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About 250 feet from the bottom of an icy shaft, I was hanging from a thin nylon string. As I looked up, blinding snow turned mad by howling winds, I noticed the sand-blasting spindrift about 20 feet above me. I was content to be out of the air, almost suspended in silence.

As my eyes adjusted to the low light, I found myself staring into an abyss far larger than anything I thought we could find beneath the surface of the Greenland ice sheet.

All I could think was, “This shouldn’t have happened here.”

The year is 2018 and I was on an expedition. Will GaddA Canadian adventure athlete to explore the moulins or giant vertical caves in the Greenland ice sheet. Will was already at the bottom of the shaft. From my point of view, it looked like a different insect.

At first glance, Will and I were an odd couple for an expedition. Will is the best in the world top professional ice climbers. he Sponsored by Red Bull. He won the X Games, ESPN’s extreme sports competition, and hung out with Jimmy Chin, a professional mountaineer and filmmaker.

On the other hand, I am a professor of geology at the University of South Florida. I teach undergraduate students about the physics of groundwater. I hung out with scientists. We do not share exactly the same social circles.

I went to Greenland with Will because he wanted to make an exploratory film focused on climate change. Will is in his mid-50s. Throughout his long career, he has seen climate change wipe out ice climbs and shrink glaciers. He submitted the film to Red Bull. They liked it. and so Under the Ice expedition was born.

Will convinced me to write my PhD. He had a doctoral thesis on glacial caves and had been studying them for over 15 years. I was supposed to be a scientist, but I certainly didn’t feel like someone staring into that inexplicably big hole.

I coincidentally started my journey as a glacier-cave expert as a geology undergraduate student at Eastern Kentucky University in 2004. A mutual friend invited me on a rock climbing trip. Doug Benn, Scotland’s St. A glaciologist at Andrews University. While I skipped classes to explore and map caves near campus, Doug was studying how the warming climate is transforming Mount Everest’s glaciers into lake networks. Some of these lakes have drained disastrously from caves in the ice, with at times devastating consequences for the villages, dams and hydroelectric facilities below. Glacialists did not understand how these caves were formed and therefore did not understand what controls the lake drainage.

Drinking beer between climbs and afterwards, Doug and I were convinced we could understand how glacial caves in the Everest region were formed—if only we could explore and map them. Although I had never seen a glacier before and Doug had only briefly visited a few caves, we thought combining Doug’s glaciology and mountaineering experience with my background in cave exploration and mapping might help us understand how to explore some of the world’s tallest caves. , and possibly even survive the expedition.

On our first expedition in November 2005, we spent nearly seven weeks exploring and mapping glacial caves above 16,400 feet in the Everest region, including caves a short walk from Mount Everest base camp. Breathing in the thin air, we survived rock slides, ice falls, and collapsed cave floors. And gradually we learned the secrets of the glacial caves.

We discovered that glacial caves in the Everest region form along bands of porous debris in the ice. Water from lakes on the glacial surface would flow through bands of debris and melt the ice around them, forming a cave. Caves can then expand rapidly as the rate of melting increases, allowing entire lakes to flow through them.

After solving my first scientific mystery, I was addicted. I completed my undergraduate studies in 2006 and began working with Doug and a growing number of adventurous collaborators, first as a graduate student and later as a postdoctoral researcher, exploring and mapping dozens of other glacial caves in Alaska, Nepal and Svalbard in Norway. finally as a professor. Along the way, I learned how to photograph the frozen darkness so I could share our findings with scientists who didn’t have the technical skills to enter glacial caves.

Over the next decade, our discoveries by navigating under the world’s glaciers helped us document the role that glacial caves play in mediating how glaciers respond to climate change. In Nepal, where thick debris covers on glacial surfaces must insulate the glaciers from melting, we’ve seen glacial caves melt ice beneath the debris. The caves were turning Everest’s glaciers into Swiss cheese and rotting from the inside out.

In other parts of the world, including Alaska and Svalbard, glacial caves followed cracks in the ice and flowed rivers of meltwater into glacial beds. The fluctuation of summer meltwater makes the contact between the ice and the underlying rocks slippery, causing glaciers to slide faster than they would in the absence of meltwater.

Before working with Will, while exploring glacial caves around the world, there was one place I hadn’t explored: inside the Greenland ice sheet.

The Greenland ice sheet stretches over 650,000 square miles—roughly the size of Alaska. If it melted completely, it could raise sea level by 23 feet.

Each summer, rising temperatures turn the frozen surface of the Greenland ice sheet into a network of rivers and lakes. All rivers and many lakes turn into moulins and continue to flow into the ocean along the interface of the ice sheet and the rocky bed below. As the flow of meltwater to this interface increases, the friction between the ice and the bed decreases, and the ice sheet accelerates, sending ice into the ocean faster than in winter.

Some glaciologists are concerned that increased lubrication could cause the ice sheet to dump ice into the ocean and raise sea levels faster than expected, as climate warming triggers more melting and new caves form in previously unmelted areas of the ice sheet.

with financing provided by National Science FoundationI was able to set up remote camps to study how the water flowing into the caves during the summer months affects the movement of the ice sheet. However, I really wanted to go back in the fall when cold weather shuts down the meltwater to the moulins, making them safe to explore. When Will Gadd emailed me and asked if I wanted to “do something cool” in Greenland’s glacial caverns, I was ready to go. I wanted to see if the ideas I had developed about glacial caves from other glaciers would work in Greenland.

After working in so many different glacier caves, I thought I had them figured out. But as I swayed in the middle of that huge, icy shaft in the Greenland ice sheet, stunned by its size, I realized that the glacial caverns still had surprises for me, and many more mysteries to unravel.

Jason Gulley is an associate professor of geology at the University of South Florida and an environmental, science, and exploration photographer based in Tampa, Fla. Instagram.

The fieldwork in Greenland was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The fieldwork in Nepal was supported by donations from the National Geographic Society.