In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, host Mark Lynas is joined by Professor Lonnie Thompson, an ice paleoclimatologist with The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State University. In this episode, they discuss Lonnie’s legacy of over 50 years of strenuous expeditions traveling to tropical high mountain glaciers around the world, to take ice core samples that date back tens of thousands of years. Mark and Lonnie dive into the critical importance of these ice cores — some of which are the last remnants of mountain glaciers that have since melted away completely — as they hold records of greenhouse gases, temperatures, microbes and volcanic activity over Earth’s history that will continue to prove valuable to science for years to come.
“Probably this year or next, those glaciers will totally disappear. And the only ice from that part of the world is here in the freezers at Ohio State University. From these ice cores, we can go back thirty, forty thousand years and see how that has varied in the natural world. The ice records anything that's in the atmosphere.
And I can only imagine 20 years from now, there are things that we haven't even asked about, that will be important and only preserved in these frozen ice cores.”
Watch the film Canary, a full-length documentary that dives into Lonnie Thompson’s legacy of work: https://canary.oscilloscope.net/
About WePlanet
WePlanet is an international movement campaigning for science-based solutions to the climate, nature and development crises. Through conversations like this one, we challenge bad ideas, spotlight better ones, and make the case for a more abundant, resilient and hopeful future.
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