The woman who risked life and limb for climate data for COP26
Ruth Mottram loses her foothold and falls.
In the middle of a glacier crevasse, she passes layers of ice.
Ash gray, chalk white and azure shades of the frozen water swirl past.
She slams her head against the ice.
Measured in metres, this a drop of about two to three meters.
Measured in compressed knowledge from the ice crevasse, this is a fall over centuries of accumulated information stored in ice and air bubbles with CO2.
Her ice ax and spiked boots are not of much use now. Ruth Mottram cannot move.
Her body is wedged in a deep crack in the glacier crevasse.
Her assistant rappels down. Twists Ruth Mottram’s body to the side. Finally gets her hauled free and taken to a hospital in Iceland.
»Afterwards, I looked like someone who had been involved in a car accident,« Ruth Mottram recalls.
Ruth Mottram after the fall.
Beaten, bruised but determined, Ruth Mottram continues the data collection a few days later as part of her fieldwork in Iceland – a career that culminates in a PhD. in glaciology and a position as a climate researcher at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
Today, she is one of the world’s leading experts in the melting of the Arctic and the importance of glacier crevices.
Ruth Mottram is one of the few scientists in the world who physically has measured the depth of the continental glaciers and helped to show that close to the surface the socalled slits in the glaciers act as solar panels.
The slits increase the melting, which is already accelerated by the man-made burning of oil, coal and gas. They also exacerbate a weakness in the ice that can lead to calving of icebergs when glaciers meet seas in fjords.
These data, combined with contributions from thousands of other research colleagues, form the scientific foundation of our understanding of climate change.
These data also form the basis of the discussions that world leaders such as Joe Biden, Narendra Modi and around 117 other Heads of State and Government are conducting in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit.
And this is a huge task.
Ruth H Mottram, PhD, is a climate Scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute
The gap between the impact of international climate plans and the official climate targets has never been greater. This gap is documented in the UN’s new ’Emissions Gap’ report released in late October.
The consequence of one of the worst-case scenarios is that Denmark and the rest of the globe will face sea level rises from 60 centimetres to one metre over the next 80 years. Meanwhile, it seems likely that the sea level will double over the same time frame.
The melting of Antarctica, among other factors, could well mean that sea levels will rise by two metres instead of one metre by the year 2100, because such factors will affect each other and accelerate the increase.
And that can perhaps also be said to be one of the biggest challenges and paradox of climate change: that the consequences are neither tangible nor visible in the course of everyday life – however dangerous the scientific data underlining the effects may be. According to Anthony Giddens,the British sociologist, many will therefore sit on their hands and do nothing. But if we wait until climate change becomes visible and acute, the most effective climate change mitigation and adaption will then be too late.
Klimamontor is therefore launching an experiment to try to do something about this paradox. The experiment is a different kind of features based on the graph below.
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