Original subtitles

PINSENT: Last time on The Polar Sea...

The Arctic hitchhiker Richard Tegner

has hitched a ride west on the luxury yacht, Libellule.

They are sailing to Alaska

among the ghosts of whaling ships

that first opened these waters.

But a century later, this is a different world.

Here, the coast is collapsing,

as the permafrost thaws out.

(HUGUES LANTUIT SPEAKING)

PINSENT: Warmer seasons and softer earth

have enabled plants to march hundreds of kilometers north,

carrying parasites that are killing

the beasts of the tundra.

But the great melt is still a summer event

and now the weather is changing.

The explorers must race to escape

before ice overtakes the Northwest Passage.

The Libellule is sailing west along the coast of Canada,

bound for the American border.

TEGNER: Don't know yet how the ice conditions will be.

There is supposed to be northerly winds,

which will not be in our favor,

and it will push the ice towards us

and towards the Canadian coast.

So we are heading for an anchorage

to wait out for the wind to set

and to figure out how to continue.

PINSENT: Sailing nearby is Traversay III.

These are the last boats trying to clear the passage this season,

and heavy winds are forcing them to seek shelter.

(WOMAN SPEAKING) (WAVES CRASHING)

PINSENT: As soon as the wind eases, they set off.

They have no time to lose.

The temperature is dropping.

Libellule is sailing just south of the Beaufort Gyre.

It's a whirlpool of what sailors call

"old ice" that doesn't melt in the summer.

Though the gyre does get smaller every year.

In the 1980s, it covered 30% of the Arctic Ocean.

Now it's shrunk to 10%.

Through the summer, it spits out ice bits to challenge sailors.

As winter approaches, ice will spread from the gyre

until it covers the ocean again.

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

(SYLVAIN MARTINEAU SPEAKING FRENCH)

(PHILIPP COTTIER SPEAKING FRENCH)

(YVES GERMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)

(MARTINEAU SPEAKING)

(COTTIER SPEAKING)

COTTIER: (SPEAKING ENGLISH) We saw the first ice at 2:00 in the morning,

and then it got really heavy

around 6:00 in the morning.

(MARTINEAU SPEAKING FRENCH)

COTTIER: (SPEAKING ENGLISH) The last four hours were quite difficult.

Never know how to get out of this labyrinth.

(ICE SCRAPING)

We got to a place where we didn't know how to get further.

(BEEPING)

But then we saw a polar bear.

We went to check out the bear, and went around it.

And then we saw a clear passage

through very, very dense ice.

TEGNER: From my point of view

it's the first ice passage with the Libellule.

At this point, we're quite lucky,

but we never know what we have ahead.

This is actually the first time we see Alaska.

It's the first sight of land, so far, from USA.

PINSENT: Entering the United States,

they sail through the only industrial corridor on the Northwest Passage.

This is Prudhoe Bay.

It is the center of what Alaskans call the North Slope,

one of America's largest oil reserves.

The North Slope is 20 million acres of wilderness

covering 35 billion barrels of crude.

NARRATOR: Since the first discovery of oil in 1968,

Atlantic Richfield Company's operating area at Prudhoe Bay

has been the scene of an ongoing adventure.

Oilmen and their rigs are part of a massive operation

designed to tap some 10 billion barrels of oil

locked in a natural reservoir beneath the Arctic tundra.

To meet the pipeline completion date,

summer, 1977,

thousands of tons of equipment must be hauled here over long distances.

PINSENT: The land was expropriated from the region's Inuit,

who call themselves Inupiat.

The deal was controversial.

Many never accepted the oil industry, but they had no choice.

The infrastructure was built

during America's first energy crisis.

The project became a national goal

and the engine of Alaska's economy.

NARRATOR: From Eskimo village,

Barrow has grown into a prosperous community,

many of its natives employed at Prudhoe Bay.

JOE CURGUS: Oil supports 85% of the state's economy.

It pays for pretty much everything here.

These are areas that we've developed.

We've been here for a long time.

It's changed 100-fold. I mean...

The schools, they've got new schools almost everywhere.

I mean, they've got... A number of them got swimming pools

and hockey rinks and things that

we never had when I was growing up.

It has allowed us to grow up

and be more like... More like outside,

but still have that Alaska independence.

PINSENT: Alaska was able to exploit its oil

by piping it south to an ice-free port.

But 40 years of pumping oil

have begun to deplete its wells.

CURGUS: Well, the production in Prudhoe since I've been here

has been as high as 2.2 million barrels a day,

and we're doing a little over

590,000 barrels a day now.

Once the oil gets to Pump Station One,

it starts its trek down the pipeline.

It's a positive displacement line.

Whatever you put in, you get out on the other side.

It used to take four days at the top

for the oil to get from Anchorage to Valdez,

now it takes over 10.

So we're in a declining field.

Puts us in kind of an economic disadvantage if we're not competitive.

PINSENT: The US government estimates that the entire Arctic

holds 90 billion barrels of oil.

It's enough to meet world demand for almost three years.

The warming Arctic, with its potential for ice-free drilling and shipping,

is tempting corporations and governments

to search for oil in Greenland,

northern Canada and across the Polar Sea.

In Alaska, the industry hopes to expand.

CURGUS: There's still tons of oil in the Arctic.

A bunch of it may be off-shore.

There's definitely oil, you know.

Some of it is locked up in ANWR.

There was a segment of that

that was slated for oil development.

It's been going back and forth for a long time,

as to whether we have the opportunities to drill there or not.

We look at it from a standpoint

that we can do that in an environmentally-friendly way.

PINSENT: They hope to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,

known as ANWR.

Industry here is forbidden because it's a crucial animal breeding ground,

especially for caribou.

CURGUS: The pictures that you see of ANWR,

somehow they end up of some mountain meadow someplace,

I mean, you know, the Arctic plain

is definitely a unique place.

It's very marshy and very watery.

JEFF ANDERSON: A lot of the propaganda that you see about ANWR,

you know, it shows beautiful mountains, where in reality,

the area could potentially be developed

is just really no different than just the flat tundra

that we work in right here in this field,

but because of the groups that want to try and keep the oil industry

from producing in those areas,

paint it up to, you know, this beautiful picture of what it's not.

I think the oil industry gets demonized

by the news media,

by some administrations. The current one.

TED SCHMITT: I've run across that a lot. People think we're just

out spraying oil all over the ground

and wiping it up with baby seals,

and that's nothing, nothing like that, you know.

We take a lot of pride in staying... Keeping it clean.

PINSENT: Oil field workers fly in from other places

and stay in the giant work camp called Deadhorse.

It's a rare Arctic community where most people don't sense

that the world is getting warmer,

and nobody's convinced that it's being warmed by fossil fuels.

SCHMITT: Not in my lifetime,

but I know that glaciers have receded over time,

I've seen pictures.

But I can't fully make the decision

if that's due to fossil fuels or not.

We also have proof that the Earth

has gone through many cycles through its time,

so in 100 years of science,

I can't make that call either way.

CURGUS: In my old drilling days, you know,

basically when they were doing core samples,

and they'd pull out core samples

that had palm leaves and stuff from here.

So, we talk about global warming

and we talk about change and stuff like that.

The world's been changing for a long, long time.

We're on this Earth, we're impacting it to some extent,

but I'm not completely sold that it's the only thing driving it.

That's my personal opinion.

I don't believe in global warming.

I think that's just one of the biggest hoaxes

that's been perpetrated on us.

I'm not saying that the climate doesn't change,

but I think it's just a natural cycle of the Earth.

I really don't believe that as a human population,

we have the ability to affect it that much.

MATT MARTINSEN: Any greenhouse gas,

radiation reflected off the Earth's surface,

you pass that infrared radiation through it,

it's going to warm over time.

That's a greenhouse gas, and so,

the more greenhouse gases you have in the atmosphere, the more warming you'd see,

so that's the general concept there,

in the importance of greenhouse gases.

PINSENT: Matt Martinsen works in a lonely outpost

that's just up the coast from Prudhoe Bay.

His job is to monitor the atmosphere.

(MONITOR BEEPING)

MARTINSEN: You find, in general, that it's one of those forms of science

that if you're talking about the atmosphere

of another planet or something,

you might have people not even debate

that it's interesting to measure it,

but it seems kind of a little politically charged.

PINSENT: Matt runs America's northern-most atmospheric data station.

Every day,

he measures hundreds of unseen changes in the air.

MARTINSEN: I really like this job

because I never feel like I'm doing the same thing

day in, day out, and so for me, that's really rewarding.

Our group at NOAA chose this spot

because it's the northern-most point in the United States.

Since we're measuring air,

we'd like to get some Arctic air.

There's nothing between us

and the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean.

So, we've got a tower with a bunch of airlines on it

measuring air from outside,

going into our different instruments inside.

Just to have a standard unit of measurement

that other people can base science off of is really important,

and so those are the types of measurements we have here,

are baseline measurements for things like greenhouse gases and CO2.

So, it's got two flasks in it that we send back to Boulder,

which is where our headquarters lab is,

and they measure the flasks for greenhouse gases

like carbon dioxide and methane

and also a lot of important things

for tracing the greenhouse gases.

(MOTOR WHIRRING)

Most of the major greenhouse gases

are going up pretty consistently.

Barrow has the biggest seasonal fluctuation, up and down.

That's because we're influenced by all the boreal forests

like in Canada and Siberia,

but in general, it's all going up over time.

PINSENT: The frightening conclusion from Matt's work

is not just the build-up of greenhouse gases,

it's in the evidence of feedback loops.

MARTINSEN: People usually talk about CO2

when they talk about greenhouse gases

and the next thing in the conversation is usually methane.

And methane in the Arctic, in particular, is important,

because there's giant carbon stores in the tundra

and so, the warmer things get in the Arctic,

the more of that methane you're gonna give off out of the tundra.

More methane and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which causes more warming,

and then you get back to thawing more out of the tundra

and that's what we call a positive feedback loop,

and there's a couple of those in the Arctic

and methane's one of the important ones.

(INSTRUMENT STARTING)

This instrument measures ozone.

So, you look at different wavelengths of sunlight,

and you can get an ozone measurement.

COMPUTER: Three, two, one, zero.

PINSENT: Matt's measurements not only prove the threat,

they prove something more important.

They prove we are not helpless.

There's actually 22 different gases

being measured right here

and a lot of them have to do with the ozone layer

and they measure CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons

and things like that.

These four in the top corner were banned

by the Montreal Protocol.

So there's a good situation where the world got together and said,

"Hey, we're doing something not good.

"We're depleting the ozone layer,

"so we banned these gases."

A lot of the major countries banned these gases,

and we can see them decreasing over time.

How... You know...

People can find out from measurements,

you know, like, the ozone hole,

they found out through measurements.

They didn't even believe it at first,

but they found out that it was a problem

and pretty quickly we figured out

that it was a man-made problem

and you know, governments got together

and they actually did something about it.

I think like anyone, you always want to feel like

you're working towards something

that is on the positive end of things.

And I definitely feel with this job, it's a no-brainer

that you're working towards something that's gonna have a positive effect,

and scientific understanding,

is very easy for me to understand

how that's having a positive effect on the world.

PINSENT: Arctic sailors accept climate change,

but even they question the scientific evidence about its causes.

(GERMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)

TEGNER: (SPEAKING ENGLISH) On board Libellule, cooking was very important.

These two French guys, they really knew how to cook.

(GERMAN SPEAKING ENGLISH)

(LAUGHS)

(CHUCKLING)

TEGNER: I am making a pasta sauce.

A very simple one.

Just tomatoes and butter, and salt.

And what are you making?

I am making a tuna fish salad with celery, capers.

It's coming, it's getting there.

(SQUAWKING)

Forty, fifty geese.

PINSENT: The Arctic still has incredible colonies of wildlife.

But the only way to understand them

is to study their individuals.

(SHUTTER SNAPS)

Just south of where Libellule sails, is Cooper Island.

It's the second home of George Divoky,

an independent, and very patient biologist.

DIVOKY: I first was up in the Arctic in the early 1970s,

and in '72, I came to Cooper Island

and I found a colony of black guillemots breeding on this island.

Black guillemots need a very secure nest cavity

for a period of almost 80 days every summer

and Cooper Island didn't really provide that

until the 1950s, when the navy came to the island

and left a bunch of boxes there.

And guillemots started breeding there sometime in the '60s.

And I was very surprised to find

all these birds breeding in man-made sites in 1972.

So in '75, I started coming back and building more boxes,

and I got the population up to 200 pair

by the mid-1980s.

(SCREECHING)

This is a newly-hatched chick.

It's hatched in the last six hours or so.

There was an egg there earlier.

I've had birds come back as adults

and I've seen them every summer for up to 30 years.

And I say, "I've known you since you were an egg,"

and there's this connection,

and they tend to have band combinations I can easily remember,

like blue-orange-blue is Bob.

PINSENT: George tries to arrive on Cooper Island each spring,

just before the birds lay eggs.

DIVOKY: I started having to leave

earlier and earlier in the year.

And it was almost that shift in my schedule

that made me realize, "Gee, birds are really laying earlier."

I started looking at the dates of snow melt in Barrow

and I realized that my data on egg-laying

correlated very well with the date of snow melt in Barrow,

and it was clear that snow was melting earlier.

And I thought, "Well, this is something."

So that was the first thing.

As the warming continued,

the ice was pulling off-shore and taking their food away.

There is one species of fish that has adapted

to feeding under the ice, which is the Arctic cod.

Guillemots have keyed in on that species

and that is what they fed their young on Cooper Island

for the first 25 years of the study.

That was almost all we saw being brought back.

There are algae that actually are found on the bottom side of ice,

and there are diatoms that are trapped in there

during the period of ice formation.

Diatoms are phytoplankton that are blooming when...

When they are in the area where sun is able to reach them.

PINSENT: Ocean ice is an ecosystem supporting a long food chain.

DIVOKY: Basically, polar bears are re-packaged Arctic cod.

If you see a polar bear, you are seeing "X" number of Arctic cod

that has been eaten by a seal,

and then the seal's been eaten by the bear.

PINSENT: Guillemots are also repackaged cod.

As the ice receded further into the ocean every summer,

George saw the birds suffering.

DIVOKY: The parents started to either not bring in as much food

or try to go to alternate food sources

like sculpins and various bottom fish

that guillemots clearly don't take unless they have to.

Sculpin actually can maintain those horns

sticking out like that,

which makes it very hard for a chick to feed on.

There's been certainly a decrease

in black guillemots in this region, in the population,

it may be half of what it was when I started the study in 1975.

PINSENT: First, it was the eggs coming early,

then the cod disappearing.

George finally knew the climate was changing when the bears arrived.

DIVOKY: For 28 years, I slept in a tent

with nothing other than my shotgun.

Suddenly we had a young male polar bear

coming up to our tent site.

He ripped up our tents, we saved the data,

and then we called Search and Rescue the next morning

and said, "We have to leave the island

"because polar bears have taken over our camp."

So we took an 8-by-12 cabin out

in the winter of 2002-2003,

and now live there with a bear fence.

Because of polar bears getting into the wooden nest sites that were there for so long,

we got these plastic cases from Nanuk,

um, that we drill a hole in one end

and put a wooden baffle inside,

and all we need to do is go open it up,

we can weigh the chick every day,

and most importantly, they're really secure

in that we've had polar bears get on top

and put, you know, I don't know,

400-800 pounds on top like that.

It's a great way to keep guillemots breeding in the Arctic,

even though the polar bears are now all over the beach.

And I mean, it really does make them though,

the canary in the coal mine

in that we are maintaining the colony

so that they can keep monitoring the Arctic,

even though polar bears would be wiping out the colony

on an annual basis if we didn't do this.

But we think it's important to do it.

(HORN HOOTING)

One doesn't believe in climate change

the way you believe in a religion.

One gets information and you say,

"Does this show this is happening,

"or doesn't it show this is happening?"

It isn't like I believe in climate change,

but I believe in polar bears.

If you've lived in a place for 28 years in a tent,

and then suddenly have a massive polar bear show up...

There is a mid-brain response that says,

"Now you believe in climate change,

"because something that depends on ice,

"which is melting because of warming, is now on your island."

One of the things that is reported every fall

is that sea ice is now down to its lowest extent,

and it's always presented as a physical loss.

It's a biotic loss.

It isn't looked on as "Oh, by the way,

"it's the Amazon rainforest."

(SCARE CARTRIDGE SOUNDING)

After I got over my fear of polar bears,

I started really feeling sorry for them.

When they show up on the beach I no longer see them and say,

"Oh, my gosh, I'm scared of them."

I realize this is an animal that is...

Has been displaced by climate change.

It walks around this island trying to find out what it can possibly eat,

and it finds things like guillemot eggs or guillemot chicks.

I know who this is, too.

I'll have to go back and see just how old this bird is,

but it's a bird that I've known

since it was an egg some years back,

and it has bred here for quite some time.

This is yellow-black-brown.

There were certainly times

prior to the climate change issue

when I thought, "May be this is the year to stop."

Now I'm thinking, "I can't."

Now, because of the implications of what's happening

with regards to global change, not just Arctic change.

I mean, you just can't look away,

but it's the same way as you can't look away from a train wreck.

PINSENT: As the winter ice and marauding bears close in,

George prepares to return home to Seattle.

He's the last to pack up at the mainland science station.

But it will be busy here in the spring.

New Arctic development requires environmental studies,

and those require scientists.

DIVOKY: It is a very strange time to be in the Arctic

because there are threats to birds and all wildlife because of the melting

and the habitat changing as quickly as it is.

At the same time, you have development

at a scale where it's never happened before.

The climate change is hitting the guillemots

and a range of other species twice.

It's both by changing the habitats that they're used to living in

and then also allowing industry to come up

and directly impact them by having developments up here

and possibly things like oil spills.

But then they're also taking the fuel,

the fossil fuel, and shipping it south

where it will be burned and then continue to warm the Arctic.

That makes me very philosophical

when I walk around the island,

when there are birds dying in every nest site.

It is very different when you're out there

and you see the chicks hatch

and they get to be 17 or 18 days old,

and then they die because there's no food.

It's like working at an animal shelter

where you're taking care of animals

that you know are going to be gassed the next day.

Where it's like you, you know, you want to be nice to them

and you're hoping for the best,

but you know that due to the food supply, they won't make it.

I am certainly in no position to say,

"Oh, by the way, you should be doing something different."

I use wind and solar out on the island almost exclusively,

but it isn't as if everyone can do that.

It makes me understand all the more

why people are pulled into a high-consumption lifestyle,

and I've seen it happen with my evolution on the island.

When I go out to a small tent now,

I can't think of the fact that I lived in a small tent for 28 years.

Now the 8-by-12 box is the minimum

that I would have to have to live out there.

And all it would take to have this change,

to have a little bit bigger box,

with may be a little bit more creature comforts,

and suddenly that would be the thing I have to have.

It's just want humans do.

It's the reason we've been successful as a species.

We keep doing this progress.

But at some point, we have to say,

"We've done this at the cost of the environment around us,

"and now, what can we do to make sure

"that future generations don't go back

"to conditions that would make living on Cooper seem plush."

COTTIER: Duck? TEGNER: Yes.

COTTIER: It's duck. Wow, wow.

It smells like a duck, it must be a duck.

(LAUGHTER)

Does your duck bite?

COTTIER: It's too nice to eat.

Bon appetit.

(COTTIER SPEAKING FRENCH)

(GERMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)

(LAUGHING)

TEGNER: (SPEAKING ENGLISH) What would happen if a tanker breaks down here?

It would be a terrible catastrophe.