Philippa Kaur

A portrait of three intrepid glaciologists brings the reality of climate change and glacial melting into sharp focus in this powerful documentary

Humans

6 April 2022

By Davide Abbatescianni
Leading glaciologist Alun Hubbard descends into a seemingly bottomless crevasseCourtesy of CPH:DOX 2022
Into the Ice
Lars Henrik Ostenfeld
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A MAJESTIC aerial shot of the Arctic landscape opens Lars Henrik Ostenfeld’s epic documentary Into the Ice. Then his narration hits us with the hard truth: “The Greenland inland ice harbours a secret. You can see our future in it.” As if to illustrate what that future might look like, the camera then pans to deep rivers of meltwater.
The message of Ostenfeld’s film is familiar, yet what sets it apart is its focus on the fieldwork of three of the world’s leading glaciologists: Alun Hubbard, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen and Jason Box. Ostenfeld travels with them, on three separate trips, to the Arctic as they monitor how fast the Greenland ice sheet is melting.
Ostenfeld provides intimate portraits of the researchers, highlighting their distinct personalities and the motivations behind their work. Box is a family man who, when he isn’t playing with his daughter, is happiest digging the snow while listening to ABBA’s hit Chiquitita. Hubbard, the most adventurous of the three, embraces the idea of living every day as “a complete surprise”. His perilous descent into the depths of a seemingly bottomless crevasse is a case in point.
Dahl-Jensen, as Box describes her, is “about science with a capital S” and is dedicated to drilling ice cores as a window into the past. “When you walk through ice, you walk on climate history,” she says. She points to a darker ice layer, which dates from the last glacial period, while a more distant, lighter part is from an interglacial period.
During his time with the researchers, Ostenfeld becomes fully immersed in their work and their mission. His presence is well balanced and respectful, and his feelings of concern, fear and admiration emerge beautifully through his intimate voice-over commentary.
In this way, Ostenfeld achieves his aim of creating a strong empathic bond with the audience. This allows him to deliver a more serious message about the importance of studying changes in the ice as they are happening, no matter how perilous an undertaking it may be.
Throughout, we learn how the study of ice and its history are essential to uncovering the scope and consequences of climate change, and the importance of collecting and analysing data that will help us update our predictions of global sea level rise.
The initial light-hearted tone and good humour of the scientists gradually give way to a more serious feel as the realities of life and work in the Arctic become clear. We see the scientists face a lashing storm that forces them to hide in their tents for two days. And we feel their fear and excitement as they take on the elements to gather data.
The dangers of fieldwork become only too apparent as Box learns of the death of his mentor, climate scientist Konrad Steffen, who fell into an ice crevasse elsewhere in Greenland, on a separate research trip.
Towards the end of the film, Box and Hubbard head back into the deep crevasse to resume their work, only to discover an uncomfortable truth: the meltwater under the ice has progressed to a level never seen before. The glaciers are melting at a faster pace than we thought and our predictions of sea level rise are probably too cautious.
Accompanied by striking imagery and an engaging instrumental score, Into the Ice is a powerful documentary and one of the unmissable titles of this year’s festival season. It doesn’t try to soften the blow or to end on a hopeful note. Instead, it is a touching wake-up call, rich in sincerity and brutal home truths.

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Shutterstock/Madlen
IT WAS out in the desert of New Mexico that humanity first tested the atomic bomb, creating an explosion that left an indelible imprint on our planet. In the same area, just a few dozen kilometres south, scientists are now finding imprints of quite a different sort: human footprints from the Stone Age. These tracks don’t have anything like the historical significance of the first nuclear test – and that is precisely why they are so important.
Archaeology often focuses on the big picture: technological shifts, epic migrations, the fall of civilisations. By contrast, the stones and bones we dig up … More

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

6 April 2022

Josie Ford
Quantum ‘do
Feedback was relieved to read elsewhere in this august rag recently that black holes aren’t bald, featureless entities with an ever-expanding waistline, but have a bubbling frizziness around their outskirts known in some quarters as “quantum hair” (26 March, p 10). We are relieved not just because the middle-aged look has never been fashionable, but also because this promises a resolution to Stephen Hawking’s black hole information paradox, an unsolvable conundrum in fundamental physics that is also getting depressingly middle-aged.
And developing that new, fresh look is as simple as popping a daily pill, as Suzie Shrubb points out. She forwards us – with an eye on the black holes, we hope, not us – details of Quantum Nutrition Labs’ Quantum Hair, Skin, Nails capsules. These promise “Bioavailable Solubilized Keratin for Quantum-State Support for The Skin, Hair and Nails”, something we find merits the capitals, even as we wonder with Suzie whether the quantum state bit expresses some uncertainty about the product’s efficacy. Still, as she reasonably points out, you will only ever know after you have looked in the box.
For timeless style right from big bang to heat death, we can also recommend Zotos’s Quantum Classic Body hair perm, an acid perm that “creates soft, supportive body and supportive waves for a ‘non-permed’ look”. Coming soon to an event horizon near you.Advertisement
Lose friends, stay healthy
Epidemiology news, as Korean Vaccine Society vice president Ma Sang-hyuk announces that if you haven’t had the dreaded lurgy yet, it is because you have no friends. “Adults who have not yet been infected with COVID-19 are those who have interpersonal problems,” he is reported to have written on Facebook – comments that seem to have won him few friends, and so perhaps a degree of protection, as they were subsequently hastily deleted.
Feedback’s experience suggests you hardly need be in contact with anyone to catch the latest variant nasty. Certainly, we have been trying to build up immunity to infection through social isolation for years, and it didn’t work for us.
Not a prayer
Also strangely transient is Eternal Prayer, a website that briefly offered to mint the prayers of the devout as non-fungible tokens for a small consideration of real-world money.
As deities move in mysterious ways, it seems not unreasonable to us to desire non-falsifiable records of contracts entered into, even if, dinosaur that we are, we prefer the tablets of stone thing. But with the site now defunct, our eternal, fruitless search for meaning in the blockchain continues.
A mattress for all seasons
Bringing us back down to earth, Richard Bartlett notes that the care instructions for his John Lewis mattress include the advice “No turning required, rotate with the seasons.” “Perhaps I should not move it at all relative to the bed but simply allow the mattress to orbit the sun?” he asks. We consider this a wise starting point for anyone invested in a good night’s sleep. Or you could try the alternative interpretation of rotating yourself with the seasons, and see where that lands you.
Come shapely bombs
Feedback is a fan of what novelist Anthony Burgess termed the “arresting opening“. A frisson passes through us as we peruse an article from The Washington Post sent in by Mike Shefler of Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, among others. “Near steep vineyards of riesling grapes, in an underground vault at an air force base in western Germany, sits an American nuclear bomb. More than one of them, actually,” we read. “Each bomb is about the length of two refrigerators laid down end to end and as heavy as the average adult male musk ox. The bombs are slender and pointy and a little more than a foot wide.” We join Mike in a waking reverie on the slender pointiness of the adult male musk ox, and feel the mind-expanding power of quality journalism.
Naughty corner
“I know it’s a bad habit”, sighs our man with the laser sight Jeff Hecht, bringing us to our senses again as he forwards us a briefing from the Government Matters website on high-energy laser weapons. We read that the US Department of Defense plans to deploy a 300-kilowatt laser for testing this November and to develop megawatt lasers effective against some ballistic missiles within a few years. The progress is “really exciting”, says retired US Air Force colonel and director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Mark Gunzinger.
From beyond the jrave
Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, an invention that has done much to remove the need for words in internet communication, has died. We are commemorating him by playing our favourite GIF of UK politician Liz Truss pronouncing the words “pork markets” with relish. No reason, which is the point.
Sadly, there is no chance of reanimation for Wilhite, but his legacy has brought joy to millions, as well as a lovely debate about pronunciation. In lieu of words on accepting the 2013 Webby Award for lifetime achievement, Wilhite played a five-word animated gif: “IT’S PRONOUNCED “JIF” NOT “GIF”. Somehow, however often you repeat that one, it’s not sticking.
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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

A set of ancient footprints seems to show children splashing around in water that had pooled in tracks left by a now-extinct ground sloth

Humans

6 April 2022

By Colin Barras
A 3D model of footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, created from multiple photographs. It shows the prints of several prehistoric children jostling around the larger marks left by a giant ground slothDavid Bustos/Matthew Bennett
The delight that children find when they jump in muddy puddles has a surprisingly long history. Fossil footprints discovered at an archaeological site in New Mexico show that a group of youngsters living at least 11,500 years ago spent a few carefree minutes engaged in some joyful splashing. But the world was very different back then: the puddles in question had formed in the deep footprints left by a now-extinct giant ground sloth.
The footprints were discovered at White Sands National Park, a site that is rapidly gaining a reputation for its astonishing archaeology. Within the park, there is a playa – a dried up lake-bed – some 100 square kilometres in size. The playa contains thousands of footprints left by humans, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and other inhabitants of prehistoric North America. Some of the tracks suggest that humans had reached the Americas 23,000 years ago – about 8000 years earlier than we had thought.
But what really sets the ancient human footprints at White Sands apart is their power to vividly show us what life was like for early Americans. Matthew Bennett at Bournemouth University, UK, has been studying tracks at the site for several years. He and his team can measure the prints to work out things like the age of the person who made them and how fast they were walking or running. Then, they can follow them and see how events such as animal hunts unfolded. “It’s written in the tracks what happened,” says Bennett.Advertisement
In unpublished work, Bennett and his team have found one collection of prints that tell a particularly evocative tale. It begins with a set of roughly 40-centimetre-long footprints that show a giant ground sloth – measuring perhaps 3 metres from nose to tail – once lumbered across the landscape.
Later, a group of three to five small children showed up. The jumbled mess of footprints they left are focused around one sloth print. The way the children’s tracks deform the sloth print tells us that the ground was wet, says Bennett. It is impossible to be certain about what was going on, but Bennett says the best interpretation is that water had pooled in the sloth print to create a puddle that was perfect for splashing in – an irresistible target for children, even in prehistory.

Kevin Hatala at Chatham University in Pennsylvania says he is excited to learn more about the tracks once they appear in a formal scientific report. “Records like this demonstrate the unique potential for footprints to record information that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to observe or infer from other materials such as bones and stone tools,” he says.
Kim Charlie and her sister, Bonnie Leno, have made trips to see Bennett and his colleagues at work, studying the prints. They are both members of the Pueblo of Acoma near Albuquerque in New Mexico, one of several groups of Pueblo people who feel a spiritual connection to White Sands.
Charlie is fascinated by the idea that giant ground sloths were so common in the world inhabited by the first humans at White Sands, who may be among the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo people. “It’s fascinating,” says Charlie. “And you think: jeez, were these animals friendly?”
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A new wave of archaeological investigations is reconstructing intimate details of our ancestors’ lives from fossilised footprints. They give us glimpses of everything from parent-child relationships to the thrill of a giant sloth hunt

Humans

6 April 2022

By Colin Barras
Rupert Gruber
A YOUNG woman is struggling across a muddy plain with a 3-year-old child on her left hip. She puts the youngster down to catch her breath. But she is too afraid to pause for long. The pair are alone, an easy target for the sabre-toothed cats that may lurk nearby. She picks up the child again and hurries on, vanishing into the distance. For a time, all is quiet. Then a giant ground sloth plods across the path she took. The animal catches the woman’s scent and is instantly on guard, rearing up and turning to scan the landscape for human hunters.
What was it like to live in the Stone Age? There must have been moments of joy, fear, love, pain and perhaps even wonder for the people who inhabited Earth tens of thousands of years ago. But emotions don’t fossilise, so we are shut out of those moments, separated by a vast chasm of time. We can find all the bones and tools we like, but they won’t tell us about the experience of life for our ancient ancestors.
Then again, a new window on their everyday existence may be cracking open. As people went about their lives, they left untold numbers of footprints behind. These recorded their behaviour in a unique way, capturing everything from nervous shuffles to determined sprints. What’s more, the tracks have an order to them, meaning events can be read like a narrative. That story of the woman, the child and the giant sloth is a vivid example we have found written in ancient tracks – but it certainly isn’t the only … More