Climate researcher tackles New Guinea glaciers
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea -- For 5,000 years, great tongues of ice have spread over the 3-mile-high slopes of Puncak Jaya, in the remotest reaches of this remote tropical island. Now those glaciers are melting, and Lonnie Thompson must get there before they're gone.
To the American glaciologist, the ancient ice is a vanishing "archive" of the story of El Nino, the equatorial phenomenon driving much of the world's climate.
More than that, the little-explored glaciers are a last unknown for a mountaineering scientist who for three decades has circled the planet pioneering the deep-drilling of ice cores, both to chronicle the history of climate and to bear witness to the death of tropical glaciers from global warming.
"No one knows how thick these remaining glaciers are," Thompson said of Puncak Jaya, or Mount Jaya. "We do know they are disappearing."
The unknowns on this wild, Texas-sized island extend even to the local climate.
"There are indications of warming," explained Kasis Inape, a senior government climatologist here. "But we can't really confidently say the temperature change has been this much or that much, because the actual data are lacking."
As a companion project to Thompson's expedition, an international research team including Inape plans a first-ever assessment of recent climate change on New Guinea, especially along the 1,200-mile mountainous spine of the southwestern Pacific island.
Thompson's quest on Puncak Jaya will be for something deeper in the past.
"We may actually see an El Nino history there," he said by telephone from his office-laboratory at Ohio State University. And that history may foretell the future, he and others believe.
Knowing how past temperature changes affected El Nino, the atmospheric-oceanic disturbance that roils the tropics every few years, may help scientists predict how much worse and more frequent El Nino's droughts, tempests and floods may grow as the world warms in decades to come.
Such discoveries would be the latest in a Thompson career whose achievements were recognized by a National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony last July.
