ice cores tell him about greenhouse gases?
"Now we know from the ice core record that the levels and the speed of rise are significantly, significantly greater than anything in the last 850,000 years," Mayewski explains. "And the levels that we expect to get by the end of this century are going to be double what we have today."
Mayewski and his colleagues have timed the sudden rise in greenhouse gases to the start of the industrial revolution about 150 years ago. If, as expected, greenhouse gas pollution doubles by the end of the century, temperatures are predicted to rise four to six degrees.
"You could very well see sea level rises on the order of several feet and perhaps even several tens of feet," Mayewski predicts.
Asked what that would mean for coastal areas around the world, Mayewski tells Pelley, "If sea level were to rise like that, that would be tremendous changes. Immense migrations."
"It would be the largest catastrophe that the modern world would have experienced," he adds.
That rise in sea level would play out over decades. Some of it may be inevitable. It turns out that many greenhouse gases last a long time in the atmosphere—there's a lot up there already.
"If we stopped every automobile every factory, every emission of a greenhouse gas, would the world continue to warm?" Pelley asks Mayewski.
"It would certainly for a while. And I think that's one of the important thing for people to understand," Mayewski says. "It is important that everybody really begins to make reductions in greenhouse gases all the toxic elements that go along with it in order to impact or to have a change in the future. And once we start it's not going to be an immediate solution. We're going to have to pay for a while for what we've done."
Click here to learn more about travel to Chile and Antarctica.
Produced by Solly Granatstein and Catherine Herrick
Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved. The other reason one comes to the Warsaw Plateau is to see some of the most dramatic evidence anywhere in the world of climate change. Over the past 50 years, this region, the Antarctica peninsula, the northwestern part and the islands around it has been going up in temperature about one degree every decade and that makes the region the fastest warming place on earth.
Mayewski is on the plateau to drill an ice core because, when ice is laid down, it captures everything in the air. Drilling down is drilling through time.
"The ice cores are really the only way we have of demonstrating what greenhouse gas levels were like prior to their first measurement by humans," he explains.
By chemically analyzing the core, he can see what was in the air thousands of years ago. Back in Maine, Mayewski has a vault of hundreds of ice cores. He once led a team that drilled a glacier core two miles deep. He and his colleagues have found some of the most powerful evidence that man is changing the climate.
What do ice cores tell him about greenhouse gases?
"Now we know from the ice core record that the levels and the speed of rise are significantly, significantly greater than anything in the last 850,000 years," Mayewski explains. "And the levels that we expect to get by the end of this century are going to be double what we have today."
Mayewski and his colleagues have timed the sudden rise in greenhouse gases to the start of the industrial revolution about 150 years ago. If, as expected, greenhouse gas pollution doubles by the end of the century, temperatures are predicted to rise four to six degrees.
"You could very well see sea level rises on the order of several feet and perhaps even several tens of feet," Mayewski predicts.
Asked what that would mean for coastal areas around the world, Mayewski tells Pelley, "If sea level were to rise like that, that would be tremendous changes. Immense migrations."
"It would be the largest catastrophe that the modern world would have experienced," he adds.
That rise in sea level would play out over decades. Some of it may be inevitable. It turns out that many greenhouse gases last a long time in the atmosphere—there's a lot up there already.
"If we stopped every automobile every factory, every emission of a greenhouse gas, would the world continue to warm?" Pelley asks Mayewski.
"It would certainly for a while. And I think that's one of the important thing for people to understand," Mayewski says. "It is important that everybody really begins to make reductions in greenhouse gases all the toxic elements that go along with it in order to impact or to have a change in the future. And once we start it's not going to be an immediate solution. We're going to have to pay for a while for what we've done."
Produced by Solly Granatstein and Catherine Herrick
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