Glaciers melting at the polar ice caps is a huge problem. Global warming is causing icebergs and glaciers to melt, making the sea level rise to increase flooding, and making many polar animals without a home. Some engineers and climate change experts wok in Antarctica or Alaska trying to find more information on the melting, and how to stop them. An actual climate change expert gave us a (big) informational quote about his work and how glaciers form.

 

Seth Campbell, Director of Juneau Icefield Research Program says, "I study the changing glaciers across the globe, namely how much smaller they are getting and how fast they are shrinking.  I also help my colleagues understand chemistry changes in the atmosphere.  To study the atmosphere from the past until now, we take ice cores from glaciers and study the chemistry in the cores with special tools at the university.  You can think of a glacier as a really tall stack of pancakes stacked on top of each other. Each pancake is like a previous snowfall event with the oldest pancake being at the bottom of the stack of pancakes (would be at the bottom of a glacier and snowfall that occurred thousands of years ago), and the most recent snowfall being at the top of the glacier (or the top pancake). Pancakes come with all different flavors depending on the items we put in them: Blueberry pancakes, strawberry pancakes, raspberry pancakes, blackberry pancakes, banana pancakes, chocolate chip pancakes, and more!  Snowfall is really similar.  Chemistry in each snowfall is dependent on the atmosphere when the snowfall fell.  If you stack a different type of pancake on top of each other, you can think of this like layers in a glacier that came from different snowfall events.  Glaciers layers have different chemistry (like different fruits or chocolate in our pancakes) that come from the atmosphere.  SO.... we can learn about past climate from ice cores by looking at the changing chemistry (or by comparing different fruit or chocolate or other items in the pancake).  That's basically what I do for much of my job to study climate and climate change!  I look at changing glacier sizes AND we look at changes in snow and ice chemistry from ice cores which tell us how the climate has changed in the past.  THEN, we use that information to try to predict how climate may change in the future."

 

He is the kind of person who knows about it and makes an effort to stop it. With some work, all of you could too!