Glacier O'Higgins, in Patagonia, Chile, is spectacular for its beauty. It is also breathtaking for the speed it is disappearing -- the glacier is morphing into a lake, retreating more than any glacier in South America.
In February 2007, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his production crew set out on an expedition to learn more about global warming. They traveled to the high mountains of Patagonia, where you can actually see a new age beginning. Then it was off to Antarctica.
In Patagonia, the 60 Minutes crew boarded a zodiac to get as close as possible to the face of glacier O'Higgins.
Pelley perilously stands on an iceberg in Lake O'Higgins -- a lake formed by the melting of the glacier.
Getting too close to the glacier can be dangerous, because icebergs, like these, break off and eventually dissolve into the lake. The glacier O'Higgins has fallen back nine miles in 100 years.
The 60 Minutes team climbed to a spot where glaciologist Dr. Gino Cassasa had crossed from earth to ice in 2004. But now, in 2007, that spot was covered by water. Much to his surprise, there's a thousand feet of water where he walked three years ago. The group had to hike for hours to get to the ice. When they got there, they found it blackened by earth and volcanic ash.
One hundred years ago in this spot, Pelley and Cassasa would have been covered by a glacier. "I think it's a very clear picture that the world is getting warmer and that the impacts that were projected even 10 or 20 years ago are happening right now," Casassa explains.
60 Minutes traveled more than 1,000 miles from glacier O'Higgins in Patagonia and across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic peninsula -- the fastest warming place on earth. These days in Paradise Cove, home to these Chinstrap penguins, it's green in places where researchers used to ski in the summertime.
Pelley walks with researchers Sue and Wayne Trivelpiece, who have been conducting the world's longest-running penguin study. It's been going for more than 30 years and has tagged over 70,000 penguins. They've found that, as a result of warming, populations of two penguin species - the Adelie and Chinstrap - have decreased by 50 to 60 percent.
Penguin chicks chase their mothers for food. Krill, a crustacean that's an important food source for penguins, grows under sea ice. With warming, there has been less sea ice, less krill, and penguin chicks have been going hungry.
With the help of scientists from Poland's Arctowski Research Station, 60 Minutes set out to climb to the top of Warsaw Plateau -- a glacier that was fractured by deep crevasses covered in snow. It is about 1,500 feet or so from sea level on King George Island in Antarctica. Everyone is roped together to avoid falling in the crevasses.
CBS soundman Anton Van Der Merwe is pulled from a crevasse during the trek. Over the past 50 years, the Warsaw Plateau, the Antarctica peninsula, the northwestern part and the islands around it has been going up in temperature about one degree every decade, making the region the fastest warming place on earth.
Dr. Kristof Krajewski is the research chief at the Arctowski Polish Research Station, which hosted 60 Minutes in Antarctica. Dr. Krajewski and his team recently discovered a fossilized moraine, which, at 80 million years old, is the oldest ever discovered in Antarctica. They were able to find the moraine because warming had melted the ice that had been covering it.
Antarctic scientist Paul Mayewski, in black, director of the Climate Change Institute at the Univ. of Maine, is on the plateau to drill an ice core because, when ice is laid down, it captures everything in the air. "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.
Where in the world? Signs outside Poland's Arctowski Research Station in Antarctica point to the researchers homeland.
The 60 Minutes team poses with the American and Polish researchers in Antarctica.
Pelley attempts one last interview -- with Antarctica's Gentoo penguins.
The 60 Minutes Antarctica Bureau. From left, sound recordist Anton Van Der Merwe, correspondent Scott Pelley, producers Catherine Herrick and Solly Granatstein, photographers Chris Everson and Ian Robbie.