(winds whooshing) (melancholic music) (winds whooshing continues) - [Man 1] Are we recording?

- [Man 2] Yes, we are recording.

- [Man 1] Okay, I'll try to be real nice to it.

Look at that.

(melancholic music) - Yeah, so we have this kind of picture perfect footage of a crack.

Worst case scenario, but I think it's very well-diagnosed by now.

At this point, I feel like the science program's dead, and we should really focus on getting all the people out safely.

- [Narrator] Understanding what has happened in our past helps us predict our futures.

This is particularly true when we wanna understand how climates will change.

Knowing how big or small ice sheets were in our past can give us a picture of what their size will be in coming years, and how these changes will affect sea levels.

We care because hundreds of millions of people are threatened by rising sea level.

To many, ice sheets like the Greenland ice sheet are some of the most inhospitable places on earth.

But the rocks beneath them hold answers to important questions like when was the last time that the ice sheet had melted away?

A few years before, a rock sample from under the Greenland ice sheet suggested that this was far more recent than some might think.

(mellow music) - The bedrock tells us that the Greenland ice sheet has not been stable.

Over a geological period, where we before were reasonably confident that it was stable.

It really switched the Greenland ice sheet from a feature that we were slightly worried about, to become basically patient number one of the climate crisis.

Realizing that this ice sheet is decaying in front of our eyes and it has done so in the past.

And the climate forcing that was not as severe as we have it right now.

As a scientist and a geochemist, if you get these data coming in, you're super excited, 'cause you know you are successful in providing something that is super important.

Simultaneously, it was immediately clear that the message will be very dire.

And now we have the tools and it's our job to diagnose where are the most vulnerable areas.

The biggest obstacle here and the biggest challenge is kind of the sampling.

So we have to drill through 600 meters of ice to get to this bedrock, and then we ideally need a core that is several meters long.

(suspenseful music) - Yeah, where to start?

Well, with climate change impacting everybody's daily lives now, what's harder to predict is how it will impact our lives in the future.

Mainly one of those uncertainties relates to sea level rise.

And when we think about future sea level rise, we think about the melting of the ice sheets that are on our planet today.

So the first time I went to Greenland was in 2008.

We worked at Jakobshavn Isbrf, this very large glacier that's just spitting out vast quantities of ice into the ocean.

And it created ice that moved into the sea so fast it calves off icebergs at such a rate that you can't even tell where the ocean ends and the ice sheet begins.

That process, the magnitude of that is enormous.

I can't compare it to what astronauts may have thought when they looked back and saw Earth from space, but it's that kind of magnitude feeling that's like, wow, it's pretty humbling.

- GreenDrill is a really large and collaborative project that is looking at the history of ice on Greenland, on the rock of Greenland.

- And using the isotope systems that we work with, the only way that we can understand that is by getting bedrock from beneath the ice sheet.

The Earth is being bombarded by cosmic rays, which are these high energy particles that originate in outer space.

And when they interact with minerals in rocks, they create these rare isotopes that we don't otherwise find on Earth.

And we know the rate at which these cosmogenic nuclides are produced.

So if we can measure their concentrations, we can calculate how long that sample or that piece of rock has been exposed to the atmosphere or exposed to the cosmic ray flux, or in other words, how long a landscape has been ice-free.

- And so the combination of that simplicity with all these interfaces and these interactions with the other parts of the global climate system.

And that's just fascinating to me how that little pluck of a rock can actually tell us not just the history of the Greenland ice sheet, but also these effects that it had on the global ocean.

- [Narrator] This is more than a question about the Greenland ice sheet.

Melting is changing sea level, currents and weather all over the planet.

And it's more than a question about science.

It's about people working together to learn and adapt in a reality where natural systems may be changing far more rapidly than we thought.

- People have worked on the Greenland ice sheet and taken ice cores.

They've drilled through the Greenland ice sheet, taken out core samples and analyzed those to learn about all these secrets about past climate change.

People have never really specifically targeted parts of the ice sheet to drill through in order to obtain rock samples from the bottom of the ice.

We proposed regions to go to and we put a lot of work into selecting where we want to go.

But what we need to do as the next step, we need to go into the field and do some remote sensing surveying from the ice sheet surface, do some imaging of the ice and the ice sheet bed to pinpoint the exact spot we wanna stick the drill.

- [Narrator] Reconnaissance was crucial.

Any drill site that the team could consider must have the right type of rock at its bottom.

The ice must be frozen to the bedrock in order for the drill to work and the ice couldn't be too deep or the drill won't reach the bottom.

(bright music) (winds rustling) (plane engine rumbling) - So camp starts off with, let's make sure we can survive out here.

So if we got hit by a massive storm, we can crawl in somewhere safe from the wind and warm enough that we can last it out.

And then we finally get to the science.

So we have all of these boxes with scientific equipment that have been sitting out, drifting in with snow, with the winds that came in right when we set up.

And so we shovel those out and we pull out all of our electronics, we charge up our batteries.

We're the scouting team.

We're trying to figure out is this a good spot where we, the GreenDrill Team, can successfully drill and pull up a piece of rock from beneath all of this ice to tell us more about the past history of the Greenland ice sheet.

The depth, the thickness of the ice matters, because the drill that they want to use can only go so deep and then it won't work anymore.

- Greenland, the Greenland ice sheet, has been bigger in the past and it's been smaller in the past.

So what this project is trying to do is to link what the temperatures were in the past and what the size of the ice sheet was in the past.

So if we could combine those two things together and say at these temperatures in the air and these temperatures in the ocean, the Greenland ice sheet is much, much smaller.

If we reach the same temperatures that made Greenland much smaller in the past, then we should worry that if we hit those same temperatures, then again Greenland will be small.

And the result of that is, sea level rises.

(bright music) The work that I do is to try to figure out how thick this ice is.

At some point, this ice has to be sitting on the rock, right?

How far do I have to go?

What do you do when you see a flash of lightning?

The flash of lightning, you start counting, one second, two seconds, three seconds, and then you hear the boom of the thunder.

And that tells you how far away the lightning strike was.

We do the same thing.

Instead of using lightning, we use a small explosive shot to make a boom.

- Fire in the hole!

(explosive booms) - And that boom has to travel through the ice, hit the bottom, and come back to us.

By knowing how long it took to get out and come back up, we'll know how thick the ice sheet is.

One, now it's armed, and it's waiting for a trigger.

- [Team Member] Okay.

(bright music) - [Narrator] After the summer of reconnaissance work, all potential sites had to be compared in a first drilling location chosen.

- Most of the available places to drill that meet the ice thickness requirements and meet the frozen bedding conditions requirements are up here in North Greenland.

That's the place where it's likely so cold that as you get to the thin ice of the ice margin, it's frozen bedded, that's up here in North Green, the real arctic coldest part of Greenland.

- I believe it.

- So this is this beautiful Prudhoe Dome.

It's the perfect ASIG site.

We'll get a killer record.

(pensive music) - The first moment I wanted to be a scientist is relatively long ago, but it took me a decade at least to kind of realize that I can really, I can realize that dream.

And deciding to go into physics back then was clearly a manifestation of the vision and idea and dream to become kind of investigator or scientist.

However, my entire college career, I was convinced that I don't have to, I cannot do it.

I mean, studying physics starts with getting overwhelmed by math and I was overwhelmed.

I mean, I was fortunate enough to find an incredible group of friends who were super smart and working in the team together for preparing for exams et cetera, it was really the absolute key, but this feeling, individually, that I'm probably not clever enough to do this was a permanent, a permanent feeling.

And the first time that I realized that there are so many different skills that you can bring to the table and that was the first moment of confidence that I could at least contribute something.

(upbeat music) - Yeah, I mean, the planning for this started years ago and you know, as you get closer to getting put out in the field, things get more hectic and you're making plans after plans and those plans always end up breaking and you need to be really flexible with everything.

And so, I mean the first hurdle, even before we even think about, you know, getting rock is just simply getting out to the field site.

You know, we have an idea on when we wanna fly in, but of course weather always delays that or there's some mechanical issue maybe with a helicopter or one of the flights.

And then once we get the cargo out here, we still need to set up camp and we probably forgot something back in Thule.

And then of course just setting up the whole drill.

And so that's a day's long process before we can even begin to think about starting to drill through the ice.

So we've been out here almost a month.

It's been, it's been a pretty good month.

The weather was a little rough when we first got out here.

I was much colder.

And so it took nine Basler flights from Thule to land here on the snow.

And each flight was carrying about 7,000 pounds worth of gear that an advanced team of us were unloading to get ready for this field camp.

(mellow music) - [Narrator] The time finally came when the rest of the field team had to make the long journey to the drill site.

- My first field season in Antarctica, it was really, really cold.

It was like negative 40s.

I love being in the field with a team of people and oftentimes people I work with outside of the field because it really opens people up and you just kind of connect and rely on each other in a different way than you do maybe when you're in the lab or at the office.

- [Narrator] Trips to Greenland begin with a flight to a military base like Pituffik Space Base.

From there, weather permitting, the scientists then leapfrog to the ice sheet.

(bright music) - Right.

So the forecast here in Qaanaaq is brilliant.

It's like sunny skies.

Not that windy.

- Yeah.

- And you look at the wind forecast for the site, it's not- - [Joerg] Good.

- Good.

It's like a fence between us and our science, right?

So even if there's a helicopter available, it's not a guinea that we'd get deployed.

- Right.

We have been delayed because there's no helicopter up here to take us to the ice, and there's a lot of wind up on the ice field despite the beautiful weather here.

So there are a lot of people up on the ice already, maybe eight people.

I think myself and others in this group are feeling a lot of FOMO or fear of missing out.

- We have a full 60,000-pound material camp up there on the ice.

Those few people have been basically unloading the plane every one of the 60,000 pounds.

Our problem is that our helicopter from Iceland is supposed to arrive tomorrow.

The reality is that he's in Iceland still.

- There's so many things about what we're doing that haven't been done before that makes it really uncertain about whether we're gonna get the sample from the bottom of the ice.

This drill's been used before, but not in this ice thickness.

This drill's been used before, not in Greenland.

This drill's been used before, not at this location.

And all these sort of complications are separate from the weather patterns that might prevent us from getting to our site.

Yeah, that sounds perfect.

We, okay, so we'll come over like a quarter to nine.

(bright music) - [Joerg] So the story here is a game of limited time.

You have to make a plan that's possible, understanding what this time means because at the end the flight schedule that is fixed in the calendar limits the time.

(plane engine rumbling) - [Narrator] And landing on the ice started a 24-day countdown until the team had to start camp extraction and make their way home.

- How's it been up here?

- We've got him addicted to American food.

- Very stormy.

- Stormy?

- Yeah.

(bright music) - [Nathan] Here's our drill tent.

There, the drillers do their thing.

- [Team Member] Coming up.

- Yep, exactly.

So that means either they just put a new rod on or they clamped it and they're going the last one and a half meters, right?

So there's our storage tents.

This is our, this is our science tent.

(winds rustling) - Hey, welcome to the cook tent.

So this is where we do most of our eating, all of our cooking, and we spend a good amount of our downtime here when we've got bad weather and whatnot.

Got some chicken thawing for burritos tonight, but we've also got our cook stove, our very important French presses for our coffee.

It's pretty tight quarters with 11 of us in here, so we've got people sitting on boxes, on buckets, on coolers.

- [Jason] Big day today.

Finally the rest of us made it to Prudhoe Dome, ASIG Drill site.

- Says it's negative three, it is rising to negative zero.

Keep your eyes on that.

I know, sunny all day.

That's nice.

- [Joerg] We'll leave it on that.

We're at Prudhoe Dome Camp ASIG.

Drill is running, in more than a hundred meters in the ice and it's just incredible here.

(bright music) - So every year, up here on the ice sheet throughout the spring and some of the warmer months, it'll actually snow.

As that snow accumulates year after year after year it gets compressed by the weight of the new snow that's falling on top of it.

The drill is our means of making our way through this giant piece of ice on the edge of the ice sheet in order to get down to a point where, ideally, the ice bumps right up against bedrock way down about 500 meters underneath the snow surface here.

The drill is a super complicated mess of hoses and electrical equipment that is essentially a giant drill press like you would see in a machine shop.

You've got a bit, which in our case is the drill rod, and you've got a large head which puts force on the bottom of that bit, pushing down into the ice.

So this drill right now is taking drill fluid, it's pushing it down the center of our bit past the sharp drill head that's cutting the bottom of the hole in the ice and out around that drill head and up like through a giant straw around the outside of the drill bit all the way to the surface.

Once it reaches the surface, that mixture of ice chunks that they call chips is pushed through the diverter, through a hose, and into a system that separates the drilling fluid from the ice chips.

So fracking occurs when the pressure of the fluid becomes greater than the pressure of the ice on the outside of the hole.

The hole can actually break and we can lose fluid out the side of the hole, and we're also unable to continue to clean that hole of the ice chips that we're making as we go deeper.

So fracking is definitely not great.

- Today is a beautiful day.

I'm guessing it's around zero degrees Fahrenheit so it's quite warm actually.

Last week we had ambient temperatures of minus 20 Fahrenheit thereabouts.

We had winds gusting at 30, 35 knots.

We had all sorts of snow kicking around and it was hard at times to see exactly where we're going.

So we have all sorts of flagging around.

And so we do have a lot of polar bear precautions.

We all carry bear horns, we all carry whistles.

As last resorts, we do have firearms in camp and people trained to use them.

In the back there we've got our fuel cache where we keep a lot of the diesel and fuel that the motors run off of.

And then over here we've got all our second drill, the Winkie Drill.

And so we've got two sites picked out here on Prudhoe Dome.

One is ASIG where we're hoping to go through about 500 meters of ice, and the other is Winkie where we hope to go anywhere between 50 and 70 meters of ice.

And it's really important that we have these two sites.

And so we're trying to figure out how this part of the Greenland ice sheet has melted in the past and the rate at which it does.

So it's important to have multiple points sort of in a line or a transect to track how the ice sheet has evolved in the past.

(bright music) - [Narrator] As with almost anywhere in the polar regions weather reigned supreme, and in this case the support helicopter that had been pinned down in Iceland for over a week because of storms made it to the ice sheet.

(Matthias faintly speaks) - Requesting startup for transfer.

(plane engine revving) It is really rewarding to work with scientists.

So they're doing something very meaningful and it's fantastic to be part of that process and the team make the measurements or the sampling possible in very remote places of the world.

(craft engine rumbling) - Allie's finally here, this is a major success actually.

Helicopter is a week delayed.

It's amazing to see it here on site.

Now we can get to work, keep our work going, establish our second camp.

This is awesome.

(bright music) I'm Jason.

Nice to meet you.

(bright music) - [Narrator] While site one with the big ASIG Drill kept pushing downwards towards bedrock, half of the team sought out another drill camp where they might learn more about the glacial history near the ice sheet edges.

(upbeat music) - So the ASIG broke the ASIG record today.

So we are down at close to 200 meters.

That's deeper than this will ever went.

So that's super exciting.

And what you hear in the background is noise is the background noise from these gazillion generators that are particularly needed to drive the pump that circulates the drilling fluid.

Otherwise, it's outrageously fast now.

I am blown away by, they operated, what they say is very careful and very slowly because they really want to make sure that nothing bad happens.

For me this goes incredibly fast.

(suspenseful music) - So we are in a snow pit that we dug here through last year's snow layer.

And the floor of this snow pit is last summer's melt layer.

So it's really hard ice, because it would've melted during August and then refroze as temperatures cooled.

And then throughout the year snow continued to build up all the way to the surface where our most recent snow layer is.

So there's these layers of snow built up that would represent different weather events throughout the year.

We're working on the surface of the ice, but the layers within the ice itself and whatever's underneath holds these stories about past climate change and ice sheet stability that we're working to tease out with this project.

(craft engine roaring) - So we just finished a recon flight to the next camp in this project.

Over there this situation is a little bit different.

Here we have a thick layer of snow on top of the glacier.

Over there, it's a very thin layer of snow, only about 10 centimeters or so.

And below that it's hard ice.

One of these challenges is just putting up tents.

And to do that safely we need to drill into the ice with screws that will go into the ice and we can anchor our tents to those screws.

- [Narrator] Once the second camp was identified, the smaller Winkie Drill and enough food and survival gear to endure Greenland storms needed to be transported into place using slingloading.

- So slingloading is when you attach a line to the helicopter and then attach cargo underneath.

And you move cargo from one place to the other with the helicopter.

It is like a pendulum.

So it's the helicopter on the top and that really likes to swing and move.

Of course, we put up the Winkie step by step as we moved there.

So it was growing, the more cargo we transported there.

And at the end it was a very satisfying feeling to see a running camp.

(chainsaw whirring) (bright music) - [Narrator] While the ASIG Drill is enormous and has the capacity to drill deep into the ice cap, the Winkie Drill is built to be light and fast.

However, it can't drill quite as deep.

It's the ideal drill for reaching rock under the ice sheet margins.

(winds whooshing) (bright music) Now, the two camps start to work in parallel, each using very different drills to reach the bedrock below.

(bright music) - Right now, we are continuing to drill with the ASIG.

The Winkie camp is set up down by the ice margin and they're doing their own thing.

So we're like six people up here focused on the ASIG and we have so far drilled to about 330 meters I think as of yesterday afternoon.

So yeah, about 170 meters left to go till we hit bedrock.

(bright music) - [Jason] Yeah.

It was definitely interesting having two camps running simultaneously, 25 kilometers separation.

You had something to be like checking in on every day.

People up the hill, here's what we did today, here's how our drill work, here's what the wind level is.

So actually it was kind of fun to have like another group out there going through a very similar experience and we could trade stories by texting each other on the satellite as we're going through the process.

(bright music) - Last night, we got snow, and there's been a little bit of wind as well so it's kind of blowing around and piling up in front of our tents.

So we're just spending some time shoveling out camp.

And yeah, this is just kind of part of camp maintenance that we can keep on living and doing our science up here on the ice sheet even despite the weather.

- I think I'm pretty patient.

At least out here I'm pretty patient.

And maybe I think that comes from 15 years of doing field work at this point and the Arctic knowing that your plans are always gonna change no matter what.

I don't think I've ever had a season go exactly as I thought it'd go.

A lot of starts and stops on the joint process.

We made quite a good, quite a bit of progress to start and then this past week there've been a few mechanical issues.

And then as we get deeper, drilling just takes longer.

So the last week has been pretty slow but we're still optimistic that we'll get all the way down to bedrock.

(upbeat music) (melancholic music) - 40 meters, 60 meters, 65 meters, 70, 80.

When are we gonna hit the bed?

In a storm.

60 mile an hour winds or something gusting.

(winds whooshing) (melancholic music) In a bit of a windstorm today.

Just everybody's hunkered down in there.

Tents trying to stay warm and out of all the blowing snow.

In terms of Winkie drilling, things are going pretty good.

We've had some really nice success.

We've drilled through 97 meters of ice.

We're pretty happy with being able to use the Winkie Drill in such thick ice.

And can't wait to analyze some of these samples and learn some things about the Greenland ice sheet up in this corner of Greenland.

The team was exceptional.

The main, the lead driller for the Winkie Drill was basically like a wizard of understanding how to get this drill to collect bed material 300 feet below.

(winds whooshing) Ground blizzards are crazy.

Their snow is just blowing like crazy but it's only maybe like head high.

For a moment, I looked up and saw this beautiful clear sky.

And then the kitchen tent was just downwind of me.

It's like a one of those videos of like a car or an airplane in like a wind tunnel, and the snow was just like curving over the head and over the snow.

All we just built and over the tent.

Marvelous.

It was beautiful.

(suspenseful music) (team members faintly speaking) - So, one of these moments where I think they are troubleshooting.

We are troubleshooting all day.

And we are just at a point where we thought we had it.

And then something was overheating.

But there's also more going on, there's something with the chips that are collecting.

They are kind of clogging one of the sieves.

So I think they are full-in diagnosing mode in the moment.

(suspenseful music) So it's just unbelievably complex is one thing up to the other.

Drilling is really has two essential elements.

So one is drilling, chipping up the ice and drilling deeper.

But the much more complicated part is getting all the chipped up ice.

So the chips through hundreds of meters of the borehole up and that requires a high pressure drilling fluid circulation.

And the deeper you go the more pressure you need.

So the borehole in ice can only take an unknown amount of pressure.

The big, big fear and the big issue with these kind of drilling exercises where you drill through ice quickly and get into bedrock has been the fracturing of the borehole.

In that moment if that happens, your borehole is toast, you're dead.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Whether it was the threat of a fractured borehole or gale force winds, each team tethered together by sat phone calls had to throw everything that they had at keeping the drills up and running.

(suspenseful music) - We haven't been able to have a helicopter come up in over a week.

We're sitting here in the cook tent for the second consecutive day with nothing to do, 'cause the weather is too bad outside to start the ASIG engines.

- Can't run The engines in this.

I've been in snow in the Territories, but not like this, not where it changes all the time.

Rapidly.

Look, you can hardly see the cook tent eh?

Wow.

- Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship, which was pretty exciting, in my hometown of Rochester, New York.

Took a solid two-hour nap yesterday, not for the nap itself, but it killed two hours where I didn't have to figure out what to do with myself.

Everyone's sitting around looking at their inReach forecast, trying to decipher what the weather's gonna be over the next few days.

On Wednesday, it looks like another storm is coming in 75 mile an hour gusts.

So we're trying to figure out how to handle that.

- [Joerg] When we are starting to calculate how many meters per day we can drill and how many days we'll need to get to the bedrock in the best of cases, that was already the moment when we all realized the clock is ticking.

It felt like the clock is ticking faster and faster every day.

- [Narrator] Despite the ice sheet throwing everything it had at the team, they were clear that they had to keep trying even as the clock of the expedition was running down.

- [Team Member] All right, just go slow and steady, I'd say.

Keep coming up 'cause we're not at the bottom line.

We're not at the bottom reamers yet.

- So where's the rock right now?

Is it recessed?

- It's gonna be in this barrel with the forklift.

- [Jason] Yeah, so right now it's probably like right up in here somewhere.

- [Narrator] A critical measure in their experimentation was to keep the first samples of stone from the chemistry-altering daylight.

- That's rock baby.

- All right.

I sure hope so.

- [Team Member] Where did we get?

- Five centimeters of ice, gravel and true grit.

Yeah, okay, so you got the (faintly speaking).

(bright music) - Eight inch.

- [Jason] And we went down through all the ice and we got down to 97 meters and we countered the bed and that was like a huge relief that we found the bed within the rod lengths we had.

The bed was a combination of rock and ice and some sediment.

We had to bring it up in small pieces.

We ended up having 13 different attempts to get two meters of the bed, a core that we were able to pull out.

Next step in the process was celebration.

- [Narrator] The success at Winkie site was a great next step moving towards understanding the bedrock history at the margins of the ice sheet.

However, a crux became, taking enough sample and airlifting it out of the field.

(winds whooshing) - I'm going crazy out here.

And so we got the sense that we were like where we were positioned on the glacier that there were like these eddies in this turbulence barreling down the glacier on us.

(winds whooshing) And that particular night, one of these gusts nailed us really hard and it broke our tent and a bunch of things.

What was most stressful for me was seeing another one on the horizon, you know, 70 something miles an hour.

- [Narrator] Back at the ASIG site, the quest for rock from deep under the ice had taken a turn further worse.

- Everything seems like falling apart.

It's clear that my job does not include being at the forefront of troubleshooting.

And again, it's hard as a scientist to admit you cannot directly help right now.

And it was just in and they lost fluid in the hole.

And the fluid stopped coming up, which is basically a classical sign of a fractured hole.

- [Allie] Let's just give them a few minutes.

- So I put my time on 15 minutes and then I will go up, and we'll see.

I think, sounds like it happened, the worst happens, and you don't know details.

- Definitely came down.

- It is very overwhelming how much work and passion from the entire team went into this.

And it really looks like it is not working out this time.

And that has been very painful to live through for me.

I mean, I like to cook.

I always like to cook.

And in a way that's probably also where I have a chemistry lab, just following recipes.

And then if stuff doesn't really work well in the lab or does not taste well in the kitchen, you just have to be creative and try few things.

This will be spaghetti bolognese tonight.

I get comfort out of that.

It's true that it calms me down.

I wouldn't say I feel in control, but it's something that I really enjoy to do and it always helps me if I have the chance to cook, particularly for others.

And that has worked here really well.

- [Allie] Look at that.

You've been waiting all day for that.

- Yeah, bolognese.

- It's a really, it calms me down and relaxes me in a very, in a very good way.

- Yeah, it's very good.

(melancholic music) - If it works, it goes directly on my iPhone when it's up again.

- Like bluetooths to your iPhone?

- Yes.

- And you can see it pretty quickly?

- Yes.

- All right, just tape the crap outta that.

Are we recording?

- [Team Member] Yes, we are recording.

- Okay, I'll try to be real nice to it.

Look at that.

- [Allie] So yeah, we're gonna be able to see that.

(melancholic music) - Hello again.

Okay so, yeah, so we have this kind of picture perfect footage of a crack and it has a fine line.

It looks like a scribble, but it's pretty, overall it's pretty vertical.

Worst case scenario, but I think it's very well-diagnosed by that.

So overall I must say, just to say that once from my side, but I want to hear from you of course, at this point I feel like the science program is dead, and we should really focus on getting all the people out safely.

Yeah.

It is what it is.

But we have to really rethink everything completely.

(melancholic music) The Hail Mary is just drilling deeper with the ice core drill.

To prepare the drill to be able to move forward is to basically patch the fracture.

And you cannot patch an ice fracture in a borehole, but you can put metal casing over the fracture.

It sounds really easy, it's crazy complicated.

And then I guess tomorrow will be the big moment where the crew here starts trying to drill again.

So all we can do here is really just hold our breath and hope and cross fingers that this borehole holds.

(winds whooshing) (melancholic music) (winds whooshing continues) It's a huge stress to be understanding what this time limit means, that it's strict.

And it doesn't matter where your experiment is.

If you're scheduled to leave, you have to leave.

Everybody in the team here have been working for decades, literally decades, to make that experiment worthwhile.

It feels like a real betrayal leaving the ice sheet and really leaving the team alone in the worst possible moment.

- We were not fully appreciative of how leading edge the drilling is.

I think the other interesting thing is that when we wrote this proposal so many years ago, I'm not convinced I know a better way.

- The first 100, 200 meters are kind of straightforward, honest and maybe 250 meters.

But then once of a sudden gets at about, that it really starts to exponentially exploding the kind of the risk and the stress and the problems.

- A lot of things with that Winkie Drill were done for the first time.

Like when you're pulling up material from the bed, you're going in and out a lot.

It's not just the more ice drilling.

Every single time you change the bit and you're playing around to try to get more and more of the rock out of the bottom, all that effort is compounded when the hole is twice as deep.

This is a pretty classic experimental science.

- [Joerg] Yeah.

- Like when do experiments ever work on their first or second or third try?

(melancholic music) - [Allie] Joerg and Jason left.

(melancholic music) We were kind of already in this flight period when the planes were supposed to be taking us out of camp.

So this was super stressful.

We were working against the clock like crazy.

And luckily, perhaps we had some weather delays that delayed those planes arriving to the camp.

So we just kept going for it.

We had a few in a row where we didn't make any progress or only made a few meters of progress, which was disheartening given that we had about 150 meters left to drill through this ice sheet to reach the bed.

The drillers felt, okay, we're not gonna be successful in getting to the bed here, but let's use this time to learn as much about this drill as we can.

They changed the bit to this particular bit that wasn't necessarily designed for these purposes.

You could kind of hear a little bit of a change in what the drill sounded like, and we started hitting 50-meter days.

I called Joerg and Jason and asked what they wanted to do.

And we have this kind of hard stop when these planes start arriving.

Do we keep going?

Do we have time to keep going?

I think Jason saw the practical side of what I was saying in terms of kind of safety and getting the team out of the field.

And Joerg kind of really left that decision of when to call it up to me.

And as I hung up the phone with the two of them, the next run of core came up and it was rock.

We came up with this really beautiful granite-like rock.

So as soon as this rock came up, there was just huge sighs of relief because not only did we hit that rock, but it's perfect for the science we're trying to do.

(plane engine roaring) - Relief is not enough as the description of that wave of happiness and gratefulness that all this energy, passion, work of the team actually led to something that will change the landscape of climate and ice sheet science.

This is an excellent example of what multidisciplinary research can achieve, how necessary that is to have different perspectives.

So the first very early results tell us that immediately that this bedrock underneath the Prudhoe Dome has been exposed, most likely very recently over the last 10,000 years.

So it is a very instable ice feature.

So there is this extreme excitement on the scientific side and this extreme concern on the citizen side, because all we find out, is extremely worrisome.

The next two feet of sea level contribution will probably come mostly from bring up.

- [Narrator] It's mind-blowing to imagine the entirety of the snow and ice of Prudhoe Dome being gone the last time the Arctic was this warm.

This less than 10,000 years ago.

This speaks to just how sensitive climate and ice are.

And this suggests that a lot of ice will be melting in the coming years.

- Patient is sick, ice sheet is melting, they'll accelerate or melt, our ocean will rise.

Now, the question is what do we do with that, how do we respond?

How do we mitigate?

How do we help?

That's where our approach, the pure scientific approach hits a wall, and it's absolutely insufficient.

We have to get a next step and think in all possible ways how to deal with that.

Where is the knowledge that knows about how to adjust to environments and systems?

- [Narrator] Humans can do the unimaginable when they work together and share.

We learned this during one study in a far corner of the ice cap.

There are other scientists, however, there are also people who live and thrive in these environments for hundreds, even thousands of years.

As part of our effort to grow knowledge of our own, we also hope to appreciate and listen to those living, not just visiting the front lines of climate change.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues)