Glacial Glory

On April 19, 2017, the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) awarded the 2017 Vega Medal to Yao Tandong for his contributions to research on glaciers and the environment on the Qinghai-tibet Plateau. Yao serves as director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research and an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is the first Asian scientist to win the award.

Founded in 1881, the Vega Medal first focused on research in the Arctic, and was expanded to the Antarctic before gradually covering more diverse fields of earth science. Yao’s research concentrated on the “third pole,” an area spanning over 5 million square kilometers centered on the Qinghai-tibet Plateau at an average altitude of 4,000 meters.

Iceman

In 1974, Yao was admitted to the Department of Glaciers and Frozen Tundra at Lanzhou University. The glaciers in the textbook looked cold and remote, so Yao thought glaciered areas might be barren and deserted.

A field trip, however, helped Yao fall in love with glaciers at first sight. “In 1975, we did field work at the source of the Yangtze River,” recalls Yao. “It was summer, and the grass was lush green under the blue sky over the Qinghai-tibet Plateau. When I climbed onto the main peak of the Qilian Mountains, I was shocked by the grand glacier. At that very moment, I knew the mysterious and great glacier would consume my research for the rest of my life. I was very excited.”

Four decades have passed, but 63-yearold Yao Tandong’s enthusiasm for glaciers has hardly waned. Yao still visits the Qinghai-tibet Plateau seven or eight times a year. The places he frequents are mostly located in altitudes ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 meters, featuring temperatures as low as 30 to 40 degrees Celsius below zero, less than a third of normal oxygen levels, strong ultraviolet rays and risks including storms, ice cracks and snow slides.

Most would balk at such situations, but Yao hardly sweats. “Every job has its hardship,” he shrugs. “Chemists do dangerous lab experiments. Mathematicians easily get stuck and bored. The most important thing is that you maintain your passion and interest. I love the plateau and glacier research, so nothing can stop my work. I would feel incomplete without visiting the QinghaiTibet Plateau several times a year.”

Yao even jokes that trips to the plateau keep him looking so young. “That environment really stimulates the vitality of my cells.”

Yao’s optimism is further fueled by seeing the conditions change over the years. “Things actually look better now,” he notes. “When I was an intern, it took 20 days to get from Lanzhou to Tibet, and a month if setting out from Beijing. But now I can get to Lhasa in only four and a half hours by plane from Beijing. Our working efficiency has improved by leaps and bounds.”

Hi-fi Ice

Sometimes referred to as “Asia’s Water Tower” for good reason, the Qinghai-tibet Plateau is home to the origins of many rivers, feeding a dozen nations and more than 200 million people, so changes in its conditions affect many. “If the plateau sneezes, faraway places get a cold,” Yao explains. And the plateau is highly sensitive to environmental changes.

“The temperature on the QinghaiTibet Plateau has risen by 1.7 degrees Celsius over the past century due to climate change, two times higher than that on plains,” Yao explains. “Human activity greatly affects the ecology of the plateau. No smog particles had been found in the ice cores from the glaciers there until the 1950s, when India started to develop industry and monsoons from the southeast brought the particles to the plateau.”

The ice core is the innermost part of the glaciers, making it ideal to most accurately show the evolution of the environment on the Qinghai-tibet Plateau. Common consensus is that the best way to study the climate history of the QinghaiTibet Plateau is to collect ice core sam- ples. Because ice cores are deposited layer by layer, the deepest ones can date back to hundreds of thousands of years. “We call ice cores the ‘Hi-fi’ evidence,” Yao continues. “Meteorological data only goes back a century, but ice cores can provide data from thousands of years ago.” The bulk of Yao’s work focuses on studying ice core samples.

“After extensive study and on-site experience, we first pick a couple of research sites from which to extract ice core samples,” says Yao. “Then we drill. At first, we do a trial, and if it’s successful, we begin the formal drill. Because everything must be done in summer, it takes two to three years to get a single sample.”

The procedure is not only lengthy, but also risky. Ice cracks can be found anywhere. Yao’s students reported seeing markers for the deceased every mile or two when climbing the mountain. In such severe conditions, Yao and his team drilled to the ice cores of Dunde, Guliya and Dasuopu glaciers at 5,000 to 7,000 meters above sea level. Their efforts were rewarded with research results: They traced climate change on the Qinghai-tibet Plateau by analyzing ice cores with time intervals of 50 years. They reached high-precision conclusions on the relationship between human activity and pollution of places of high altitude. They correlated the quantity of ice cores in certain years with the precipitation of Indian summers.

Nobility before Knowledge

Yao was a student of academicians Li Jijun and Shi Yafeng, two of China’s most renowned glacier researchers. Yao also studied glaciers under Professor Laurence Thomson in France. “Those great scholars influence me a lot,” says Yao. “I still remember my teacher Li Jijun instructing me to be a noble man before being a knowledgeable man. This is also my demand for my own students. How can one be noble? You should be honest, steadfast and responsible, and persevere and concentrate at the same time. Only by practicing such traits can one perform excellently in academics.”

According to his students, Yao is very considerate of their needs, but in academics, very demanding.

But how can a scientist have more concentration? Yao again mentions “interest”: “Interest in science is the most important thing. Exploring unknown things is instinctual and addicting for scientists. For me, climbing a glacier or ending up with rewarding data provides incomparable excitement and satisfaction.”

Yao believes that in the basic research of science, China still trails Europe and the United States. “Thanks to their competence in basic research, European nations and the United States enjoy the fruits of technological innovation continuously.”

“We cannot deny our own development,” Yao declared as he dedicated his Vega Medal to the development of China and the country’s science. “Thanks to my country’s development, the international academia is more actively paying attention to the work Chinese scientists are doing. Our foreign counterparts want to cooperate with us. The award may have my name on it, but it represents the attention from the international community on China’s valuable research on the Qinghai-tibet Plateau.”