CCI @50: The Climate Change Institute

(dramatic instrumental music) - [Narrator] Austere and forbidding as they rise from the plains of northern India, the rugged Himalayas continue to challenge adventurous humans.

This is particularly true of Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, which has just been scaled for the third time.

And here now are the first pictures of the American triumph, called the 1963 National Geographic Society American Mount Everest Expedition.

The conquering team was composed of 20 Americans, aided by Sherpa tribesmen who acted as carriers.

(dramatic instrumental music) Later, deep, un-bridged crevasses called on the expedition to build their own bridges.

They are hazardous, frail links that test the nerves of all, but every obstacle, sheer cliffs, treacherous glaciers, are conquered by the Americans.

(dramatic instrumental music) (wind blows) - It's a very strange place to work.

It's a challenging place.

Even a base camp, which is just under 18,000 feet, much less significantly higher, but we had people spread all the way from about 3,200 meters up to 8,400 meters.

Seven different science programs.

It's remarkable that we were as successful as we were.

It's because everybody worked really hard.

They had a completely different purpose for going to the top than everybody else on that mountain.

They weren't going up to take pictures of themselves.

They were going up to what has now turned out to be the most significant scientific effort ever on Mount Everest.

(wind howls) - It's bigger than you could possibly imagine.

Everything's taller.

You can look at it on Google Earth all you want, but you'll never know how big things on earth can get until you venture into the Eastern Himalaya.

- Every day wias something new.

Some days I was going down to the stream to do stream sampling.

Other days when it snowed, I'd be sampling snow.

When that wasn't happening, I would enjoy sitting out and chatting with the wonderful people that we were with.

You meet a lot of people who are very successful in what they do, climbers, and scientists, and kind of makes you wanna try new things, definitely - When you think about it, it's a bit terrifying.

So I've never been that condition, never been higher than 7,000 meters plus.

So when I was thinking about it, that was the biggest fear, that we be able to make anD accomplish our work at that elevation.

But it wasn't that bad.

It's a bit challenging, work in a huge down suit, oxygen mask, big goggles.

Pretty much you feel like visiting Mars or moon, it's just like a space suit.

You have a bit more narrow, the view.

You can see that much as just like regular conditions, but it wasn't that bad.

(wind howls) - It was really interesting to see the geomorphology in context of my classes.

To see how active of a landscape it was, where everything is constantly being shaped by various systems and processes.

So to see all of that in context of what I've learned over the past four years in my undergrad and what I'm planning on studying and have read in papers, that just to see it all happening right then and there and so fast, such an active area, was eye-opening.

- I hope that we get one very important thing outta Mount Everest, and it's gonna take some extra work to do it.

It's one thing to do the science, that was hard enough.

The next thing is what do you do with the science.

In the case of Mount Everest in Nepal, we as the scientific group that was involved in this, along with the media who were close partners for us in this entire endeavor, want to find ways in which we can take our discoveries and turn them into something that has value to the people of Nepal.

How do you do that?

You do that not by reading about what goes on in Nepal.

You do that by going to Nepal, by speaking to the people, which we have the opportunity to do.

Find out what are the important things in their lives.

Businesses are opening up all over and all over the Himalayas.

And whenever you are experiencing change from around you, which is climate, and also going through great change yourself, as the people in the Himalayas are, the more information you have about the future, the better off you are.

So that's our goal.

We want to bring to the people of Nepal value from the science that we have conducted.

And that's why we did it as well as we could, because we know it's important.

(wind howls) (cheerful instrumental music) - Hello, I'm Joe Kelley.

I'm a marine geologist at the University of Maine.

I study the geology of the sea floor and coastlines.

And we're here to look at how those kind of come together in Acadia National Park.

This is Thompson Island.

Understanding how water changes, where it is on the earth over time.

I mean, this shoreline is often called timeless, but it's really just constantly changing.

We'll see some evidence later when we look around here for the fact that the ocean was hundreds of feet over our head just a few 10,000 years ago, and hundreds of feet below us within that same interval.

Here today, we're gonna be considering what's happening right now.

Sea level is rising, and this particular place is nothing unusual.

You could see what we'll be looking at here.

Almost any place along the coast of Maine, there's evidence that the ocean is rising.

We can look around and see things that would not look this way if the ocean were at the same elevation all of the time.

Here you can see the way it's eroding along the edge here.

There's tree stumps where trees have, mature trees have come into contact with the ocean and died, and been cut off by the park service or fallen into the water.

These are mature trees, they couldn't be born in this environment.

They were born when the shoreline was out there.

But the shoreline has come to meet them because the ocean has risen.

And the encodements of our society are around us too.

These are the remnants of fire pits.

They're all over this area.

The park service put them in, and the ocean has come and removed them.

To protect them, you can see these granite blocks that were in placed, nobody remembers now, maybe 50 years ago, to kind of hold the shoreline in place.

They've been ineffective.

The ocean has come around it, and you can even sort of get a sense for the how much the shoreline has changed here.

But by considering that these rocks were probably put right at the edge of what was the upland at that time.

(cheerful instrumental music) We're at a another common coastal setting along the main coast.

This is Thompson Island, but behind me you can see this grassy area here.

It's a special kind of grass.

This is a salt marsh.

And this particular grass here is called salt hay because in the olden days the colonists used to graze their cows on it.

But what's important to us here is that this grass lives within a vertical range of about, oh, five or six inches.

It can't go above it 'cause it'll be out-competed by the upland plants.

It can't go below it because the ocean will drown it.

And so it's narrowly confined between mean high water, the average height of high tide, and the highest high water that will happen on a full moon or a new moon when the tides are unusually high.

So it's trapped, it can't move.

What's astounding is that if we were, this is a park, we can't core here, but if we could drill down here, we would come up with meters and meters of peat from this plant always living in the same envelope of the tidaled range.

Between mean high water and mean highest high water.

But we can go down meters below this, 10 feet, and it'll be the same plant.

So it tracks the fact that the ocean level has risen because this plant can only live in that narrow restricted range.

We have means to radiocarbon date this plant from the bottom.

I can know when that was mean high water, and subsequently track it coming up through cores.

And we've done that all along the main coast, and been able to measure how sea level has risen along the coast over the last few thousand years.

So it's been a huge addition of water to the ocean, and it's gotten warmer, and which means it's expanded and takes up room.

But so much so that the shoreline is just literally being driven landward by this rise in the ocean.

(cheerful instrumental music) Over here is the Bar Harbor tide gauge.

Tide gauge is our devices that are installed by the federal government to measure and predict the tides.

And they exist in all US cities.

This one was built in 1947.

Portland was in 1912, and others go into the 1800s.

And they're very good at that, they help us predict tides.

But by the 1940s, when this was put in people began looking at the records, and they observed that the tides just didn't go up and down.

They went up more than they went down.

And as a consequence, they came to the conclusion that contemporary sea level is rising.

Here, it has risen at 2.3 millimeters per year.

Seems small, but it's every year.

In my lifetime, the water level here has risen 6.3 inches.

That's a fair amount, that's the base level.

On a storm, of course it's much higher.

And that's happening all over the place.

The water is just slowly but surely coming up.

And we're finding areas, particularly manmade land, like this is a parking lot here, the Portland waterfront will be underwater more and more as as the ocean simply comes up.

These structures were built at a different time to a different level of the ocean, and now they're succumbing to the fact that the ocean is rising.

(boat engine revving) Behind me is a sea cave.

It's called the Anemone Cave, and it's built into this cliff here of granite and some other rocks.

But what's important to us about that is that it's where caves along the ocean have to be.

It's pretty much at the high watermark, the average level of high tide.

You can't form a cave above high tide in this kind of rock, because the waves don't get there often enough.

And you can't form it below it because there's no way to excavate.

So a cave like this marks the average level of high tide.

Until it collapses, but then a new cave will form.

We'll see that there are other caves on this island and other places that are well above the present level of the ocean, suggesting to us that the ocean, in fact at one point in the past was much higher than today.

If we were standing here 15,000 years ago, there would be glaciers receding in the distance, but they would be what are called tide water.

They'd float up and down with the tides.

And this area that we're standing on right here just above present sea level would've been about 150 feet deep.

(dynamic instrumental music) Behind me down below there is Monument Cove.

Now, it's a beautiful cove, it's Boulder Beach.

You can see the big rounded boulders of granite and the cliffs.

Common enough scene on the main coast, this is a rather spectacular example.

But there are beaches like this, there are cliffs like this, and there's a feature like this thing I'll talk about in a moment.

But to point out the boulders, people think of a beach as always being sand.

A beach is a deposit formed by waves.

Here there's no sand available, and so the waves have made a beach out of big, round granite boulders.

The the rock erodes a bit.

Those blocks come off, they're angular.

And truly in a winter of storms, they're rounded into almost spheres.

Boulder Beach, always at high tide.

You're not gonna find one down below necessarily.

But then against the sea cliff in the backdrop, you can see a standing column of granite, and it is attached to, it is bedrock.

It's attached to the granite at the bottom.

It's not something that moved there.

And it's an erosional feature.

Once it was a cave, there used to be an arch over it, it was an arch, a sea arch once, it was a cave.

But it's evolved down to now that's all gone, and we have the freestanding sea stack.

And again, these exist pretty much at mean high water.

If you find them higher than that, well, then the water had to be higher than that because these don't form overnight, these take some time to form.

But here we see a beautiful example of it.

Today is a really beautiful, calm summer day.

These are not the conditions under which this beach formed or is even maintained.

In the winter, it is very different.

We couldn't come down here.

The waves could even be crashing up this high, spray certainly would be.

And that's when the waves can come in and quarry these large granite blocks.

You might think about can a wave move those?

A wave can move those easily.

There's rocks all around me here that have been thrown up from below by storm waves.

So winter is the time.

Not easy to get to in the winter.

Quite dangerous, I wouldn't be here in a big winter storm.

That's when those boulders are active, and now that they've been freed up and are loose, literally waves will pick them up and smash them against that cliff in the background, continuing to erode it in.

And that process will just continue.

Next, we are going to go to a spot about 220 feet above this, and we're gonna look for some similar features to what we've seen.

Caves, cliffs, boulder beaches and sea stacks, but not at sea level anymore.

We're gonna go to where the ocean once was, 200 or so feet above this elevation.

(dynamic instrumental music) This is a cave.

You can see well into it, and there's a rounded boulder in the very back of it.

But we're not at sea level today.

This is a paleo sea cave.

'Cause the only way you can form a cave like this is for waves to break against this.

And if it were glaciers, you'd expect angular broken up rock fragments.

But when you look in there, you can see a spherical rock.

Probably the last big storm, the ice was still melting away back on the mainland, and the sea level was high because the ice weighed so much it pushed the earth's crust down.

And waves were rolling in here.

We're about 220 feet above contemporary sea level, but it's the same kind of features we could see down below.

The sea cliff, the sea cave.

If you could be here as, well, of course you'd be underwater.

I mean, the water would be right there, but there would've been no trees obviously, it would've been the ocean.

But then as the glaciers melted away, the land lifted up higher and higher to its normal elevation where it is today, and the ocean fell.

There still would've been no trees.

It would've been, it was a very cold climate then, tundra.

It would take, I'm guessing, a thousand or 2000 years for plants to be able to come in here, colonize this, and eventually some trees would start to grow.

But certainly, the indigenous people who lived in this area knew of this.

Nice place to go on a hot day to camp maybe.

It's granite above and below, so you're not gonna, there's no archeology site here, you can't dig down and find anything.

But I'm sure this has been used by many people for a very long period of time.

(dynamic instrumental music) I'm here on Day Mountain in Acadia National Park.

It's a forest today, but it wasn't always.

I'm staring off here to the northeast, the direction from which our winter storm waves come.

And at the end of the last ice age, the earth's crust was lowered here and the ocean came in.

And this was the shoreline.

Behind me was a sea cliff.

And specifically behind me right there is a paleo or an ancient sea stack, much like the one we observed on a monument cove.

Now, this would've been active for probably no more than 500 years.

15,000 years ago, the waves would've struck here.

Nobody probably lived here then.

In fact, certainly nobody did.

And again, as the water went back down, this would've become a tundra probably.

But for a brief period of time, 220 feet above modern sea level, this was the shoreline.

And if you really wanna come here, this is Day Mountain.

We came off the carriage path, and you can walk along the length of it.

We're not gonna go there, but there's a boulder beach about a half a mile along that's really spectacular.

Seen a lot of changes in water volume in the ocean.

As the ice melted, the ocean rose.

The ice pushed the lands crust down, and the ocean came in.

I'll thank you for watching.

You can see this and other things like it at the Climate Change Institute website at the University of Maine.

(dynamic instrumental music) (rhythmic instrumental music) - Hi, my name is Dr. Cindy Isenhour.

I'm an associate professor at the University of Maine in the Climate Change Institute.

My work focuses on environmental policy, climate policy, and particularly the climate impact of consumption.

Let me tell you one thing I've learned, and that's that while climate drivers are very complex.

One of the most important anthropogenic drivers or drivers that are caused by humans is what we call the linear materials economy.

(trailer clatters) It takes a lot of energy and emissions to extract resources, manufacture products, and ship them around the world, then sell them, use them, and dispose of them.

(forklift engine revving) In fact, about 60% of global emissions can be traced to the production or use of household consumer goods and services.

We know this because we have a wide range of tools that we use.

From national level emissions inventories, all the way down to fine scale analyses of the emissions embedded in certain products, like various types of plastics that you see here.

One of the most important tools we have is called lifecycle analysis.

This allows us to look at the emissions embedded in a product all the way from the beginning of its lifecycle, the extraction of materials, through production processes, distribution, retail, the used phase and then disposal.

For everything like shoes, pots and pans, toys.

Lifecycle analyses tell us that for most materials, the majority of emissions occur upstream during extraction and production.

Here's something else I've learned, and this is the good news.

It's important to reduce the energy associated with production by using more efficient technologies or alternative energy sources.

But lifecycle analyses tell us that we can achieve even more reductions by keeping most existing products in use longer.

Essentially delaying or displacing the need to replace them with new extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal, and all the energy that that entails.

Even better news is that by reducing our demand for new products, we can address a whole range of problems in addition to climate change, like resource depletion, growing waste streams, and biodiversity loss.

So in addition to advocating for climate action, there's something important that we can all do to mitigate climate change.

And that's by participating in more circular economies.

By repairing, buy more durable goods, and by ensuring that we're participating in secondhand markets.

(rhythmic instrumental music) We're here today at a facility that processes donations.

All the goods here have been for sale already in secondhand stores.

And today workers are tasked with trying to sort them into piles for recycling, for resale, and unfortunately sometimes for trash.

We can all contribute to this important work by buying durable, high quality goods, by repairing our items, by offering them for resale, by donating them, and by making sure that we're contributing to a more circular sustainable economy.

(rhythmic instrumental music) (adventurous instrumental music) - We are now, that we've turned 50, one of the oldest multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary climate research units in the world.

And we're very proud of the fact that the institute has evolved over the last 50 years to do many more things.

Which is what makes it so exciting, you're constantly learning.

And when you take students into the field, you can watch exactly what it was like the first time you went in the field.

It's always invigorating to see new people come in the field.

In the early years, we as an institute were involved in a program called CLIMAP.

It was the first approach at understanding the real differences between the ice age world and the modern world.

The next big jump scientifically for the institute would've been the understanding of the significance of glacier's large ice sheets and how warming the ocean can result in massive losses of ice.

I think the next big jump is around the period of acid rain.

And people like Steve Norton in our institute were pioneers in understanding how we had polluted the atmosphere, and led to the loss of forests.

We recovered ice cores from Greenland to demonstrate that humans really did create acid rain, that it wasn't just something that occurred naturally.

And then we began to go into the period of greenhouse gas warming and the massive loss of glaciers, rise of sea level.

We've been pioneers in organizing large research programs, the International Trans-Artic Scientific Expedition, 21 countries, the Greenland Ice Sheet Program, which had 25 US institutions, the National Geographic and Rolex Everest Expedition with multiple countries.

So we've been big leaders in research.

And now that we are into the period in which people understand that climate is changing, we've been pioneers in terms of software development.

Creating software that not only allows people to understand and provide perspective, but also to make it publicly available.

(adventurous instrumental music) The biological side, which has been very strong on the institute, understanding how lakes and the Arctic will or will not take up more carbon as things get warmer.

How lakes in Maine are impacted by pollutant inflow, working with the CDC in Maine to talk about predictions for the migration of ticks as a consequence of warming.

I believe we were the first or one of the first to ever develop a state-based climate change report, which we upgraded over the years.

And now under the Mills administration, she enacted the Maine Climate Council, of which many members of our institute are involved.

Which is very important because they provide a voice for the things that we do, for what the state does, for what the interests are, and they also see how the process works.

And then of course we are trying to build even more associations with engineers so that we can contribute to an understanding of what are the potential sources for renewable energies.

We are in many ways the glue that holds a lot of climate change together.

We're signature research program.

We have partners in the state, we have partners nationally, internationally.

So it's really all about good partnerships, collaboration.

We also have a remarkable array of graduate students.

Graduate students who are an integral part of our institute.

They're very important to us.

I personally consider them to be junior colleagues.

You work with 'em closely, and they each come with a different skillset, which is really exciting.

And they bring, as a consequence, something different to the institute with every single new student.

There are two things that probably characterize our institute.

One is collaboration, and the other one is the concept of change, which is our middle name.

We are trying very hard to understand from indigenous people in the state and in places like Greenland what their view is of what's going on.

And the way other cultures, indigenous cultures view their place in the environment is very important.

And of course the local tribes in Maine, there's an immense amount to be learned.

Only reason that they need a scientist there is that it's somebody who can translate it to the rest of the world, which they're not given the opportunity to do.

It's critically important to everybody, but for our students, we have the ability to introduce 'em to see other things, other places, other people.

And it's very comfortable to stay home, but it's critical, particularly when you're younger, to experience things.

(adventurous instrumental music) It's important that the institute keep evolving, and drawing in more and more expertise, and synthesizing that expertise.

We have been primarily the messengers of what's happening.

We need to become more involved in the solution.

We are hopeful in the institute we wouldn't go out and do the things and go to places we go if we weren't hopeful about whether it was valuable, whether or not things would work out okay.

And I think that this latest generation, they understand that this is really not just about getting a job and doing all the same things that were always done before, that they can actually do something to have great effect is very valuable.

(adventurous instrumental music)