Transcript:
Scientists who work in Svalbard, Norway, in the high Arctic know it’s one of the fastest-warming places on Earth.
And yet James Bradley of the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography says he was still shocked by the weather conditions that he and his team encountered there in February.
Bradley: “We saw vast pools of meltwater, so we would ordinarily never expect to see water in its liquid form in the middle of winter in Svalbard. … We usually encounter a deep snowpack of maybe a meter or two meters … that covers the whole tundra and covers all of the mountains and covers all of the glaciers.”
Bradley studies how microbes survive in extreme environments.
On this trip, he’d planned to sample freshly fallen snow and to drill through the frozen ground to collect soil samples.
Bradley: “But instead of snow, we had days of rain.”
And the ground had thawed so much they could scoop the soil up with a spoon.
Bradley: “We spent a week under this intense warmth watching the snowpack disappear, watching the tundra become exposed, and as researchers and scientists, we were really feeling the weight of the implications of this kind of event.”
So for people who live and work in Svalbard, the signs of rapid climate change are unmistakable.
Reporting credit: ChavoBart Digital Media
