Yeah, so the Kinnit Glacier is five miles wide at the very bottom, about 25 miles long, goes up to 9,200 feet.

Two years ago, flying above Alaska's expansive ice fields.

This is all new right here. This iceberg broke off probably about two weeks ago.

You could clearly see the signs of climate change. This is so beautiful, but it's also just so sad. We don't have decades.

We hardly have years.

Research now confirms these glaciers are on the brink. Some already past the point of no return.

If all of a sudden the snow line rises above the top of the ice field, you're not going to have any more snow income. The tipping point in this case is we don't have any more income. I've worked on 250 glaciers. Every single one of them is retreating out, and I sit on 27 different glaciers that I've taken measurements on that are now gone.

Mori Pelto has studied Alaska's evolving landscape over the past four decades. What are the changes that you've observed recently that are, I imagine, quite different than in decades prior?

From 1948 up to 1990, it was losing mass, but you weren't going to panic. And then it began to accelerate. And then after 2010 is when it was going to really increase. Alaska is having a major heat wave.

Trends that have already triggered dramatic consequences on weather patterns.

It feels about 70 degrees out, and it's still warming up.

Entire ecosystems.

Risk of starvation as foods on land are not an adequate replacement for seals on the sea ice. And local communities.

There it goes.

There it goes.

Unbelievable.

Roads are crumbling. Airports are breaking apart. Homes are skewing because the ice that used to be in the soil isn't there anymore.

And this alarming reality is playing out across the entire Arctic.

What people don't realize is that the Arctic is changing faster than pretty much anywhere else on the planet. As we lose these really bright white surfaces, it's actually making the Earth darker. More of the Sun's energy is being absorbed by the surface underneath, whether it's ocean or land.

It's known as the albedo effect, and you've felt it if you've worn a black shirt outside on a hot day because darker colors absorb more of the Sun's energy, while white and lighter colors reflect more of the Sun's heat, helping you stay cooler. Well, polar ice and glaciers work the same way, reflecting the Sun's energy back to space? And the more of it we lose, the hotter Earth gets just accelerating climate change.

Even these fundamental rules of climate change are going to be breaking down in certain parts of the Arctic.

It's a weird phenomenon that we're trying to understand, but they do offer some potential insights into the future of the Arctic in general.

Will Harcourt and his team just got back from a research expedition to the remote Svalbard Islands in Norway.

Svalbard is an area where there's a hotspot of what we call surging glaciers. So glaciers that suddenly speed up without any prior knowledge of it being able to do that. I definitely don't want to say that climate change is triggering surges, but there is some interrelationship there that we're trying to understand.

An Arctic anomaly or forecast for the future. One thing is clear, we are facing a rapidly changing and unpredictable Arctic with far-reaching effects.

Chase joins me now from Los Angeles.

Chase, those effects on the world's climate are something that you've been tracking this summer, no exception, right?

Yeah, that's right, Valarie. If we look at Alaska and just last week, parts of central Alaska, we're seeing temperatures in the upper '80s and even 90 degrees. And a lot of people in the lower '48 might think, Okay, gosh, that's not actually that hot, right? But these temperatures are 15, 16 degrees above average. And then when we zoom out and look back at just last year, across the Arctic, the Arctic circle as a whole saw its sixth warmest year on record in 2023. But when you look specifically at last summer in the Arctic. It was the warmest summer ever recorded. And that's really important because that's, of course, the time of the year where you're going to see most of this polar ice, these glaciers melting. And then if we zoom out even further, look at back at basically the last century or so, what's been going on in the Arctic, you see just how quickly it's warming. I mean, the Arctic has warmed in just the last 40 years by nearly 6 degrees Fahrenheit. That is four times faster than anywhere else on the planet. And really, the long term solution to this warming is that we've got to start reducing and eventually eliminating fossil fuel emissions, coal, oil, and gas.

The science is clear about that, Valarie.

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