A portal
to the past
© Audoin Desforges/Rolex
This article reports on the impact of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet initiative, which supports outstanding individuals
and organizations that are implementing novel solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.
The initiative highlights the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, a program that for over four decades has recognized
changemakers from around the world, including Gina Moseley, who is featured in this story.
On the far northern edge of Greenland — so far north that the summer sun doesn’t fully set, and the winter sun doesn’t fully rise — lies a small Arctic peninsula known as Wulff Land. It is one of the most remote places on the planet. A region hundreds of miles from human civilization, a frozen desert of rough peaks and formidable cliffs, where nothing much grows and nothing much lives. But it’s possible that this harsh, barren landscape may also hold the clues to the future conditions for life on Earth, locked within caves no explorer has ever reached.
At least not yet.
Next year, Gina Moseley, a British climate researcher, will head deep into Wulff Land, leading a world-first expedition into the planet’s northernmost caves. She hopes to unearth a fuller picture of Greenland as it was in the warmer, wetter climates of Earth’s past, and to build a clearer, more accurate picture of what the future could bring.
Given the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world — the first-ever recorded rainfall occurred at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet last year — that future may be a lot closer than we think. Because, while the wilds of northern Greenland might seem far from our own day-to-day, they wield an outsize influence over every corner of the Earth.
Greenland is home to the only permanent ice sheet outside of Antarctica. The more this vast store of ice melts, the less solar radiation is reflected into space, causing the planet to warm. This melting adds significantly more water to the ocean, too. According to NASA, Greenland has lost 5 trillion tons of ice in the past 15 years, equivalent to adding 112 million Olympic-size swimming pools to the ocean every year on average.
Moseley hopes her expedition will add urgency to the pursuit of solutions before cataclysmic weather patterns and rising sea levels become inevitable.
Unearthing the past
A project of such consequential proportions got a low-key start. It was 2008 when, sitting in a pub in Bristol, England, Moseley first heard about Wulff Land’s uncharted caverns. Then a PhD candidate in paleoclimatology, the study of Earth’s climate history, she was also an enthusiastic caver and had stopped in for a beer with her university’s caving club. Among the group was longtime explorer Charlie Self, who happened to mention a legendarily remote cave, first discovered in the 1960s during aerial mapping surveys. A succession of researchers and explorers had tried, and failed, to reach it in the ensuing decades.
“A light bulb went off at that point,” Moseley recalled. “I just thought, wow, I have to go. At the time, I was very young, I had no expedition experience, no funding, no nothing. Nowhere to start from, other than, ‘I would really like to make that happen one day.’”
PLANET VISIONARIES PODCAST:
SEASON 2, EPISODE 5
Hear Gina Moseley in conversation with fellow cave explorer and Rolex Laureate Francesco Sauro in this episode of the "Planet Visionaries" podcast, hosted by “Free Solo” star Alex Honnold.
Fast-forward to now, and Moseley is on the cusp of this long-held dream. After building an impressive assortment of field experience as a researcher with the University of Innsbruck in Austria, Moseley was awarded the 2021 Rolex Award for Enterprise, enabling her to mount the expedition.
Next summer, she’ll lead a six-strong team into the fabled cave, located 600 meters up an unforgiving cliff face, and where, after abseiling 200 meters into the inky depths of the cave mouth, she hopes to find ancient speleothems.
For a paleoclimatologist like Moseley, these speleothems — rock formations such as stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstones — are a sort of Holy Grail; each its own time capsule that, when analyzed, reveals long-stored chemical signatures that provide clues to climates past.
“Speleothems can be hundreds of thousands of years old,” Moseley explained. “I’ve even got one sample that’s 1.8 million years old.” Digging that far back into Greenland’s climate history would be a breakthrough. Arctic climate science typically relies on ice cores, which only date back around 128,000 years.
“Modeling is used to predict what will happen in the future, but for those models to be reliable, we have to understand the climate system really well,” Moseley added.
“We have very little information about how North Greenland has responded during past warm intervals. And to improve our understanding of the scale of change we can expect from our climate, we need a really good understanding of that.”
Caving for clues
Paleoclimatologists like Gina Moseley study the Earth’s climate history.
One of the most important resources for unearthing the secrets of climates past? Caves. Enter this interactive experience to explore how.
Surface
When water evaporates, it travels through the atmosphere, then precipitates elsewhere as snow or rain. As this snow or rain seeps into the ground, it takes with it the chemical signature of everything it has passed through previously.
Water
As the water runs through the soil, it collects minerals, including calcium carbonate. It absorbs carbon dioxide, too. As this solution passes through the ground and drips into the cave, the carbon dioxide is absorbed by the cave’s airy atmosphere.
Speleothems
Losing the carbon dioxide is a chemical change that causes the calcium carbonate to precipitate as crystal-like calcite deposits. Over time, these deposits build up in thin layers, creating speleothems, unique rock formations found in caves.
Another common speleothem is flowstone, sheet-like deposits of calcite that form as the water runs down walls. Flowstone often resembles frozen waterfalls or melted wax.
Speleothems include icicle-like stalactites, which grow down from the ceiling as the water drips; and stalagmites, which grow up from the floor like a cone, as dripping water accumulates on the floor.
Calcite
layers
Remember how the water carried the chemical signature of everything it had passed through previously? These signatures are now trapped and preserved in the speleothem’s calcite layers.
Analyzing oxygen trapped in different layers, for example, can reveal changes in temperature over hundreds of thousands of years. Chemicals absorbed from soil might show whether some periods of time were drier or wetter than others.
Even the presence of speleothems reveals a lot about past climates. Because you need precipitation to create them, speleothem deposits in Northeast Greenland reveal it must have been warmer and wetter here in the past.
Moseley hopes analyzing speleothems from the world’s northernmost caves will reveal how Greenland looked in a warmer, wetter world. This could help us understand more about the potential impact of climate change on the Earth’s future, and ours.
The missing link
The trouble with exploring uncharted territory? There are no guarantees of what you’ll find. “All I can say is, I’m really optimistic we’ll find these speleothem samples and see further back into Greenland’s climate past than anyone ever has,” Moseley said. “But we have no idea if that’s going to be the case.”
Still, even if Moseley and team don’t find speleothems, they won’t leave empty-handed. “Because these caves are completely unexplored, just finding out what’s in there, and documenting the most northern known caves in the world, is a huge finding in itself,” she said.
But Moseley acknowledges she is lucky to have the support of Rolex, because few organizations would back an expedition without a guaranteed result.
“The way academic funding works is that you have to show you know the answer to what you’re proposing to go and do,” Moseley said. “For Rolex to support these high-risk, high-gain projects, where we don’t really know what the outcomes will be, that’s really incredible.”
Of course, it’s not just that high-risk projects like these can yield meaningful discoveries. They capture the public imagination, too.
“Yes, we hope our expedition will tell us how Greenland will look in a warmer and wetter world,” Moseley said. “But to raise awareness and change habits — something we need to do very quickly, to be honest — often, with scientific work, that’s the missing link.”
