With +/- 1 Year To Live, Former Astronaut Chooses Front Lines Of Climate, Working In Greenland
Piers Sellers landed in Greenland on a frigid Monday morning in April, and as he stepped off the plane at Thule Air Base he regarded the surrounding snow-covered hills with delight. A former astronaut, six-time spacewalker, and presently the acting director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Sellers was visiting the country for the first time. “I didn’t even see this from space, since the farthest north the shuttle goes is fifty-one degrees latitude,” he said. “We’re at seventy-six degrees now, right? Fantastic.” Sellers’s plan was to rendezvous with NASA researchers at Thule (pronounced “TOO-lee”) and accompany them on Operation IceBridge, an annual mission to collect data on the diminishing ice in the Arctic Ocean and on the Greenland ice sheet. “These guys at IceBridge are always saying, ‘Oh, you should come along, see where the rubber meets the road,’ and I say that I’m too busy, with too much piled on my desk,” Sellers explained. “But, given my current situation, of all the things that we’re doing in the field, this one is probably the most critical right now.”
By Sellers’s “current situation,” he means the fact that he was recently diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, a development that he wrote about earlier this year in the Times. After the diagnosis, he briefly considered living his final year or so—assuming his doctors’ expectations prove correct—as a rich man might, in a tropical, hedonistic splurge. “I thought of myself sitting for weeks on a beach,” he said. “What would I do? I’d be thinking about climate. And I know that I’d be thinking about the problem, and thinking about areas that needed to be investigated. All these things would just be going around in my head. I’d be sitting on my beach with my margarita—and it would be pointless.”
So Sellers went back to his desk job at Goddard, where he oversees the work of about sixteen hundred people, and considered how he could fit a few modest adventures between his office duties and chemotherapy sessions. Soon it occurred to him to go to the Arctic, which is warming faster than any other part of the world. “The global temperature has crept up one degree centigrade, but you can’t really feel that,” Sellers said. “But everyone can understand the ice melting. Everyone can see these graphs, and see the shrinkage of the pole, and see that the Greenland ice-sheet loss is just huge.” According to data from NASA satellites and airborne missions like IceBridge, Greenland is losing about two hundred and eighty-seven billion metric tons of ice each year. This spring, the ice sheet’s usual summertime melt began in mid-April, earlier than at any time in recorded history. That was worrisome to Sellers: if even a tenth of the Greenland ice sheet were to fall into the Atlantic, it would raise average global sea levels by about two feet.
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At the moment, Sellers is not sure how things will turn out for humanity. “I’ve been surprised lately at how quickly and visibly you can see the planet changing,” he said. “Half my lifetime—thirty years—I’ve been thinking of this, and I’m getting worried about the political response, particularly in this country, where it’s taken a long time to come around to a consensus.” Even if governments around the world manage to reduce their carbon emissions drastically and keep over-all warming to within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—the goal of last year’s climate accord in Paris—Sellers foresees some difficult circumstances for the planet. He pointed to the recent drought in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, which disproportionately affects the poor and drives the region’s conflicts. Still, the impacts on the developed world, Sellers said, might be manageable. “Now, what if you start creeping up to the hairy end of things—the three-degree world?” he asked. “Well, then we’ve got surprises.” Sellers rattled off the possibilities: intensified droughts, inexorable coastal flooding, severe food shortages. He wouldn’t be around to see these events happen, if indeed they came to pass, but his two children, both in their late twenties, might. The risk of political inaction worried him. “If you’re going to hang around until the Greenland ice sheet falls off into the Atlantic, or one of these big ice shelves becomes unzipped on Antarctica—if you wait for that, by the time that event has taken place, the series of follow-on events that leads you to really bad situations is unstoppable.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-astronaut-finds-himself-in-greenland?mbid=social_twitter
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