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00:00Every morning, I check the weather, but lately, I find myself wondering, what's even normal anymore?
00:21Whew, it's windy.
00:23A powerful storm system is behind a surge of tornado activity.
00:27Breaking rain is flooding entire towns.
00:28B.C. is in a state of emergency as wildfires continue to grow.
00:33As people fled for their lives, the fear was there would be nothing to return to.
00:38It's hard to know what's coming.
00:40Here in B.C., the wildfire season is getting longer, more intense, and harder to predict.
00:46And the smoke doesn't always stay local.
00:48It can drift all the way across the continent.
00:51We can all see the weather's getting more intense, and I want to understand what's setting it in motion.
00:57So, I'm meeting the scientists who study the invisible, yet powerful, forces that are driving extreme events.
01:04Could shifting air currents make a heat wave worse?
01:07It was so unprecedented to have temperatures that were that high.
01:11How do rising temperatures affect volcanoes?
01:14Oh my gosh!
01:16If one system changes, could it throw off the weather somewhere else?
01:20What happens in the Sahara is connected to our daily lives here in North America.
01:26And just how far could shifts in weather reach?
01:29It will have implications for the wider ocean and the globe itself.
01:33This is a story about how currents flowing through the ocean, the atmosphere, and even deep in the ground are triggering wild swings in weather.
01:41Miami is on the front lines of an increasingly chaotic forecast.
01:55Behind the scenes, meteorologists like Larissa Abreu have to deconstruct what's going on with local weather every single day.
02:03This has been the headliner across the weather department.
02:07We continue to watch the storm.
02:09These storms are getting scarier.
02:11They're getting stronger.
02:13They're more intense.
02:14When we're talking about extreme weather, I make sure I leave no stones unturned.
02:20The more you understand the science, the better and more accurate your delivery is.
02:25This sometimes is life or death, but you have to deliver it because at the end of the day, you can't stop the weather.
02:33Does it seem like there are more extreme weather events now than when you started work here?
02:38100 percent.
02:38Being here in South Florida, I think that that is all people talk about.
02:43And it's a coastal community, so you see the impacts of climate change more with disappearing shorelines, with hurricanes, with intense rain, with heat, with flooding.
02:54And so there are definitely more extremes in the weather department.
02:58I'm from the West Coast, and our extreme weather is about heat domes, and forest fires, and smoke, and atmospheric rivers.
03:06I mean, all of these are unusual, but they're becoming more frequent.
03:10So every year we continue to break records as far as temperatures, and this year has been Earth's warmest year on record.
03:20And unfortunately, we've seen that happen the year before that as well.
03:25There's so many impacts with extreme heat and how it's a domino effect in so many ways.
03:34A heat advisory that's locked in place from the changes to the extreme summers that the southeast are seeing,
03:41to the huge and strong storms that we continue to see every year in the Atlantic,
03:46are all related to the warming in the Arctic.
03:49I mean, it's all connected.
03:53The Arctic is a long way from Miami, but it's amplifying extreme weather here and across much of the planet.
04:01To understand how it can have such a wide-ranging impact,
04:04a team of German scientists launched the largest polar expedition ever.
04:10The Arctic is absolutely key for the global climate.
04:14It's the epicenter of global warming.
04:17No other place of our planet does warm as rapidly as the Arctic.
04:21It's three times, perhaps four times faster in the Arctic than in the rest of the world.
04:26And that has severe implications for weather and climate in the northern mid-latitudes where we live.
04:32The expedition involved freezing their ship into the ice
04:35and spending a year investigating what could be speeding up the warming.
04:40One factor stood out.
04:42The Arctic has lost nearly a third of its summer sea ice.
04:45And that's triggering a feedback loop called the albedo effect.
04:49The rapid decline of the sea ice in the Arctic is directly relevant for climate and weather in our latitude.
04:56That is because when the sea ice declines and retreats, then you get a dark, open surface.
05:03Where you previously had a white surface of the ice.
05:05That dark ocean can absorb much more of the sunlight, of the energy coming from the sun, and it amplifies the warming.
05:13Bright ice reflects most of the sun's energy.
05:17But as the ice melts, the darker ocean is exposed.
05:20And that surface absorbs heat instead of bouncing it away.
05:23The more it melts, the faster things heat up.
05:27It's like swapping a white shirt for a black one on a hot day.
05:30You heat up faster.
05:31And if the Arctic is now warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet,
05:37the temperature contrast between the cold Arctic and the warming with latitudes will reduce.
05:43And the jet stream becomes less stable.
05:46And that is connected to extreme weather.
05:48The jet stream is a fast-moving river of air that flows in a fairly steady path
05:54when there's a strong contrast between the cold north and the warm south.
05:58But with that contrast breaking down, Larissa is watching things closely.
06:03How influential is the jet stream on the weather that we see?
06:06It is extremely influential.
06:08The jet stream is a column of air, and it basically drives our weather in this country from west to east.
06:16So this is an area of high pressure that we're watching here.
06:19It's the jet stream, and it's bringing in some rain out towards the Pacific Northwest
06:23and even western portions of Canada.
06:26It influences the weather we see every day.
06:28But the jet stream itself is shaped by huge invisible forces
06:32that atmospheric scientists like Rachel White are working to decode.
06:37These things are happening at such a scale above our atmosphere
06:41that it's really hard to wrap our heads around.
06:44Yeah, it's happening at the top of the troposphere.
06:47We're like, whoa, 10 kilometers above the Earth's surface?
06:51And so the jet stream's roughly about the height of where airplanes fly.
06:55And so it actually means it does impact the speed at which planes can go.
07:01And the speed of the jet stream depends on the temperature difference between the Arctic and the equator.
07:06If you have a bigger difference between your equator and your pole, you'll have a stronger jet stream in the middle.
07:13But if you have a weaker difference, then you're going to have a weaker jet stream.
07:17The thing that climate change is doing, if you look at the surface temperatures,
07:22is the Arctic is warming so much faster than the equator.
07:26Because we're weakening this equator-to-pole temperature gradient, we're going to weaken the jet.
07:31That's going to create more waves.
07:33We're going to see more extreme events.
07:35To show how waves in the atmosphere shape what happens on the ground,
07:38Dr. White and her team map real-world data onto a pretty unique projector.
07:43This one is showing us the jet stream and surface temperatures at the same time.
07:48So the jet stream is the white band typically moving from west to east.
07:53And sometimes they stop moving and they become sort of what we call quasi-stationary.
07:58And that's what happens in some of these extreme events and can lead to these extreme temperatures.
08:03And so this is part of Lualawi's research, is trying to understand these quasi-stationary waves.
08:09Let's stop and unpack quasi-stationary.
08:12The jet stream isn't just for planes.
08:14It moves weather along, like a high-speed highway.
08:17But when there's a sharp bend, traffic slows and the weather can get stuck in place.
08:22Climate change is making these atmospheric traffic jams three times more common
08:27and more deadly.
08:29This is what happened during one of the most extreme weather events of my lifetime.
08:34On this one, we have the 2021 Pacific Northwest state wave.
08:38And you'll see the jet stream cuts off and almost becomes a circular around that region.
08:43Those red colors, those are showing temperature anomalies during the event.
08:46And when you are contained in that circle, actually, you also don't see any clouds
08:50because weather is almost not allowed in that region.
08:54Certainly for those of us who were there and lived through it, it really felt like you were suffocating.
09:00There was nowhere to go.
09:02We broke temperature records for three days in a row.
09:05On the fourth day, the town of Lytton burned to the ground.
09:10Over 600 people died in B.C. alone.
09:12I mean, this was unbelievable times.
09:16That's what these atmospheric blocks are doing, that the longer this atmospheric circulation
09:22sits in this wavy configuration, the worse those extreme events can get.
09:29But interestingly, it's the same sort of atmospheric circulation pattern that causes cold extremes.
09:34A historic winter storm brings Texas to a standstill.
09:39Dozens of deaths were reported, many from hypothermia.
09:42On this other plot, we're looking at the Texas cold snap that happened in February 2021.
09:49There was a lot of power out of this because when such events happen in regions that are not used to it,
09:54there's no infrastructure to deal with these kinds of events.
09:57A cold wave is so rare in Texas.
10:01And you can see that as the jet stream passes through this North America region,
10:06by meandering like that, this jet stream is bringing cold air from the poles.
10:10Here, the purple colors are very low temperatures with respect to what we see regularly or on average.
10:15And it was a very significant event.
10:18Looking at it from here, you really can see how connected everything is.
10:22Like it's all one system.
10:24Exactly, all of it's connected.
10:26Jet streams do more than just carry storms.
10:30They also move dust from one side of the world to the other.
10:35Here on a rooftop weather station in Florida,
10:39atmospheric chemists are tracking these particles and their surprising impact on temperatures.
10:45When we think about climate change, at least, I don't think about dust and particles in the air,
10:51but that is such a big part of what you do.
10:52Yes, and dust has been a real big player in many different facets of Earth's climate.
10:59On dusty days, we don't get as much visibility.
11:03Well, that also affects, you know, the temperature that we experience, right?
11:06When it's a clear day right now, it's quite warm.
11:09But on a dustier day, we might not get as much sun affecting us.
11:13Dust is kind of like sunscreen.
11:17It blocks some of the harmful rays, and this cools things down.
11:21But not all dust is the same.
11:23And Dr. Gaston is especially interested in the type that travels all the way from the Saharan desert.
11:29What happens in the Sahara is connected to our daily lives here in North America.
11:35You have intense heating of the North African continent.
11:38This lifts dust from the Sahara desert into the atmosphere.
11:43The Saharan air layer, once it gets lofted, gets pushed across the Atlantic Ocean due to the jet.
11:49And because it's high up in the atmosphere, as it transports across the Atlantic Ocean, it descends slowly.
11:59And that's how it's able to make its way all the way across into the Amazon rainforest.
12:04It's like a fertilizer, and it can stimulate plants that then take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
12:11The climate system impacts how much dust is in the atmosphere.
12:15And then the dust in the atmosphere, in turn, impacts the climate system.
12:20Since dust plays a powerful role in shaping temperatures, Dr. Gaston and her team want to know whether it's reaching Miami.
12:28What we can do with the tower is this is a high-powered pump that can actually suck air out of the atmosphere.
12:36We try to piece together where these particles are coming from.
12:40Is the particle coming from the ocean?
12:42Is it coming from the Sahara?
12:43Is it coming from the causeway?
12:46And in my lab, we can get an assessment of what's in the air.
12:50This is blowing my mind.
12:52I never knew there were so many different types of dust.
12:55So basically what you're telling me is you're a chemical detective.
12:58Is that right?
12:59Yeah, that's exactly right.
13:03So we've measured the dust going back to the 1960s.
13:06And we have seen shifts in how much dust comes to the Caribbean and to the Americas.
13:12When we have changes in air currents and pressure systems, it can shift the dust such that it doesn't go to the Amazon.
13:19That could really reduce how much carbon gets absorbed by the Amazon.
13:24And we'd have an increase in warming.
13:26Like any good detective story, the tale of Saharan dust has a scary twist.
13:32When it drifts off its usual path, it's bad news.
13:36Not just for keeping temperatures down, but for hurricane season too.
13:39Storms require a lot of moisture.
13:44And so when that desert air interacts with a brewing storm, it can suck some of that moisture out of it.
13:51And that can possibly diminish the storm.
13:53So we were in Barbados when Hurricane Beryl hit.
13:57We had a big dust cloud coming.
13:59And at first, people thought, well, the dust should suppress the storm from intensifying too rapidly.
14:06But what happened was we had a rain event.
14:08It washed the dust out of the atmosphere.
14:11And it facilitated Beryl spinning up and intensifying into as bad of a storm as it was.
14:17Beryl wasn't just destructive.
14:20It made history as the earliest Category 5 hurricane the Atlantic has ever seen.
14:26Storms are now getting much worse, much faster.
14:29This is the world's largest hurricane simulator.
14:32And scientists are using it to investigate what's driving storms to these new extremes.
14:38Here, we focus on what happens where the two fluids that are so important on our planet, how the air and the water mix.
14:45So a lot of things that are really important for weather have to do with how those two things interact.
14:49So air and water, they interact all the time, but we can't really see what's going on.
14:56And so it's so helpful when you have a modeling system like this where you can visualize it.
15:02So can you walk me through a Category 5 class hurricane?
15:09When we turn on our fan, you'll see that the wind will start to cycle up and the waves will start at the front and start to grow.
15:19It's probably about a Category 1 now.
15:22For a hurricane to grow, first of all, you need warm water that is heating the lower atmosphere and evaporating water.
15:38And you need all the other atmospheric conditions to be right.
15:41It needs to be kind of an unstable condition where you have the air can start rising.
15:45And there's not a lot of dry air in the atmosphere, like from the Saharan Desert.
15:50If all the ingredients are in place, that rising air starts rotating and can grow into a hurricane.
15:59Well, this is a Cat 5 now.
16:01Holy moly!
16:15The simulator cranks the wind to 300 kilometers an hour.
16:25It's the only one in the world to reach this speed.
16:28And it shows how sea spray adds heat and moisture to supercharge a hurricane.
16:33To get up to the Category 5, there'll be a tremendous amount of spray in the air and almost continuous breaking of the waves.
16:39In the ocean, you can go from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in just over a day.
16:46And that is called rapid intensification.
16:49Your house may lose the roof, maybe destroy yourself, but you may still survive.
16:53But if you have 10 feet of water in your home and you don't have any way to get out,
16:58it's really hard to survive that situation.
17:02What's terrifying isn't just their strength.
17:05It's how fast hurricanes are intensifying.
17:08It's even shocking veteran meteorologists.
17:11Hurricane Milton has been rapidly intensifying already.
17:15John Morales, his demeanor while reporting the weather has always been cool like a cucumber.
17:21And so to see that man with such a legacy break down because he understood the severeness of Hurricane Milton at the time,
17:32I think it struck a chord with many.
17:34He has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.
17:41I apologize.
17:42This is just horrific.
17:45Where the storm was in that particular moment, it was hitting an area that they have just basic necessities.
17:52Not an area that has the infrastructure to withhold and survive a Category 5 storm.
18:01Rapid intensification is becoming more common, mostly because there's a lot more warm water out there.
18:06If you have more warm water, you have more potential energy there that the hurricane can grow on.
18:10Hurricanes are now intensifying over the hottest oceans on record.
18:16But the ocean's role in driving extreme weather doesn't stop there.
18:23As a marine biologist, I've always been focused on looking down into the water.
18:27But learning how ocean currents affect weather makes me think about what's happening above.
18:34Brad de Young is studying how currents are changing and what that means for the forecast.
18:39So the ocean obviously drives the atmosphere both in heating and cooling it.
18:44And if you don't know the ocean, then you can't include that in your weather forecast.
18:49Forecasting used to rely mostly on data from the skies.
18:52But the atmosphere shifts so quickly that predicting anything beyond a few days was unreliable.
19:00Up until about a decade ago, it was impossible to make a weather forecast longer than about five days.
19:06You can now get forecasts to between seven and ten days.
19:10The reason is we have a whole program of these autonomous floats providing the ocean information
19:15that allows you to see beyond the five-day window.
19:19I joined the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada to launch instruments
19:25that track how the ocean moves heat and shapes the weather.
19:30The gear is high-tech, but surprisingly simple to launch.
19:34You'll pick it up and you'll just kind of dump it in.
19:39There's a program called Argo with almost 4,000 floats.
19:45They're measuring mostly temperature and salinity.
19:48This program has already collected more data in 10 years
19:53than all oceanographers did in the previous century.
19:58Perfect.
19:59Wow.
20:00That's how you do science.
20:01Sciencing.
20:03We also use ocean gliders, which look like torpedoes.
20:07And so all these cool technologies allow us to make measurements that even 20 years ago were just undreamt of.
20:16How have things changed over those 20 years?
20:20Well, the big story is the ocean has absorbed about 90% of the heat as a result of global warming.
20:26So most of the heat isn't in the atmosphere.
20:29This is a huge finding.
20:31With the ocean absorbing so much extra heat, the effects are far-reaching.
20:36While the jet stream acts like a highway for weather, ocean currents work more like conveyor belts,
20:43moving heat slowly around the planet.
20:45One of the most powerful is the AMOC.
20:49It's moving more than 100 times all of the energy production of all humans everywhere on the planet.
20:55From everything we have, electric power plants and you name it.
20:59And it's doing that every year.
21:01You slow that down by even 10% and that's still 10 times the energy production of humans.
21:08So small changes can have big impacts.
21:11Billions of people would feel these impacts.
21:15If the AMOC moved less heat, weather could be disrupted across the planet.
21:20Short for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the system includes the Gulf Stream,
21:26which carries warm water northward.
21:29There, it cools, sinks into the deep ocean, and flows back south.
21:34The AMOC is what keeps Europe milder than it would be otherwise.
21:43The oceans cover 70% of the planet.
21:47So, obviously, to regulate the climate at the global level, it's extremely important.
21:52They will also redistribute the heat from the equator to the poles.
21:56If there is no redistribution of heat, it will be much colder in the poles, much colder in the equator.
22:02To show what's driving the circulation, oceanographer Didier Swingadu set up a simple demo using warm and cold water.
22:10This aquarium represents, in fact, the ocean.
22:13From the tropics, here, to the pools, here, to the pools, here.
22:20You have cold here, here, here, here, and here, here.
22:25And so, this difference of density, which we call a gradient, will generate the current current.
22:32As the water cools down, it sinks because it's denser than warmer water, and that sinking helps power the global conveyor belt.
22:40But Arctic warming is changing the balance, as the surface ocean is becoming less cold and less salty.
22:48The Arctic milk water is releasing fresh water into the surface ocean.
22:52If you add too much fresh water, then the water never gets dense enough to sink, and so that stops happening.
23:00And then that changes the way in which the whole ocean circulation develops.
23:05The AMOC is under pressure, and tracking such a big system is hard.
23:09Scientists don't yet know when all this fresh water might jam the planet's conveyor belt, or how bad it could be.
23:17But one key place could hold important clues, the Florida Straits.
23:21Between Miami and the Bahamas, the Gulf Stream flows through a narrow channel at full force.
23:28The Gulf Stream contains the water that eventually will overturn in the northern North Atlantic.
23:36If the Gulf Stream's weakening, that's a sign that the overturning is weakening.
23:41Oceanographer Lisa Beale is leading a study that deploys ocean moorings evenly,
23:46all the way across the Florida Straits.
23:49She's searching for signs that the current might be shifting.
24:03Whenever you put anything at the bottom of the ocean, right, it has to withstand a lot of pressure.
24:07These things sit at the bottom of the Florida Straits in hundreds of meters of water.
24:12So this instrument, it has a current meter that measures the velocity of the water as it flows past the instrument.
24:20We have them all programmed to send 16 pings to the surface every 10 minutes.
24:25So it's really a very high volume of data, yeah.
24:29No kidding.
24:30We usually go on the University of Miami vessel, the Walton Smith.
24:34So that's how we've been taking out our instruments and laying them in the Florida Current.
24:40Half of our instruments are actually in Bahamian waters and that feels really special to me.
24:46I grew up in the Bahamas and when I was 50 and my island was destroyed by Hurricane Joaquin.
24:52And that was a pivotal moment for me and it helped kind of inspire this desire to work in the climate change space to help my country.
24:59So do you feel empowered to make that difference and to be part of that change?
25:04Yeah, definitely.
25:05And for me, this research is really important because it helps us understand more about how changes in the Florida Current are really impacting those day-to-day flooding, sea-level rise events in both countries.
25:17It often floods here even when it hasn't rained, something known as sunny-day flooding.
25:24In Miami, we don't always know when to expect, you know, really bad flooding because it's not just the tides but the strength of the Gulf Stream and the amount of heat it's carrying can also change sea level.
25:36The sea surface is about a meter higher in the Bahamas because of the Gulf Stream.
25:42So they wouldn't have the same rise in seawater.
25:45Exactly.
25:46The strength of the current is proportional to the difference in sea level between Miami and the Bahamas.
25:53We have the lower sea level.
25:55So you can imagine if the current weakens, then the sea level could go up at the coast.
26:01And so we're trying to understand that aspect more.
26:05With a flood of new ocean data pouring in, leading climate modeler Ben Kurtman analyzes how ocean systems could change in the decades ahead.
26:14This server room, these are all data disks. Each one of these is just grinding away.
26:21So this picture is just showing you surface current speeds. This ribbon, that's the Gulf Stream. You see these less bright colors, the current is weaker than normal.
26:31And our estimates seem to suggest that we're going to see a reduction in the strength of that Gulf Stream associated with a weakening trend of the AMOC.
26:40So if the Gulf Stream starts to weaken, and the currents around here start to weaken, sea level is just going to keep going up.
26:49Sea level rise continues. Coastal flood risk goes up. And then you combine that with the ice sheets melting, you get yourself a perfect storm.
26:58So there's a Hollywood film called The Day After Tomorrow. In it, they say, OK, the AMOC has shut down. Is this at all likely?
27:07Not as far as that clearly. The time scales of the movie obviously required them to have that happen within days. And some of the results they showed were absurdly non-physical, massive water inundation of Manhattan.
27:22But I think reasonably likely are just really an acceleration of the patterns we've already been seeing. Extreme rainfall events, dramatic changes in hurricane patterns.
27:33It basically would shift the whole structure of our expectations for weather and climate. In the Atlantic in particular, but also around the planet.
27:43When the AMOC collapses in the movie, the North freezes almost overnight.
27:49In real life, changes would take decades. But if the odds of a plane crash were as high as this, no one would be flying.
27:58Turns out, the deep chill part isn't that far off.
28:02La diminution de la AMOC va impacter le climat de l'Europe.
28:06Peut avoir une espèce d'augmentation de la saisonnalité, avec des saisons beaucoup plus marquées finalement qu'à l'heure actuelle.
28:15Un gros effet sur les hivers qui resteront froid.
28:18La AMOC joue beaucoup sur la position des précipitations des moussons africaines.
28:30Donc là , on parle d'un impact majeur en termes d'agriculture.
28:34Parce qu'on aurait une diminution jusqu'à 30% de la précipitation.
28:37Donc un impact majeur sur la production du sorgho, du millier, qui est une culture vivrière pour les personnes habitant là .
28:43Et on parle de centaines de millions de personnes.
28:46Ce qui se passe dans l'Arctique n'est pas dans l'Arctique.
28:51Ce qui se passe dans l'Arctique, clairement, n'est pas dans l'Arctique.
28:55L'alimentation de l'alimentation de l'alimentation de l'eau,
28:58threatening the currents that have stabilised our climate for thousands of years.
29:02And the effects of melting ice don't stop there.
29:05They ripple through the atmosphere and down into the earth itself, disturbing another powerful force.
29:12Volcanoes.
29:13I've come to Mount Meagre to see how melting ice can trigger a local disaster.
29:27Here, a team from UBC's Landscapes of Climate Change lab is studying a disappearing glacier on top of a restless volcano.
29:36And now we can start to see the fumaroles.
29:39Dominique.
29:40Wow.
29:41So this does look different to the last time I was here.
29:44The fumaroles are a lot more obvious and a lot bigger.
29:47A fumarole is just a volcanic vent as spewing gases.
29:51And we're going to land on the glacier where those fumaroles are erupting from the surface of the ice.
29:58They've really melted through that glacier ice which has just gotten so much thinner with successive years of heat domes and heat waves and hot summers just really melting it down.
30:09And then we've been having milder and warmer winters so there's less accumulation and restoration of the glacier.
30:15Mount Meagre is the site of the largest known eruption in Canada.
30:20And it's still one of the country's most dangerous volcanoes in part because of how many people live nearby.
30:27The community of Pemberton, the Lilwat First Nation, farms and critical infrastructure all sit downstream.
30:45We've landed in fresh snow on Mount Meagre.
30:48This place is amazing.
30:51It's beautiful.
30:52But the volcano is more dangerous than it looks.
30:55The snow covers a landscape that's crumbling from the inside out.
30:59I'm going to walk in your tracks.
31:01Great idea.
31:02I'm totally going to face plan.
31:05As the glacier melts, it's triggering a cascade of changes that make the mountain more unstable.
31:13The team uses a drone to map the growing hazards.
31:19There's a lot of emergence of these enormous crevasses that we can see just to the left.
31:24The geothermal heat from the vents, that's also going to be contributing to that retreat of the ice, the warming of the landscape from the bottom up and creating these distinct forms that we're seeing today.
31:35Did you hear the rock fall?
31:36No.
31:37Oh, no.
31:38Yeah.
31:39So you can see over the funeral, the blue ice, and there's a lot of debris because it's all kind of unraveling from the valley walls.
31:46Rocks are falling off.
31:47There's a volcano right here.
31:49I mean, there's a lot of energy going on.
31:51Yes.
31:52Yes.
31:53Absolutely.
31:54And they're all kind of intersecting.
31:55As these glaciers are thinning, then the volcano gets to expand because it's under less pressure.
32:02So as it expands, it allows for more movement of magma and gases to come out.
32:08So you're getting these feedbacks between what's triggering the volcanic activity and then what's triggering the glacial activity.
32:15And the two of them are dancing.
32:21In Iceland, glaciers that once stretched for kilometers are retreating, and scientists fear this could trigger more eruptions with severe consequences.
32:31In 2023, the town of Grindavik was evacuated and left nearly empty for years.
32:38For Freystein Sigmundsen, it's part of a dangerous new chapter he's tracking.
32:44In my research on the volcanoes, the biggest surprise has been how the climate change can actually influence volcanoes.
32:53The volcanoes were very gentle to the people of Iceland for half a century.
32:58But what has happened here in Grindavik was truly a shock.
33:03There has been no eruptive activity here for 800 years.
33:08So now we have had, in the last three years, nine eruptions.
33:13Here in Grindavik, most visual is all the lava that has partly flowed into town.
33:18But actually, most of the damage is due to cracks, earthquakes and faulting.
33:23So this is destroying houses and property.
33:27While homes here are torn apart by ground movements, melting ice is reshaping the land on a much larger scale.
33:35We see that a very important effect of retreating glaciers is that they are causing uplift of the ground
33:42that we can measure one to few centimeters per year here in Iceland
33:46because there is less weight on the surface as the glaciers are thinning.
33:51This can change the pathways for new magma.
33:55And it can also influence the timing of eruptions.
33:58And in some cases, volcanoes can collect more magma.
34:08If retreating glaciers can help wake up volcanoes in Iceland,
34:12what does this mean for Mount Meagre in BC?
34:15About half its glacier has melted and shows no signs of stopping.
34:22And this was one of the trail cams from a couple of weeks ago.
34:26So all of this area was full of ice and crevasses only two years ago.
34:30And now it's just all this dark-colored debris.
34:34The harsh reality is it's disappearing before our eyes and permanently sometime soon.
34:41Is there anything unexpected that you've found because of the glacier melt?
34:46So we know that it is an active system.
34:49We know that there is movement happening beneath the surface.
34:53We know that the last eruption was 2,500 years ago.
34:57And that eruption was of a similar size and scale to that of Mount St. Helens.
35:02So now we've got an eruption down here.
35:06If another eruption happens again,
35:09you know, we could get an ash cloud which covers Vancouver and Seattle.
35:14And we could have lava flows which devastate an entire area.
35:18Science can't yet predict exactly when the next big eruption will happen.
35:23So researchers are watching for warning signs.
35:27These big plumes that are kind of coming directly towards us,
35:29so I think we should mask up for a little bit just until this next plume passes.
35:34Based on current data, an eruption doesn't appear imminent,
35:38but melting ice is making the mountain more unstable.
35:41And that's setting the stage for a different kind of disaster.
35:45This volcanic complex was the site of one of the largest catastrophic landslides in human history.
35:52Basically the volume of that peak that we can see behind us.
35:56And it all just comes crashing down.
35:59On the ride back, we followed the path of the landslide.
36:04So the landslide was caused by an intense heat wave.
36:0850 million cubic meters of sediment came rushing down that mountain at over 200 kilometers an hour
36:15and carved out this incredible flow path.
36:18And it went over 100 to 200 meters above the face of the valley.
36:23Wow.
36:24It was just splashing everywhere.
36:26But for many years before that failure, all of these different conditions were generated.
36:32So the history of glacial retreat makes it a weak slope, a mountain of bush.
36:36But when the heat wave happened, that rock expanded.
36:39It was enormous.
36:40And the impact on the landscape we can still see today, 10 years on.
36:46And we're going to be seeing the generations into the future.
36:49You can see also to the right, there's all of the agricultural land right by the river.
36:54So again, when we're thinking about the cascading impacts of landslides and mass movements,
37:00we're thinking about how the flood risks to those communities are changing and evolving over time.
37:05When you start thinking about all the impacts from climate,
37:09you're like, you're kind of sitting right downstream.
37:11You know, as these events become more frequent because of climate change,
37:14it's so important that we understand their dynamics so that we can better predict,
37:19better warn, and build that resilience.
37:22This is the new normal.
37:23This is the new normal.
37:25And it's repeating across the planet, from the Himalayas to the Andes.
37:30When extreme heat or rain hits slopes weakened by glacial melt, the result is often the same.
37:36catastrophic landslides and floods.
37:40With communities struggling to keep up, scientists are racing to turn insight into action.
37:46Behind every forecast is data gathered by scientists from around the world.
38:02They're working to understand how shifting jet streams, ocean currents, dust patterns, and even magma
38:09are driving more extreme events.
38:12But behind all of this change is a powerful invisible force, CO2.
38:17Emissions from cities, fires, and power plants have now hit record levels,
38:22and this will shape our lives for decades to come.
38:25This means scientists aren't just tracking change.
38:28They're studying how we adapt to it.
38:31If we stopped polluting CO2 and methane today, completely stop, dead stop,
38:35there'd be 30 more years of warming.
38:39We're going to have to figure out how to adapt to the continual changes.
38:42Do your models help directly in community-level events?
38:47Yes. So, in fact, I say that emphatically.
38:50We're actually working to develop forecast tools that can tell the risk of fire outbreaks in the West,
38:57where that's going to be concentrated so that material and resources and personnel can be redeployed in advance.
39:05In the shorter timescale, we're seeking to develop tools so that the forest fighter that's in the valley,
39:11right now fighting that fire, knows 30 minutes from now the wind's really going to pick up, I've got to bug out.
39:16I love that because it doesn't end with the model.
39:19You're saying this is what the data say and this is what we can do about it.
39:23That's right.
39:24If we use the best available science to guide where and how we build infrastructure, where and how we live, I'm very optimistic.
39:34Every scientist I met is looking to connect their data to daily life.
39:39Dr. Beal hopes to detect changes in the current early enough to help Miami prepare for sunny day flooding events.
39:46And at the hurricane simulator, Dr. House is contributing to the science that helps people survive deadly storms.
39:56Here we can make really detailed measurements that are difficult to make over the ocean.
40:01And that particularly is important for the really high winds in the hurricanes.
40:05We can get the necessary data to do better forecasting, which is a life safety thing.
40:09And then there's a longer term thing about better construction planning, building and zoning for the damages that can occur so the communities can be more resilient.
40:19So climate change is having a very chaotic and interconnected impact on our natural systems.
40:28And some catastrophic landslides have claimed the lives of individuals.
40:32And there haven't been these management systems in place.
40:36But we can make a difference.
40:38We can put sensors on a mountain and track the seismic records of these rock falls so that when something really big comes down, we're prepared for that.
40:47And it only takes a small group of people to share knowledge.
40:51And that stops a hazard from becoming a tragedy.
40:55To stay ahead of disaster, scientists are looking at how the pieces fit together.
41:00How one change in the landscape can ripple outward and trigger extreme events downstream.
41:07A lot of the research that my group has been doing has really been looking at what are those connections from the mountaintop to the ocean.
41:14So we're standing on the banks of the Lilluit River.
41:17Earlier we were up on the glacier and that glacier is what's feeding this river here.
41:23That glacier shrinks, it fails, causes a landslide and that landslide sends a pulse of sediment that goes all the way downstream.
41:33And that increases the riverbed height and so there's more chance of flooding.
41:38It's almost like that flow never stops.
41:41There is no start and end to that flow.
41:44And the more we get to know the Earth's system, the more we realize that these connections are happening all the time.
41:50It's one thing to understand that everything is connected, but it's another to actually feel it.
41:57Dr. Copps is taking that a step further.
42:01We've been using hydrophones to start to hear what is being transported from the mountaintops to the ocean.
42:08So both how much water is moving through the system and how much sediment is moving through the system.
42:14I've actually been collaborating with sound artists to create soundscapes where we're inviting audiences to actually listen to the stories that the Earth is telling us.
42:24Okay, I'm hearing like a sound.
42:29Yeah.
42:30So that's the sand and silt that's being flushed down the river.
42:35Oh, okay.
42:36Right, so you can hear it.
42:37It's kind of like it's roaming through.
42:39Yeah.
42:40These hydrophones help understand in a more embodied way what are the impacts of climate change.
42:46So we're actually listening to the sounds of climate change.
42:50In order to be able to truly understand what we're losing as the Earth is adapting to a warmer planet, we need to be able to understand it through all of our senses.
43:00Now when I start my day, I pay more attention to shifts in the weather and how they connect to something bigger.
43:12As extreme events increase, it helps knowing there's a global effort to study the invisible forces that are reshaping our world.
43:19Because the more we understand, the better we can adapt.
43:25How we chat about the weather matters too.
43:27It's not just small talk anymore.
43:29It's about preparing for what's ahead.
43:31And I'm learning for what's ahead.
43:32How we chat about the weather matters too.
43:33As extreme events like this, we have to, we have to learn more about it.
43:38It's about preparing for what's ahead.
43:39I'm learning for what's ahead.
43:40I'm learning for what's ahead.
43:44Transcription by CastingWords
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