What Mud From Glacial Lakes Can Tell Us About Our History | National Geographic
[Music] Climate change is all around us. Now we've gathered data; it's real. We see it in the record, and while climate has changed over the whole lifecycle of this planet, the changes that we're seeing now are very dramatic.
[Music] Everest is iconic; everybody knows it's the highest mountain in the world. The National Geographic divers 2019 expedition is different than a lot of expeditions I've been involved in, certainly the most multidisciplinary. Once you get to about five thousand meters, you are above where most of the science on the planet has been done. Lakes contain layers of sediment that have accumulated in the bottom. It's a bit like a tape recorder, year by year, what's gone on in the climate, what the temperature was, what the life-forms were around. So it was proposed that to add to this climate story, we go to some of the nearby lakes and do some coring.
I [Music] started my work in Nepal in 1985. One of the more meaningful things about coming to Nepal has been a close collaboration with Dr. Ananta ARL. Cheers! There are a lot of exciting potentials to learn about past environments, to learn about environmental activity. These past events are archived in hueco sediments.
Be working on getting the frame together on the yellow boats solar project here is to take rafts and go out on this lake to take a sediment core. That involves sending a plastic tube down into the lake sediment, bringing that back up with the sedimentary layers in it, and then doing a number of different types of analyses, looking at those old life forms and looking at the sediment itself.
[Music] Chorong high mountain lakes pose a challenge for a number of reasons. If you were somewhere where you could drive to the lake, you could have a very stable heavy-duty boat that you could car from. Not an option up here in the high mountains. One of the first challenges was to actually create that stable boat platform; make sure all the boats have completion doubles.
[Music] The other challenge that we ran into was that we were coming in at the tail of winter and the beginning of spring, and so every lake except the first one all had a bit of ice on them. Lakes 4, 5, and 6 were frozen solid. So here we are; we've got the boats pumped up, ready to go, and hold those vertical in the hole.
[Music] Okay, yep, strap just feels like it's going down. [Music] Turns out this lake is deeper than we thought. We were right at the limit of our rope links on the first core, so when we pulled it up, it was full of water. It didn't—it didn't go; if there's no sediment in it, we kind of reevaluated the situation, took another attempt at it, but each try we figured something else out.
Got it lowered down slowly so we could really feel when we got on the bottom. It was like all of a sudden everything came together.
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] We are very successful now; we are very happy. The mod can help us to understand the climatic fluctuation in this area.
[Music] My work with Ananta has been critical in this whole process. We've grown up seeing geology in slightly different ways. We've brought students with us, so the students have been able to benefit from the work that we do. He was really demanding; getting these cores out is gonna help us predict what's gonna happen in the future.
Our helpful first goal would be then to get incremental analyses up through the core and learn what we can about those years that we've collected information about: water temperature, life forms that were available, CO2 content within the lake. This is an amazingly exciting expedition; it will no doubt lead to many, many other studies.
The Himalayas are the lifeblood for 20% of the world's population. It determines whether or not there will be a successful period of agriculture. It determines whether or not there will be extreme floods and loss of life and infrastructure.
The ultimate goal of this project is to turn the science into something that has value for the people. By understanding how the climate is changing, we can help people that are in those areas make adaptations that will be sustainable for them.
[Music] You.