National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World Page #4

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around and look after the dogs.

The dogs are hungry,

so I have to be a little bit careful

not to get bitten.

And when the dogs are hungry,

they are a little bit more dangerous

to people and kids walking around.

It doesn't seem to be sick.

He's very skinny.

So I have to try to find out

who's the owner

and talk to him.

These animals were

once in peak physical condition.

They served a vital purpose

in their owners' lives.

That's a thing of the past,

and we don't see

any young people who take

some dogs and live

as a fisherman and a hunter.

Dogs have been

in Finn Sistall's family

as long as he can remember.

He finally gave up his team of 19

just in the last few years.

In the winter,

even though it was

an impossible thing to do

about 20 years ago,

most of the fishermen go out

with a boat today

instead of dogsleds.

When Finn was growing up,

this was their winter hunting ground,

solid ice for more than half the year.

Everything happened so fast.

It's so visible.

You don't have to be a scientist

to determine what's happening.

With each passing season,

Finn watches as traditions

locked in the ice melt away.

Something

interesting in this ice,

because you

can see small bubbles.

And these bubbles are older

than all living creatures in the world.

And you can listen to it.

[Popping]

Because the bubbles

are so compressed,

and when they get out,

it's like popping.

You can talk to the ice.

That's what an intrepid team

of scientists does once a year,

fly into Greenland's interior

to listen to the ice.

Swiss camp is a scientific

research installation

built directly into the glacier

to track climate change.

Dr. Konrad Steffens

has erected 23 full-service

weather stations

that take a complete range of climate

measurements every 15 seconds,

updating global warming

computer models

all over the world.

The ice sheet is very old.

It's over 150,000 years old.

If you start to remove it,

then you actually start a process

that is unknown to civilization.

We have never seen

Greenland disappearing.

Watch it, watch it, watch it.

In 1992,

was slipping into the sea

and disappearing.

Ten years later, that number

more than doubled

to 15.5 kilometers annually.

Steffens wouldn't understand

how warmer weather affects

the speed of glaciers,

until he came upon

one of the strangest

and most dangerous features

of this forbidding landscape.

Rivers of melted ice

are cascading straight down

into the glacier,

creating huge tunnels

called moulins.

The team lowers

a fiber-optic camera.

Their hypothesis:

That melt water

has cut all the way through

to the bedrock

a quarter of a mile below,

and is lubricating

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