A glacier in Glasgow with bubbles of atmospheric stories trapped within

Climate COP26 Summit Mull over it!: An iceberg delivered by members of Arctic Basecamp on show near the COP 26 summit in Glasgow | AP

It was a huge block of ice, dripping and melting rather rapidly. What we consider biting winds of Glasgow were a warm embrace for this visitor from the Arctic, and the cold rain a sauna bath.

Forty tonnes when it was removed from its refrigerated shipping container, and not even a handful of it will return home. But while it was there, this chunk of ice told a chilling story. About how a faraway world is melting away and how that will destabilise everything as we know it now.

“Look at this ice, it’s different,’’ said Lovru Valcic, an instrumentation scientist and director of operations with Arctic Basecamp, the organisation which dared this stunt for the Conference of Parties (COP) 26 summit, “See these bubbles trapped within? They are records of what the atmosphere contained hundreds of years ago.”

Arctic ice is not formed by freezing water, it is formed as snow falls, and hardens over time. This snow traps in the air, and all that it contains at that moment in time—pollen and particulate matter, greenhouse gases or emissions. Scientists study this trapped air at various levels of the glacier, to glean an idea of what the earth’s atmosphere was like in times past.

The poles are distant places, not accessible to most people on earth. Arctic basecamp, therefore, brought a piece of the poles to a venue visited by people from around 200 nations. This organisation, founded by Gail Whiteman, comprises a group of experts and scientists who “speak science to power”.

Bottles containing melted ice on display at the summit | AP Bottles containing melted ice on display at the summit | AP

Situated a little away from the official venue, the glacier chunk was not an official delegate to the event, but a star attraction, nonetheless. The organisers created a mini basecamp, with the same material used by scientists in the Arctic.

The idea was for people to understand polar ice, and to make this distant place and concept tangible. This glacier chunk, for instance, was not carved out of the polar caps. It was a piece that had broken off and was lying on a beach in Norway, a victim of global warming already, said Valcic. And now that they have seen and touched it, people better appreciate numbers and facts. Like what it really means when they say that between 2011 and 2014 alone, one trillion tonnes of ice has melted from the Greenland ice sheet alone. Since the melt at the poles is at twice the speed compared with the rest of the planet, this world is fast changing, and now, Arctic peatfires are raging.

Unlike Vegas, what happens in the Arctic does not remain there, but impacts the rest of the world. It impacts climate all the way down south, causing long frigid spells or persistent dry ones, and prolonged floods. And even wild fires. “The actual situation is far, far worse that the worst case scenarios scientists have drawn up at these meets,” says Valcic. “Time is running out fast, unless we do something drastic towards the 1.5 degree goal, there is doom ahead.”

Several visitors posed for selfies around the glacier. They even touched it, and looked for the bubbles of atmospheric stories trapped within. And as they saw the glacier drip away, creating a puddle, they understood better what melting caps mean.

Valcic took me into the basecamp, swearing me into secrecy as he smuggled out a little something for me. It was a bottle of water. Not just any water, though. Arctic Melt, said the label, with a line below saying: “Unnatural Greenland water sourced from melting icebergs caused by climate inaction”.

Arctic basecamp bottled a thousand litres of this ice melt, to distribute to important guests at the venue. The glass bottling was done in Scotland. Later that evening, as I opened the bottle and took a sip, I felt humbled. I was sipping on something that took thousands of years to form, but was melted in hardly any time at all. A record of the past, gone.

Will we all, too, be headed that way?