Short Wave - Where are the whales? Scientists find clues thousands of miles away

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Endangered North Atlantic right whales are disappearing from their native waters, a serious danger for a species with only 340 animals left. The mystery behind this change took NPR's climate reporter Lauren Sommer 2,000 miles away to the world's second-largest ice sheet, sitting on top of Greenland. On today's episode, Lauren takes Short Wave co-host Emily Kwong on an expedition to Greenland's ice sheet and then to the Gulf of Maine to break down the ripple effects of climate change. Reach the show by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. Today, we've got a mystery on the cutting edge of science, a mystery that links the entire planet together. And here's where it starts with the footsteps of our very own Lauren Summer from NPR's climate desk. Yep, those are my feet. We're in crampons. And I'm walking on top of Greenland's massive ice.

sheet. It's just an unbelievably huge piece of ice that covers basically the whole country. And here's where this slice of the mystery ends 2,000 miles away. Is that a whale? It's a North Atlantic right whale. They're highly

endangered, and in recent years, dead whales have been showing up in places that no one expected them to be. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Okay, so we started with ice on Greenland and our ending with endangered whales. Are these two connected? That's what scientists are starting to believe. Oh. There's a lot of news these days about melting ice, right? Because as the climate gets hotter, polar ice is disappearing. And it can feel

really far away, right? Right. Yeah. It's bad, but it's literally happening at the end of the planet. Yeah. Well, now, weird things are happening all over the globe. And scientists are starting to figure out that it's connected to melting ice. There's these, you know, huge cold spots on the planet. they're linked to everywhere else through the Earth's fundamental processes, you know, things like weather and oceans. Yeah. And I guess as ice disappears in the Arctic, that would affect everything else. It would cause like a ripple effect felt around the world. Yep. And all this week, we at the climate desk, we'll be here bringing you three stories from all over the world about these unexpected connections that really affect people every day. Okay. So today on the show, ice is melting increasingly fast as the climate. climate gets hotter, what does that mean for our Earth? Today, we go to Greenland to talk about a

chain reaction that's disrupting entire ecosystems in the ocean. You're listening to Shorewave from NPR. Okay, Lauren Summer, to unravel this mystery, we should probably start at the beginning and at like the very end of the earth with Greenland's ice sheet. What was it like to visit? It was pretty awe inspiring, I have to say. You know, we started climbing it, you know, where the ice meets the land, kind of at the bottom. And it's like climbing an actual mountain. We were there with a research team from the University of Sheffield. And there's just these big, craggy peaks of ice, these deep holes, crevasses. And because it was a warm August day, the surface of the ice sheet was kind of alive. Oh, it sounds like it's melting. That's water pouring off the ice. You know, first it's in these little streams, and those flowed into actual rivers on top of the ice. And then the river kind of just disappears into this dark, terrifying hole in the ice. Andrew Sol, who is a researcher at the University of Sheffield, told me it's called a moulin,

and it happens when the river finds a crack. Forces the crack to just penetrate through the ice. It's called hydrofraction. So it's a waterfall. It's basically a waterfall, yeah, a cylindrical waterfall through the ice. Yeah. Which goes a thousand feet down. Lauren, I'm sure you've read about this phenomenon, but what is what was it like to see it in real life?

Just seeing it and realizing how massive it is and what a huge role it will play, it really, it really struck me. It just is at a scale that's just so hard to wrap your brain around, just how much ice is sitting there. And seeing the melt, you know, in particular, this thing that we cover and talk to people about all the time really was striking as well because this melting process is speeding up. as the climate gets hotter. It's going faster and faster. I mean, since 2002, Greenland's ice sheet has been losing 280 billion tons of ice per year. And scientists are really trying to figure out how much will that accelerate? Because it's not an easy question to answer. Why is that? Well, when you have this huge, you know, chunk of ice three times the size of Texas, melting is really complex. It's not like the ice in your glass. And Andrew showed me one way

they investigate that. Okay, go for it, Ryan. One of his students had waded out into the river. He was tethered by a rope, by the way, I should say, for safety. And he released this bottle of very bright, non-toxic dye into the water. So now the whole river downstream of Ryan has turned a really fluorescent bright pink. And it's, to be honest, quite surreal sight, surrounded by the lovely white ice and the sort of blue turquoise color of the water. That does sound striking. What does dyeing the water in this way help them determine?

Yeah. So what happens is the water with that dye, it drops to the bottom of the ice sheet. It goes underneath it. And then the team has a sensor where the river comes out, which is at the base of the ice sheet far away. And it tells them how long the water took to get there. And what happens under the ice sheet is important because at certain times of year, there's so much melt water there. It makes the whole ice sheet slide. And that moves it to a lower elevation. where it's warmer, which makes it melt faster. Oh. So the melting water causes more melts. The whole process speeds itself up. Yeah, exactly. And eventually, all this melting water makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean,

where it can have very big consequences, because that's where it runs into a major ocean current. It's called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC. Nice name. Also, didn't know currents had names, obviously, because how else will we be able to understand it? But, okay, so there's this current called Amok. Yes, Amok for short. And to picture this current, I want you to think about a conveyor belt. So the top of this conveyor belt is a big current of warm water that goes up the east coast of the U.S. It goes north all the way to Greenland.

Amy Bauer, who studies ocean currents at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, explain this to me. And she says near Greenland, the salty water cools off. It gets heavy and it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. And then go back towards the equator down deep carrying that cold water, kind of a return flow. Oh, so it sounds like the bottom of the conveyor belt. It comes back on itself. Yeah, returns, yeah. And it's powered by the sinking that happens near Greenland. So that's kind of the engine, basically. Okay. But if you remember near Greenland, there's also a lot of freshwater pouring into the ocean from the melting. The freshwater is like, I don't want to sink. I don't want to sink. I'm very light. I don't want to sink. So freshwater tends to inhibit this sinking motion.

It could slow down the entire current. That's what studies show is likely to happen as the climate keeps changing. There are signs it may already be happening, but some scientists I spoke to said it needs to be watched for longer to be sure. Well, Lauren, what would be so bad about this giant ocean conveyor belt, this current slowing down? Yeah, I mean, this current is kind of like the circulation system of the planet. It connects to the whole thing. And it's tied to everything from, you know, what the ocean is like to what the weather is like. And in this case, the current is already changing in one part of the Atlantic and it's having big effects. And I spoke to someone who's seen it, Philip Hamilton.

He's a scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. Last summer, he was on a boat searching for North Atlantic right whales. We've only been able to find about 20 whales in this large area, and we're expecting to find more like 70 or 80. So he actually knows most of the whales individually, because there are only about 340 of them left. And normally Philip would be looking for them in the Gulf of Maine during the summer. But around 2015, the whales began disappearing from there. They just weren't there. Now he's looking hundreds of miles away in Canadian waters,

where some of the right whales have turned up. We saw a calf appears to have a propeller cut on its chin after only eight months of life. Pretty distressing. And over a two-year period, 21 right whales were killed in Canada, many hit by ships or tangled in these long ropes from fishing gear. That's very sad. So what happened that caused this sudden shift in the whale population, such that they moved and are now kind of endangered? waters. Yeah, I mean, when they got to Canada, they weren't expected there. So there weren't any protections from the ship traffic or from fishing gear, you know, that poses a big threat to them.

The whales needed to move, though, because they were following their food. Right whales really depend on one tiny plankton, a copepod, to be exact, called callanus finmarchicus. That's what they used to eat in the Gulf of Maine. But the Gulf of Maine is changing fast. The water there is heating up really quickly, faster than 97% of the global ocean. It's largely because the ocean current has shifted near the Gulf of Maine. It's kind of pushing more warm water into that area, basically. And those plankans just don't survive well in those temps. Okay. So the natural habitat of these whales is changing. Whales had to adapt to find their food again and migrate. Just is such an example of how climate change sometimes isn't a gradual process at all. It sometimes can happen within a few short

years. Yeah. And the big question is how that will keep changing, will it keep changing? That's what ecologist Aaron Meyer gutbroad from the University of South Carolina told me. Which puts us all in this state of emergency because then we don't really know where they're going to go, which means that we can't effectively protect their habitat. Yeah. And that's, you know, just what's, you know, just what's going on with right whales. We know because we've been tracking them super carefully, but, you know, think about all the other ocean life. There's entire ecosystems out there and a lot of unknowns about how these changing ocean currents could just alter the entire food chain. We're just entering this time of extreme uncertainty. You know, we can't look at the past and

allow that to shape the future because humans have kind of thrown a wrench in what used to be natural processes. Oh, okay. So we started with ice on. on top of Greenland, followed it into the Atlantic Ocean, through the ocean food chain all the way to these endangered whales. You've really shown us how deeply connected things are on this planet. How if something happens in one part of the world, it can have ripple effects that reach everywhere and are incredibly complex and not super well known. Yeah, I mean, that's why we wanted to do this whole project is because there's this race to understand those connections as they're changing in real time. Yeah. There's a hope, I mean, that we can.

forecast the changes better going forward, you know, so we can kind of be prepared. That would obviously matter to right whales and to ocean life. It would matter to the people who depend on the oceans too. You know, it's why just so many scientists we spoke to say this is really the time to kind of do that research, to have a better handle on this ice melt and these really complex ocean currents so we can kind of understand the stakes here, the stakes of climate change, basically. Lauren, thank you so much for this reporting. I cannot wait to talk to you and our colleagues on the climate desk more this week.

Thank you. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger. It was edited by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Britt Hansen. Robert Rodriguez was our audio engineer. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Emel Quang. Thanks as always for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

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