 I'm a university distinguished professor at the Ohio State University in the School of Earth Sciences and in the Bird Polar Research Center. You can go to the polar regions either by going to higher level of latitude or by going to high elevation. So for the last 35 years we've been perfecting the drilling of glaciers above 20,000 feet in remote parts of the world. And quite a challenge, it takes a special team to do that and it takes special lightweight equipment to get it up to 20,000 feet to drill the cores. And a number of years ago we developed the first solar powered ice core drill because if you go to the tropics and you go 20,000 feet you have over half the Earth's atmosphere below you. So every panel works 20 to 30 percent above manufacturer specs. And it's a beautiful source of power. There's no pollution at the drill site. And the only thing you have to worry about is that in the tropics drilling starts when the sun comes up. You reach your maximum drilling rate at noon and you've got to make sure you get to drill up before sun sets in the evening. Keeping the ice frozen. I mean if you're working over in the Himalayas, you're in a very remote part of the world that the logistics, food supplies, medical kits, we have to take in everything so our team is self-sufficient. You couldn't do it without our colleagues in China that help us arrange what we need in the way of logistics. But if you're drilling, the highest we've drilled is 23,500 feet. The top of the Himalayas is a place called Dasupu, wonderful history of the monsoon records. You can't get that out of the polar regions. But getting up there, living up there for six weeks is a real challenge. And then keeping those cores frozen because we use Sherpas to backpack them from the high elevation down to the edge of the glacier. But even when you get to the edge of the glacier, you're still 3,000 or 4,000 feet below where the trucks are out on the plateau. And you've got to transfer that to special insulated boxes. And in that part of the world, we put those boxes on yaks that carry the cores down to the trucks and valleys below. And we drill five to 600 meters of core and you can get two of these insulated boxes on a yak. You can get about 12 meters of core on one yak. So if you're transporting 500, 600 meters, you've got to have a whole herd of yaks. And the yaks are kind of like cats. They got a mind of their own. So you're trying to move them down to where the trucks are. And then once you get them to the trucks, there's a dash across the plateau to Lhasa where there are freezers where we can divide our samples between our Chinese colleagues and then we air cargo them to Beijing, go through Chinese customs, then air cargo them to Chicago in the US and go through US customs and then we put them on freezer trucks and ship them down to Ohio State University. They're usually in transit for a month after we leave the field site. It's a long story. It actually is a remarkable story in many ways. I grew up in a small town called Gasway in West Virginia, which is a coal mining state in the US. Very poor family. No one in my family had ever gone to college. But I was very interested in science. I knew that when I was in sixth grade. And so there was a group of us, about eight of us that hung out together. We competed with each other and all eight of this group went on to go to college. And we got scholarships to go and went to Marshall University and I started out in physics because I knew I wanted to be a scientist, but I wasn't sure what kind of scientist. But that kind of is the basis for any science. And then when I was a junior, I took a geology class and I really liked it because you could see it dealt with big processes and you could see them. And you wouldn't have to spend the rest of your life in an office building. You go out in remote parts of the world and so I really, really liked that. And then when I graduated from there, I went to Ohio State University to study cogeology because I grew up in West Virginia and as a young person, I was looking for a job, a good paying job. And I was at Ohio State for about a quarter and I got a message that there was an opening in what was then the Institute of Polar Studies to look at ice cores. And I'd had geomorphology and I knew that glaciers only cover 10% of the planet and they're in places where people don't live. So how could they possibly be important? But if you took the research position, you could get your master's degree faster and therefore get out and get your job faster. So I took it and it took about a year and a half of working with ice cores to start to realize what their potential was. And so it's not like I started out in that direction. And so I always tell my students that, you know, and it's true. Most of them come, families want them to get a good education and to get a good job to have a secure life. But I tell them if they're really lucky in this process, they will find their passion, the thing that they'll get up for every morning and go to work. And once you find your passion, you don't worry about anything else because it takes care of itself. I made my first trip to Antarctica in 1973 as a graduate student and the following year it's kind of interesting that the way things come to be because all the work at the time I started on ice cores was being done in the polar regions in Greenland and Antarctica. And all the pioneers in our field were alive and I had a chance to meet them when I was a student. And it was in 1973 that there were so many people working in Antarctica and in Greenland that came up with this idea that wouldn't it be great to have a record somewhere in between to compare the, look at the connectedness between Antarctica, climate from Antarctica and climate from Greenland. And so there was a geographer who had made an atlas of the glaciers of the world. And he had all these aerial photos and in these photos we found this tropical glacier called Kalkia in the Andes of Peru, 18,670 feet and took the photos to what was then the polar programs because they were the only agency at the time that funded ice core research, made a case to the program manager that wouldn't it be great to look at something in the low latitudes to connect to the high latitudes. And he lessened and he said afterwards his name was Jay Zawalli, he said, you know Lonnie that sounds really interesting but you know I can't fund it because we can't fund anything that's not north of the Arctic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle. So in 73, 74 in the winter I went to Antarctica and back then they had telexes and in February I got a telex from Jay Zawalli saying, quote, that I have funded all of my real science projects and I have $7,000 left, what could you do on that tropical glacier for $7,000? And I tell the expert, hey, I think we could get there. And in the summer of 74 we made our first excursion to Peru up in the Andes, found this ice cap and that opened up a whole new area of research, not quickly I might add, because it was clear there was a record there but we still had to find the funding to be able to go there and being young and naive I thought we would just make a contract with Approving Air Force and bring the drill and the generator from Antarctica and we would fly the helicopter up through the Andes and get it up on the ice field, get the drill out, drill the cores, put them into the helicopter and fly them out. That was a great idea but when we got a contract and we actually tried this in 1979 and we had to fly the helicopter 13 hours to get it into the region and there were no airports up there so we had to bring the fuel in by train on a boxcar and we staged out over the back of a small town in Sequani in the Andes but when you got the helicopter up to 19,000 feet it would, I mean even in beautifully blue skies it would just fall because there were updrafts and downdrafts and there was not enough air to support it and eventually the pilot said no we can't do this and so I mean it was my first really big failure I mean I've been funded by NSF to do this, I was told by the pilots they could do it but in the end they couldn't and there was a two day journey from the end of the nearest road to this ice cap and so you can only get there either walking or using horses and the drills from Antarctica were too big, the generator, no way you could put that on a horse. So that year we actually went to the ice cap and we sampled down a crevasse, got a record going back 25 years which we published in Science and but it's one of, it's those things in life where you come to a point where is this possible? I mean you know and this was the first time we thought about using solar power because a panel, a solar panel can go into special made bags that can be put on horses and you can, it's just you need 40 panels, you get as many horses as you need to transport them to the edge of the ice and so we came up with this idea and we took panels there and sure enough they performed 20 to 30 percent above specs of manufacturers but of course we had to get reviewed for getting money to build a solar power drill and this is 1983 and solar power was just coming on line and so Willie Dansgard who was one of the pioneers in our field reviewed the proposal and he sent me a copy of the review he sent to NSF, National Science Foundation and it was very short, it said the Kalkaya ice cap is too high for human beings and the technology does not exist to drill it therefore you should not fund this project and fortunately there was a program manager who said he was interested in monsoons and I'd got his PhD studying monsoons and he said well maybe Willie Dansgard is right but we won't know unless we try and so we built this solar power drill we tested on a parking garage in Columbus Ohio we brought him blocks of ice and we were able to drill through the blocks of ice looked like it would work but two weeks before we left on the expedition to drill there I passed the MBA exam Fisher School of Business because this if it failed it would be my second failure and I figured I'd need a new career life and I really liked Willie Dansgard I had read all of his papers when I was a student and so we went down in 1983 and we succeeded in not just drilling one quart of bedrock but two and bringing back 6,000 bottled water samples because we hadn't devised a technology to keep the ice frozen but we could cut it prepare it in field and carry it out with horses and we brought it out and one set of those samples I sent to Willie Dansgard who analyzed them and it was such a fantastic record that from that day on he was our greatest supporter on why we needed to drill in the high mountains around the world but I'm a very firm believer in a 10,000 hour rule that if you want to be an expert in anything you got to be willing to put in 10,000 hours which turns out to be about eight and a half years of your life and I did that on the Calcaya ice cap between the time of the concept and before we actually succeeded to drill it in 1983 using solar power so so and so the other thing I always tell my students it's very important at an early age to fail because it's in failure that you you're really pushed to think about you know is this what you really want to do and to think about okay how can I accomplish it you know success you don't learn that much failure you learn a lot and so and it's good to do it when you're young because no one knows who you are and if you fail yeah it's a big deal to you but it's probably not for the rest of the world so that that's kind of how we we got started in that ice core opened up a whole new field and we've now drilled in 16 countries including Antarctica and Greenland we've run I just finished my 58th expedition to New Guinea no other time in human history would it be possible for one human to do this because we move six tons of equipment to these countries and go through customs and get them up to these remote areas and get the ice core back frozen and so it's amazing I would never thought when we started out that this would be possible but now we have an archive we have over 7,000 meters of core stored at minus 35 degrees and our freezers at Ohio State it's the only tropical collection on earth and no one has duplicated this because of the team it's really comes down to people the team that we were able to put together that they know what they're getting into and it's tough working at above 20,000 feet and but they're marvelous records 58 expeditions over four decades what changes have you seen well the the glaciers again when we started in the 70s you know there no there was no discussion of global warming in fact they were talking about the coming Ice Age because there had been crops failures and in what was then the Soviet Union because there had been some cold winters and so we didn't go there to look at changing climate as much as to understand how a tropical glacier works versus those in the polar region but and going back to these places we were able to document the changes that taking place and what was really incredible was the initially how slow the glaciers were retreating and then how they have accelerated coming forward in time and in such that many of the sites that we drilled early in my career have disappeared and you cannot go get those records now and therefore the archive we have I mean we cut our cores in half and half of them go in the freezer for the future because we know there'll be new techniques there'll be new ideas but you're not going to be able to go out and recover an ice core from the summit of Kilimanjaro in Africa because the ice is not going to be there and so I think that has a when I look into the future and have 100 years from now when all forgotten I think what will be remembered are that the quality of the records that have been obtained because those isotope values those dust measurements those chemistry measurements they're not going to change the interpretation of those may change but those records will be there and then the archive for future generations to work on to me is it will be a good legacy as time proceeded it became very clear that especially the lower elevation glaciers by that I mean glaciers at 5,000 meters 18,000 feet we're going to disappear first and so getting those archives has has really been it's in recent years have become almost a salvage mission when we went to New Guinea I mean in the center of this tropical rainforest I mean this is middle of nowhere and that it was to capture what's left we should have drilled there in 1935 because we have some old photos there's a lot of ice there but but we we got a record at 32 meter cores to bedrock and they have a marvelous record in them but they they won't be there my best guess is that glacier will disappear in 2017 three years from now it's I mean these glaciers it's not just their area that's ranking they're no longer accumulating on top they're they're losing mass from the surface down and to me this is a this one of the problems of using satellites to measure glaciers is that you're not really change measuring the volume change of that ice and yet if you are in the Himalayas where you have millions of people downstream depending on water those glaciers will appear to be there on a satellite image but they are thinning vertically one year there'll be glaciers and the next year if that glacier will be gone on Kilimanjaro those ice fields are thinning in about half a meter a year from the top down and so when the fewer longer glacier if you're looking at it from the satellite in 2017 they'll appear to be a glacier and 2018 just be bedrock because it's it's it's going from the top down so they I think the implications for water supplies in these remote areas I mean if you go to a country like Peru 70% of the tropical glaciers on earth are in Peru and the Andes are Peru here you have a country of 34 million people over 50% live in the desert on the west coast of Peru depending on rivers that originate in the glaciers up in the Andes 76% of their electricity comes from hydro power the water coming from those glaciers they have a very distinct wet and dry season so that you know glaciers are kind of like an insurance policy they accumulate snow during wet seasons and wet periods and then they melt and release that during droughts and dry seasons but they're getting smaller so their ability to do that becomes less and less so this has tremendous implications for people who live in areas that depend on those water resources because downstream that water goes for those hydroelectric plants it goes in the irrigation goes in the municipal water supplies for cities and you go to a city like Lima Peru that have 15 million people in it they are looking at putting in tunnels through the Andes to capture water now that goes into the Amazon and bring it back to the west coast for water supply for people so the implications of the change are are tremendous in these areas and I think in the tropics there's that there's where you're going to see the first real impacts on people because the people are living right downstream below the glaciers and their large numbers of people living downstream so what's happening to those glaciers become extremely important when I first started working on this and seeing the system change I think it was 1992 when I first testified at US Senate on climate change and back then I talked about prevention so that time has come and gone I think now it's the mitigation the adaptation or the suffering and so we're as we go further down this road our options are becoming less and less of how we deal with these these changes if you're working in Tibet there are 46,000 glaciers there and you take a river like the Indus River it flows through China through Pakistan and through India all nuclear power countries all depend on that river for its water supplies so these are these are places of geopolitical hot spots in the future you look at population projections for the world by 2050 50% of the world's population will live in mega cities in southern China and India so that water becomes more and more important as we go forward in time it's interesting that you've studied cold geology and also business and then going to climate science yeah there's a common I guess argument against to cast out on climate science is that climate scientists are only agreeing with the human cause global warming because they're in it for research I have never understood that argument anyone who's in science will tell you up front it's not where you go to make money science is it's where you if you have a passion you go there to seek that past and fulfill a drive that you have within you and but I must say that I I've come to understand skeptics and climate change much better because of a incident that happened now two and a half years ago two and a half years ago I should go back and say 20 years ago I was diagnosed with exercise induced asthma and because I I'd have a hard time breathing when I'm doing exercise and and that's always an issue when you go to high elevation but the doctor told me that the good thing about it was that there if you had to write medicine there's nothing in the world you couldn't do so you know I'm climbing mountains drilling ice cores and and putting getting harder and harder to work at those high elevations and when I came back from Peru in 2009 I went to the Ross heart hospital and I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and my cardiologist looked at me he said Lonnie he said you know in your future you have one choice and one choice only and that is you're gonna have to have a heart transplant and I looked at him and I said you're crazy I've been climbing the highest mountains in the world for about 63 years old at the time and I I fought this guy every step of the way for for two years I mean I was running expeditions to New Guinea and I was in the Alps drilling in 2011 and in one day I couldn't get up from my tent to go to the drill site I couldn't breathe and I came down and I ended up getting out of Italy back to the Ross heart hospital at Ohio State University went right in the emergency room they put me in put put me initially on a heart pump and then they had to put in an L VAD system which is a turbine that was invented six years earlier that goes into your old heart and you you have a computer on the outside and you have a drive line and during the day you run on batteries and at night you plug in to the wall and six months later there was they found a what turned out to be a pretty good match and I got a heart transplant one year after that I was in in 2013 I was at 20,000 feet and West Central Tibet and doing what my passion is recovering these records but I use the story because I believe that I had two things two options the reason I didn't want to believe that was congestive heart failure is that if you put that on your medical form there's no way you'd be permitted to go climb the next mountain to run the next project so I'd rather believe that it was asthma and but the fact is at the end of the day we deal with what is and what is was that I had to have a heart transplant and when it comes to climate change we will deal with what is because the system is changing and we will have to deal with it but unfortunately as human beings we don't usually do these things until we have no choice and and then sometimes we can still deal with it it may be touch and go for a while but things can get better on the other side first of all yeah we work with ice cores and we have now an 800,000 year history of CO2 methane nitrous oxide and and we know that we have not had levels of CO2 at 400 parts per million bavarium in 800,000 years of history and we know that that's rising about 3.2 parts per million every year and we know where that CO2 is coming from because we do the isotopes of the carbon we know it's coming from fossil fuels so we know we're changing the composition of our atmosphere we know the temperature of the earth is going up because we have thermometers all over the world and we have a record that goes back 130 years that documents that fact that temperatures are going up at the same time the glaciers all over the world are melting and retreating and that's what you would expect if the world was getting warmer and that water is flowing into the world's oceans and sea level is rising and the rate of sea level rise is accelerating as the rate of glacier melt accelerates so the evidence is very clear where where we're headed and the fact that the humans are driving it it's a it's a matter of physics and chemistry and at the end of the day science is about what is and what is is we're changing the climate system how long it takes us to actually make meaningful advances on dealing with this problem to me is is the only question the fact that we will deal with it is a given