Associated Press
For 5,000 years, great tongues of ice have spread over some of the tallest slopes of tropical New Guinea—the remotest reaches of this remote tropical island.
Now those glaciers are melting, and Lonnie Thompson must reach them before they're gone.
To the American glaciologist, the ancient ice is a vanishing "archive" of the story of El Niño, the equatorial phenomenon driving much of the world's climate.
More than that, the little-explored glaciers are a last unknown for a mountaineering scientist who for three decades has circled the planet pioneering the deep-drilling of ice cores, both to chronicle the history of climate and to bear witness to the death of tropical glaciers from global warming.
"No one knows how thick these remaining glaciers are," Thompson said of the ice rivers on Puncak Jaya, or Mount Jaya, the island's largest peak. "We do know they are disappearing."
(Read a 2004 interview with Thompson.)
El Niño—Past and Future
The unknowns on this wild, Texas-sized island extend even to the local climate. (See map of New Guinea.)
"There are indications of warming," explained Kasis Inape, a senior government climatologist here. "But we can't really confidently say the temperature change has been this much or that much, because the actual data are lacking."
As a companion project to Thompson's expedition, an international research team, including Inape, plans a first-ever assessment of recent climate change on New Guinea, especially along the 1,200-mile (nearly 2,000-kilometer) mountainous spine of the southwestern Pacific island.
Thompson's quest on Puncak Jaya will be for something deeper in the past.
"We may actually see an El Niño history there," he said by telephone from his office-laboratory at Ohio State University. And that history may foretell the future, he and others believe.
