Extreme climate research – On the road in the icefields of Patagonia | DW Documentary

Extreme climate research – On the road in the icefields of Patagonia | DW Documentary

The icefields in the Patagonian Andes: unknown, barely discovered terrain. A team of mountaineers and scientists plan to explore these almost unlivable regions where global climate change is more tangible than almost anywhere else in the world. A German scientist is leading the expedition in the harsh battle against wind and ice.

The goal: to collect data for climate research. This data is very important for us, and these expeditions may be able to close some of the gaps we have up here. Two professional mountaineers accompany Sauter. Their job is to collect samples from regions no one has ever been to before.

Covering an area of 17,000 square kilometers, the Patagonian icefields are over 200 times the size of the largest glacier in the Alps. Climate researcher Tobias Sauter is investigating the changes here and documenting the impact. How is climate change affecting these remote areas? Our extensive research here started with the vision

That something should be done in the region where little research has been carried out so far. We needed more data. The glacier changes in particular have been poorly documented due to the extreme weather conditions. But it’s also what makes it so appealing to go there and say:

All right, we’re going to a region where researchers don’t normally go. It’s a combination of a passion for research and adventure. It’s wind force eight. Before setting off on the big expedition, Sauter stops off at one of the weather stations he has installed on the edge of Grey Glacier.

Although the weather stations run self-sufficiently, the recorded data has to be retrieved at least every two years. Great! It’s working. We have a connection to the logger. And it’s still recording. Grey Glacier is relatively easy to reach, so there is already a lot of data available about it.

The glacier is in the southern Patagonian icefield, which is the third largest in the world after Antarctica and Greenland. So far, Sauter and his team have only worked here. The more remote northern icefield has hardly been explored. Here at its access point in Puerto Guadal, professional mountaineers Robert Jasper and Jörn Heller

Are preparing for their expedition to Cerro Hyades. The logistical preparations on site take a week, at which point climatologist Sauter will join the team. Few mountaineers have more experience in Patagonia than these two. They have been a close-knit team for more than 30 years. Jasper is one of the world’s leading mountaineers.

He is a pioneer of extreme ice climbing. He has given many talks on mountain protection, a subject he is passionate about. I believe that if you take nature’s energy back with you, wherever you live, you will simply live in a more environmentally friendly and conscious way.

If every single one of us takes more care of nature and our environment, then I think we’ll have gained a lot in the end. Sauter is on his way to Puerto Natales, where he’ll meet Professor Ricardo Jaña from the Chilean Antarctic Institute. They’ve been friends for years. Hi Ricardo, how are you? Great!

Jaña is considered the scientific expert for this region. This is an extraordinary point on the planet. The lowest tip, where South America ends, and the Antarctic Peninsula are directly opposite each other here and are the only large land masses in the southern hemisphere that lie this far south.

So this is the point where you can explore the outer limits of climate change, which is unique. It’s clear to everyone here that climate change has already led to dramatic shifts in Patagonia in recent years. Ingrid Hebel’s plants are also feeling the effects. She has German roots and is married to Jaña.

As a biologist, she is very aware of the consequences for agriculture. Drought causes problems for agriculture. There are 150,000 people here and we need to eat – we need a healthy diet. We had a month or two without rain starting in November. That makes things a bit difficult.

Two days before setting off on the expedition, Sauter also reaches Puerto Guadal. Here he meets the mountaineers, whom he has asked to take samples from higher regions. Patagonia has one of the most extreme melt rates in the world, so you could say it has the highest turnover of mass.

In the lower region at the tongue of the glaciers we have extremely high melt rates. When I get to the places I’ve been in the past, you simply can’t see the glacier at all. Often, hundreds of meters of altitude are missing. And sometimes it has receded by kilometers.

In our work as mountain guides, we see every day how the glaciers are retreating. Climate change is here for us, it’s very very real. Puerto Guadal is the last outpost of civilization and the starting point for expeditions to the northern Patagonian icefield. A shallow-water boat will take the team through the icy rivers,

Saving them six days of hiking. We’ve packed all the equipment and checked it several times. If we’ve forgotten something, the expedition could fail. Jasper and Heller have planned a total of four weeks to ascend Cerro Hyades. Sauter will join the expedition team for the first ten days.

He hopes to reach the lower parts of the glacier, which is one or two days’ walk from the base camp. The extremely volatile and unpredictable weather in Patagonia will also impact the outcome of the expedition. I think the first bad weather will come tomorrow.

That’s why it’s important that we don’t just sit in our little tents, but that we have a kitchen here. For me, the fascination of the Patagonian wilderness is simply that you have to live very close to the elements. I don’t think there’s anywhere else you can experience

The weather and nature as closely as here. The goal is to ascend the 3100-meter-high Cerro Hyades. Only three expeditions have ever reached its summit. What Jasper and Heller are planning has never been attempted before – the direct ascent of the south flank. Sauter hopes to reach the higher glaciers with the mountaineers

So they can examine the snow conditions there. But the first part of the route is already very challenging for Sauter. They come to an ice-cold river – and they have to cross it. So the rucksack is pretty heavy. I’m not quite sure how much it is,

But the scientific instruments are all in there, plus the ice equipment. It won’t be easy. Wow. Yeah. Check that out… Wow, it looks completely different than I thought. I really thought that the glacier would go all the way up here and that the icefall would be a bit wider up there.

Now there’s a waterfall up there. On the satellite images, the glacier was 200 meters thick, so it must have melted away within a year or two. This is a disaster. I mean globally with the warming and the melting. I was expecting to go up there onto the tongue

And then be able to go up at least a bit. But this is a disaster. I don’t even know how we’re going to do it now. It soon becomes clear that it’s impossible to get any further on the ice. The glacier tongue has disintegrated even more than they had initially thought.

You always think of the glacier as retreating, but it’s not retreating at all, it’s disintegrating. You can see it here too. It hasn’t really retreated, but the ice is breaking up into small icebergs and chunks of ice and then it melts relatively quickly. So we should actually be talking about the glaciers disintegrating.

We’ve been preparing this expedition meticulously for two years, analyzing all the data and satellite images we’ve received. And now we’re faced with the possibility of not even getting up the glacier. I think we’ll just have to resort to plan B.

We had always thought about that rib up there, where all that forest is. Up to Hyades. It’s steep and difficult, but we’ll give it a try. The next day. They don’t want to give up yet. The rubber dinghies were intended only for the return journey.

Now they’re being used to find a way through the labyrinth that is the crumbling glacier tongue. This is really old ice, right? The ice comes from the upper part of the plateau. It is very old. The last great ice age was 18 – 20,000 years ago. But it could be much older.

We already had ice masses here before the last ice age. So it could be very old. I can’t say exactly. Even by boat, the team gets stuck. Setbacks are a common occurrence for researchers. But Sauter is disappointed. Now he has to hope that the mountaineers will at least bring him

Some snow samples from the upper parts of the glacier. I’ll give you the test tubes to put the samples in. Robert and Jörn have a way of penetrating regions we don’t normally reach. Our research is almost exclusively limited to the outlet glaciers, which are logistically very easy to reach. We are a university.

Our job is to do research and teach. So we have our specific tasks. We are not extreme mountaineers. And that isn’t our goal! It is fun to be out in the field, to go out and collect data. But we also have to weigh up the risks a little.

And going out onto the Patagonian ice sheet is not without its dangers. And so when we work with experts like Robert and Jörn, we get data where we wouldn’t otherwise have any. And that’s very valuable. Sauter is going back to his university. His ten days are up. He has lectures to give.

Meanwhile, the mountaineering team are trying to reach the glacier by making their way through the dense undergrowth of the forests near the valley. From there, they plan to climb to the summit of Cerro Hyades – an ascent that no one has ever attempted before.

At the end of the first day, they set up camp at the foot of the glacier. I was just imagining what it would look like if all the glaciers melted. I can’t really do it. I mean, you can already see the beginnings of it down here,

A lot of the glacier has already receded. It’s been pretty difficult to get out here at all. We can see the smooth rocks rising up here, and it’s getting more and more difficult to get onto the glaciers. And the crevasses up there look very open.

So I’m curious to see if we can get through them. There’s little hope of finding a way through the icy labyrinth. Nevertheless, they want to keep trying to take the promised samples for Sauter. There was only ice on the glacier down there. But now there’s a layer of firn here

And I think that’s interesting for Tobias. He said to stuff as much snow in here as possible. Exactly. Sample number one. Like this. Each sample is carefully documented so that it can be assigned correctly later. In total the mountaineers collect 30 snow samples in the unexplored area. Jasper is bringing them to Berlin

Where Sauter plans to analyze them at Humboldt University. So I’ve got five samples here. I’d love to know how you research the climate from snow samples. We’ll analyze the water samples later in the laboratory and determine the isotope ratio. The ratio between O16 and O18 oxygen isotopes.

Moist Pacific air flows over the Patagonian icefields, creating precipitation. But the researchers don’t know how much. That is why they compare the samples from the lower areas with those from the higher regions. The analysis of oxygen isotopes is crucial here. They can be used to estimate how much precipitation

Has fallen on the icefields. This in turn gives an indication of the extent to which the mass of the glacier is changing. So, that’s where you come in. We know roughly how much water vapor comes in here from the Pacific, but what we don’t know is how much precipitation

Falls on the Patagonian ice sheets. Really? So far you’ve only collected samples on the eastern slope of the Patagonian ice sheet. So now it would be interesting to see what the situation is like further inside the sheet. That’s why I’m glad you’re often out there and you can help us.

Six months later, the mountaineers are back in the northern icefield. This time they want to take samples, but on a different mountain. The Cerro Cristal. It too has hardly been explored. The expedition took three months to prepare. It’s great because now I can hopefully give something back to science with the samples.

Because I think we get great weather forecasts and avalanche forecasts. It’s much more professional these days, and we benefit from that. So this is great for us. If they reach the summit, they will be the second rope team ever to make it up the mountain.

The conditions are not as good as we thought because there’s still a lot of snow. And now there’s a storm. Yesterday there were gales of up to 100 kilometers per hour. So it was almost impossible to move at all. But there’s also a huge storm rolling over the ice sheet today

And we can’t move. So it’s very, very difficult right now. Sauter is also back in southern Patagonia, on Grey Glacier. While the mountaineering team collects samples for him on the northern icefield, he wants to experience what his scientific colleagues know only from pictures.

We have satellite images and can assess the current situation from them. We also have some meteorological data, so we actually have a good amount of data. But when you arrive on site and see how far the glaciers have melted, and you remember what it was like three years ago

– that really is a bit like being hit by hammer. And then you’re brought back to reality. Access to the southern Patagonian icefield is comparatively easy. Using simple methods, Sauter is able to document the retreat of the glaciers here. We mark the top of the glacier with the tape and a year later

We come back to measure how much ice has melted on the surface. Sauter and his team’s findings so far are worrying. The yellow and red areas show the disintegration and retreat of glaciers in Patagonia. For the researchers, the icefields also serve as a test laboratory for the Antarctic, which is 700 times larger.

Changes taking place here are expected to affect the glacier masses at the South Pole in the future, with consequences for the planet’s climate and rising sea levels. Oh! Here we have water damage. Okay, so the camera is still running. That’s very good news so far.

We’ll now change the battery, the chip card and reset the camera. And then it should keep working. The camera takes pictures of the glacier front every three hours. From the images we can then derive the flow speed of the glacier, and we get information on how much mass,

How much ice is breaking off at the front of the glacier. That’s another factor that leads to the loss of ice. We’ve observed things and there is a great deal of evidence that climate change is happening. We make these results and findings available to politicians and decision-makers so that we can still achieve

The promised target of 1.5 or two degrees. So far we are doing too little. That’s sometimes a sobering thought. Here are the GPS coordinates for the first sample. The climbers make rapid progress this time. By the morning of the third day, Jasper and Heller have already overcome the brittle glacier areas.

They’re on their way to the higher regions of the inland ice. But another storm is coming through. Gale-force winds sweep across the icefield. Knowing their tent would not survive the storm, they decide to dig a snow cave. Come into the parlor! Thanks, it’s not quite so stormy anymore.

At least we’ve made it here now. I have a nice snow cave and we don’t need to worry about the storm outside. We just have to check the entrance from time to time and make sure there’s enough air in here. But it’s looking very good.

Sauter explores the edge of Grey Glacier by boat. It retreated 400 meters in 2019 alone. Just a few years ago, the glacier front was maybe 40 to 50 meters high. Now it is only 30 meters high. So you can already see that the glacier

Is simply not as big as it used to be. It saddening to know that there is almost no chance of preserving these glaciers. And future generations will never have the chance to see these large glacier masses. That gives me pause for thought. The storm on the northern icefield has subsided.

Heller and Jasper set off to climb to the summit of Cerro Cristal. On the fourth day of their ascent, the climbers are about to reach their destination, with plenty of samples in their backpacks. The data they’ve collected may only be a small piece in the large mosaic of climate research,

But it helps reveal the overall impact of climate change on the large ice masses of our planet.

Patagonia’s icefields are very difficult to access. As a result, they remain largely unexplored by climate researchers. Now, a scientist and two extreme mountaineers are venturing into this hard-to-reach area, in search of new data for climate research.

Even after 15 years of research in Chile, scientist Tobias Sauter says that for him, many questions remain unanswered. To clarify them, he decides to venture into areas that are difficult to access. The mountaineers Robert Jasper and Jörn Heller agree to help – and put themselves in great danger in the process.

The two icefields in the Patagonian Andes, which stretch across the borders of Chile and Argentina, represent the largest ice mass outside the polar ice caps. However, as a result of climate change, the ice here is losing mass. In some areas, the icefields are losing up to 20 meters in height per year.

Little is known about these dramatic developments and their specific causes. The ice field to the north in particular has so far mainly been studied using satellite-based data. The area’s extreme weather conditions and great remoteness make field research on site a challenge.

Tobias Sauter from Humboldt University in Berlin is one of the few researchers to take on this challenge. He and a small team of German and Chilean researchers have been investigating developments at the southern end of Latin America for years. Until now, the researchers have lacked data and samples from the higher summit regions, which are difficult to access.

With the help of professional mountaineers Robert Jasper and Jörn Heller, Sauter now wants to change this. The two German mountain guides have been searching for new routes and unconquered peaks in the Patagonian Andes for 30 years. The expedition takes the team through magnificent landscapes. It is a battle against the unpredictable weather, but also a test of their own limits. A camera team accompanies the group to one of the most remote areas of our planet.

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