The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Drilling shallow ice cores at Camp Black and Bloom on the Greenland Ice Sheet in summer 2016
Risking encounters with polar bears and being eaten alive by mosquitoes, 30-year-old British scientist Joseph Cook is unlocking the secrets of why – and how fast – Arctic ice is melting. His work has taken him from Sheffield to Greenland to a gala night i
At the home of the Oscars, the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, 500 sets of golden cutlery had been laid out. The well-groomed guests and an uncommonly smart gaggle of reporters had flown into Los Angeles from Moscow and Singapore, Paris and Johannesburg. Passing the stars on the Walk of Fame, they lingered by the bar, snacking on canapés and sipping champagne, and now they were taking their seats in the auditorium, making sure to snap a selfie or two. On the stage, the orchestra warmed up; in the wings, the director James Cameron and a roster of Hollywood stars awaited their cue. And there in the front row, nervously anticipating his ovation, sat a little-known man from Derby who spends much of his time peering into puddles.
Not just puddles, actually. Some of the pools he likes to examine, far away in the Arctic, more closely resemble drill holes, just a centimetre across. Some days, he flies a drone above them; other times, he hunches over them, scooping their contents into a test tube, then flying them across the ocean to his laboratory in Sheffield.
On this November evening, the man – an athletic-looking 30-year-old named Joseph Cook – arrived at the theatre with his family. In the moments before the ceremony began, his father stepped right up to the stage to take a picture of Cook and the two women sitting either side of him: his wife, Kylie, and his mother, Angela. Cook had never known either of them fret so much about their choice of outfit.
They were not the only ones. Searching for their seats in the rows behind the Cooks were mathematicians in tuxedos and biologists in cocktail dresses. One elderly man wore a hearing aid and a bow tie. But the dress code was apt, for they were here to witness the science world’s closest approximation of the Academy Awards.
Every two years, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise honour scientists, explorers and assorted other geniuses who have ambitious plans to chart unknown corners of our planet or develop life-enhancing technology. Launched 40 years ago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rolex Oyster, the world’s first waterproof watch, this latest ceremony would induct five new ‘laureates’ – who would each receive 100,000 Swiss francs (£79,000) towards their projects – and another five young laureates, would be given 50,000 Swiss francs (£39,000).
This being a Rolex affair, the awards were preceded by a session to adjust the engraved watches the laureates also received and followed by a dinner of lobster salad and filet mignon – served at tables arranged on the same stage from which the likes of Julianne Moore and Leonardo DiCaprio delivered their acceptance speeches. Hence the golden cutlery.
‘It’s another world,’ Cook told me. ‘So extravagant. It’s not what you expect when you’re sat at your desk in Sheffield just quietly getting on with stuff.’
Why, then, had Cook been plucked from that desk? What singled him out, ensuring he was named one of this year’s young laureates, when 2,312 applicants had been rejected? The answer lay 3,700 miles away, on the vast expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Try to picture Greenland’s 656,000 square miles of frozen water and you will probably imagine a vast, homogenous crust, all the brilliant white of a Holly wood snowstorm. In fact, the ice is awash with colour. ‘There are colours there that I’ve seen nowhere else,’ says Cook, when we meet in a hotel near the theatre a day before the ceremony. ‘You see these wonderful neon blues, deep purples and pastel shades everywhere.’
He loves taking in the view – he confides that ‘it’s totally got under my skin’ – but he knows these colours are important for more than their beauty. They also hold long-kept scientific secrets – and Cook, as one of only around 200 glacial microbiologists in the world, is trying to unravel them.
His research focuses on how as the ice darkens, it melts more quickly, exacerbating the harm unleashed by global warming.
The ice darkens for two reasons. As it begins to melt, algae bloom in the fresh water and spread across the otherwise white surface. At the same time, minute particles of debris from across the continent are blown on to the ice. This insulates the ice below, making it melt faster than the surrounding sheet. In time, little‘ puddles’ begin to form, which are properly known as cryoconite holes after the Ancient Greek words for ice and dust.
‘By changing colour it changes the way [the ice] absorbs sunlight,’ explains Cook. ‘It’s like going out on a sunny day in a dark T-shirt: you get hotter.’
None of this causes our planet to warm – Cook stresses that humans are still to blame for that – but algae and cryoconite act as ‘amplifiers’, accelerating the pace at which the ice melts.
Now, Cook and his fellow microbiologists want to measure the extent of the cryoconite and algae, in order to make more precise predictions about how quickly the ice will disappear. The accuracy of such forecasts is crucial since the ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea levels by seven metres.
‘The science of climate change is no longer about “Is it happening?”. That’s done. What we’re doing now is working out the details and trying to come up with good predictions. What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic – it’s got global consequences. If we don’t fully understand the process by which it melts, we can’t predict global climate change.’
Cook, who is a full-time researcher at Sheffield University, has now spent six summers in the Arctic. His Rolex prize money will fund three more research trips this year – to Svalbard, an icy outpost of Norway, and to his beloved Greenland, where he will adapt a drone to map the spread of the darkened ice.
But the cryoconite holes may yet yield even more secrets. These freezing pools are also thriving habitats, teeming with life – albeit on a microscopic scale. According to one estimate, 100 million billion trillion microorganisms inhabit the world’s cryoconite, making the holes, in Cook’s awestruck phrase, ‘cryo cities’. There are algae, fungi and even ‘water bears’, a predator so named because ‘they do kind of look like bears, through a microscope. They’re really ugly, horrible things.’
These plants and animals are only a few millionths of a metre long but their ability to thrive in such a hostile environment suggests they could one day enable sig nif icant scient if ic advances. In temperatures barely above freezing, they respire and photosynthesise as if they were in Mediterranean soil. ‘What that suggests is they’ve got survival strategies that they employ that we don’t really understand yet but must be very effective. It’s very fertile ground for fascinating research.’ Cook will use his remaining prize money to study these strategies, which could eventually lead to the discovery of cold-resistant genes or new antibiotics.
‘The thing that really gets me about cryoconite is that it looks so simple,’ says Cook. ‘It looks like a hole with some mud in it. But actually there’s so much going on in there. I find that so compelling.’ C ook’s road to Los Angeles, to the incongruous glitz of that ceremony, did not begin in the Arctic. It really got going a quar ter of a centur y beforehand, over the kitchen table at the family home in Kent. His father, an accounts manager called Mitch, transformed at weekends into Magic Mitch, the ‘Merlin of Margate’, and he needed someone to test out his latest tricks.
When he rehearsed his newest sleights of hand at dinner time, his young son was gripped. ‘I would sit and try to work it out and go through the motions of problem solving and hypothesis testing. There is quite a lot of science to that,’ recalls Cook. ‘That was his measure of success – if he could get it past me, it was a good trick.’
Sensing an interest, Mitch bought his son a pocket microscope, instructing him to run into the garden and pick up a leaf or some soil to examine. Cook was hooked and that first microscope still lives at the home in Derby he shares with his wife and their cat – Shackleton.
At the age of 11, Cook became obsessed by rock climbing. From then on, he saved up to take the 14-hour coach to Wales each summer to explore its peaks. When he came to pick a university, Sheffield was an obvious choice: as well as having a renowned geography department, it is Britain’s climbing capital.
After a gap year ticking off a ‘bucket list’ of ambitious climbs around the world, Cook settled down to his work, which made good use of this love of exploring. ‘There is a distinction because the field work is science-driven – you don’t go out there to have an adventure and do a bit of science. But it gives you the skills to operate safely in some pretty wild places.’
And it can get pretty wild. Cook and his colleagues undertook rifle training before catching a helicopter to the ice sheet: there is always the threat of an unwelcome visit from a polar bear, so g uns must be kept close to hand. ‘Colleagues of mine have had close encounters. [One] had three polar bears come into their camp in Svalbard. I’ve seen them in the distance – and that’s fine.’
Far more common are the mosquitoes that plag ue the camps, biting through socks and even trousers. One night last year, Cook fell asleep in the open; when he awoke, he was covered in bites. ‘My face looks like a sheet of bubble wrap,’ he wrote on his blog.
In such conditions, little comforts assume unusual significance. Cook savours his whisky nightcaps, sipped from a test tube (‘a clean one!’), and once hosted a formal dinner on ice, when he and his colleagues dressed up in shirts and ties to tuck into three courses of freezedried rations.
The scientists’ only contact with home is a weekly satellite phone call so there is little to distract them from appreciating their environment. There are sometimes glimpses of reindeer and Arctic foxes; from their camp, they can hear the constant crunching and cracking of the ice, distant torrents of water and the wind howling towards the coast.
One night last year, Cook woke suddenly and got out of his tent. ‘To the right was the midnight sun just above the horizon, shooting these wonderful reds through the low cloud. Directly opposite, we had a full moon. The two were joined by this beautiful purple haze.’
A colleague soon joined him, but neither of t hem sa id a ny t hi ng. ‘ We just stood a nd appreciated this until we were too cold to stay out any more. I will never forget how that looked. It was like being in those psychedelic album covers that you see from the 1960s. It was just magical.’ To make the Rolex shortlist, Cook spent 16 months negotiating an ever-higher series of barriers. First he had to submit two written applications, then survive three phone interviews, then produce a minidocumentary about his proposal. Eventually, he was summoned before a jury at Rolex HQ in Geneva, whose number included an astronaut, several eminent scient ists and Marcus du Sautoy, the Oxford mathematician. It was, he says, ‘almost a viva’.
Then, last April, he received the phone call he had hungered for. He had won. But it was to remain a secret: he could only tell Kylie and his parents. ‘Dolby Theatre!’ he kept exclaiming to his mother, as she worried about her outfit. ‘Dolby Theatre!’
At last, there they were. And now the whole world seemed to know. Rolex took out advertisements about the awards in Britain and America, and videos of t he winners were posted and shared on Facebook. The auditorium was filling up with 80 former laureates, invited back to celebrate the anniversary. Cook marvelled at the size of the crowd: ‘There are more people here than I would normally see in an entire summer.’
First up were the laureates. There was a Peruvian marine biologist, Kerstin Forsberg, who protects manta rays by training the fishermen who once threatened their survival to be tourist guides instead. There was Conor Walsh, an Irish mechanical engineer who is developing a robotic suit to help stroke sufferers walk; Vreni Häussermann, a German biologist charting unknown life in the southern fjords of Patagonia; and Sonam Wangchuk, an Indian engineer sculpting artificial glaciers in the Himalayas to provide a steady stream of water. And there was Andrew Bastawrous, a British eye surgeon who gave up his NHS job to develop a smartphone app that African teachers can use to pinpoint pupils suffering vision problems.
Finally, it was Cook’s turn. As he stood in the wings with the other four young laureates, he kept looking around, trying to appreciate every detail. ‘Take mental photographs,’ he told himself.
When he strode on to the stage, applauded by some of the academics he most admired and by his family, he looked as if he belonged there: he was not, of course, in his summer uniform of down jacket and thermals but in a smart three-piece suit and tie. Still, he had not entirely left the Arctic behind. Beneath the suit, he wore the only piece of jewellery he has ever owned, aside from his wedding ring – a reindeer-bone pendant, in the shape of Greenland. Now, as ever, it was close to his heart.
‘What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. If we don’t fully understand the process by which ice melts, we can’t predict climate change’