Dynamic Planet

Narrator: Justus Utuaq is a Tunumiit hunter.

He's from the Indigenous Tunumiit community of about 3,000 people in East Greenland.

[Dogs barking] Narrator: Justus and his dogs are on a mission, to catch a seal for his family.

Hunting this way is central to the Tunumiit way of life.

Narrator: Indigenous people have been using dogsleds in Greenland for around a thousand years.

Narrator: Sled dogs are so important to the people of East Greenland that it's forbidden to bring other breeds into the region to protect the gene pool.

Narrator: But the melting ice is the bigger threat to the breed and the dogsledding culture.

[Justus shouting commands] Narrator: In this epic new series, we explore the extremes on all 7 continents... meeting people standing in the face of change and revealing how science... -Ooh!

-Whoa.

Narrator: nature, and Indigenous knowledge... [Man speaking native language] Narrator: can prepare us for a fast-changing future.

In this episode... Man: Think I see some whales.

the ice world is melting.

Can people and animals adapt?

And what is the future of the frozen extremes... Man: Careful.

Careful.

Narrator: on our "Dynamic Planet"?

Narrator: The edge of the sea ice is a perilous place for Inuit seal hunter Justus Utuaq.

The surface is too thin to walk or sled across.

[Fires rifle] Narrator: But luck could be running out for this 1,000-year-old way of life if the rapid change continues.

[Dog barks] Go, go, go.

Go, go, go, go, go... Narrator: Ice covers 10% of Earth's surface.

Polar icecaps have cradled our planet for millions of years, influencing global ocean currents and weather patterns that affect us all.

Ice reflects most of the sun's heat, which helps to keep our planet cool.

So the faster we lose it, the faster the world heats up and the faster the remaining ice melts, forcing the people and the animals of the ice world to face rapidly changing conditions that require ingenious solutions.

Man: Polar bears are the poster child for climate change.

I've been working about 25 years in the Arctic.

I think the big mystery in the Arctic is what happens when the ice is disappearing sooner than ever before and it's forming later than ever before.

What happens to the polar bears during the summer?

Narrator: These polar bears specialize in hunting seals on the sea ice in winter.

In summer, they live off their fat reserves until the ice returns.

But can they last that long as the number of days with sea ice decreases?

Cinematographer Adam Ravetch is documenting one group of bears that may have found a solution.

Adam Ravetch: When the tide is out, it's this huge, vast rock, boulder field.

And you think nothing could live here.

It's really harsh.

We came here thinking, Oh, well, this is a place where polar bears are very desperate.

But here in Seal River, these animals seem to be thriving.

They don't look desperate at all.

The question is, what are the bears doing to adapt?

Think today's our day?

Man: Every day is our day.

[Chuckles] Every day is our day.

Adam: Every year, thousands of beluga whales arrive to Seal River.

These are beautiful white whales.

[Adam laughs] Look at that.

I don't even know what I'm getting, but look at that.

Narrator: Tens of thousands of belugas come to the safety of this shallow estuary to molt their skin and give birth.

Adam: When the tide rises, when the water comes in, the rocks emerge, and the beluga whales move in.

And you start to see bears climbing out on those rocks.

Narrator: Big, hungry males looking for beluga.

This is what Adam has come to film.

Adam, voice-over: First, all you're worried about is, can I do it?

Am I able to capture this?

Adam: It's amazing.

We captured it from the air.

We captured it from the water.

Into the second week, we were starting to see a lot of it.

And then you start to get your head around what's actually happening here.

You see, it's not just one desperate bear or a couple desperate bears trying to hunt beluga.

They were actually working together.

The minute one captured a beluga, another one would move in.

Narrator: Adam sees signs of cooperation that he's never seen before among the normally solitary bears.

[Growling] Adam: Even if there was a little fighting going on, they would eventually share together.

And so it's a real collaboration.

We're seeing socialization in bears that I don't think has ever been really documented before.

Narrator: A mother with a cub in tow heads out into the boulder field.

No one has filmed a mother and cub hunting this way before.

Adam: And the tide was high, but the rocks were submerged and they could push off the rocks.

We watched her hunting in the shallows of Hudson Bay.

It's an amazing teaching moment to teach her young cub how to eat beluga here in the summertime.

And it's just a great honor to be there and to witness it.

Narrator: The ability to adapt is a useful trait in a changing world.

But the environment at Seal River is unique.

Nowhere else on Earth do polar bears have so much summertime prey or such a handy way to catch it.

Adam: This boulder field is a unique ecosystem that bears have learned to use as a tool to hunt beluga whales.

So it's a huge community of bears that in this one specific area are all thriving together.

You know, the credo I think of Seal River is, We hunt together, we survive together.

Narrator: By 2050, the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free in summer for the first time in millions of years.

And there is even more ice at risk at the opposite end of the globe.

Antarctica is mostly land covered in vast ice sheets up to 3 miles deep.

They account for 90% of all the world's ice.

Almost no life survives here.

[Penguins calling] But on the sea ice that fringes the land, there are a few...residents... and a handful of scientists monitoring the impact of changing conditions on the wildlife.

Rachel Holser: They tell you when you arrive that everything takes longer in Antarctica, and they're absolutely right.

It can take us up to two hours driving on Ski-Doos just to get to the site where we're going to work on our animals.

But I love my work.

I absolutely love being out here.

Narrator: This is what the scientists are here for.

[Seal barks] Weddell seals.

They live around the entire coastline of Antarctica, an ideal species for monitoring the impact of rising temperatures on this pristine environment.

Rachel: Climate change and ice cover affect the entire marine ecosystem underneath the ice from the algae all the way to the fish that the Weddells are eating.

So if there are shifts in water temperature and in ice cover, you start to see indicators that climate change is impacting the species.

Narrator: Weddell seals breed closer to the South Pole than any other mammal.

To survive the extreme conditions, their pups need to gain weight fast, about 4 1/2 pounds every day.

Their mothers make some of the richest milk on the planet.

The team want to see how they're coping at this critical time.

Rachel: So step one is we need to sedate the animal.

[Seal calls] Whoo.

Rachel, voice-over: We'll actually cover her eyes with a towel, which helps minimize disturbance to her overall.

What's our time?

She'll be monitored by a vet throughout the entire procedure to make sure that she's breathing well.

Narrator: This mother tips the scales at almost a thousand pounds.

Did you get her flipper tags yet, Sarah?

I did not.

8047 on both.

OK. [Calls] Rachel, voice-over: We will just sort of let the pup do what it wants to do.

It usually notices us and sort of will squawk and move around, and we tend to let it move as freely as we can, but we will keep it close to its mom.

All right.

We want to make sure that the two are back together once the female wakes up from the sedation.

Narrator: Mother and pup are doing well, suggesting that for now, they have access to plenty of prey beneath the ice.

Rachel, voice-over: They need to have the ice to breed on safely.

They need it for their pups to grow safely before they can start to forage.

But it also controls food supply.

So the presence or absence of the ice impacts both their ability to forage and their ability to successfully reproduce.

Narrator: Almost all life in Antarctica depends on the sea ice.

It may look like a featureless plain from above, but seen from beneath, it's a rich meadow of algae that use the light filtering through the ice to grow... an essential food source for krill, small members of the crustacean family.

Almost every food chain in Antarctica starts with these underwater pastures because young krill couldn't survive the winter without the algae to graze on.

And krill are food for everything from fish to whales.

So far, the cooling effect of the ice sheet on land has slowed the reduction of Antarctica sea ice, but it's now clear that the sea ice is shrinking all around the continent.

And on the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends furthest from the South Pole, a future with drastically less sea ice is already here.

Man: The West Antarctic Peninsula is an indicator place where things that are going to happen in the rest of Antarctica are happening here first.

It's a place where you can kind of feel that existential dread.

We're sitting here in this bay, and you can hear glaciers calving in a way that used to be a really rare, unique event.

[Cracking, loud thudding] Narrator: The peninsula is already 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the 1950s.

And the sea is free of ice for 3 months longer.

Dave Cade: More ice-free days give whales more days to feed before the ice freezes over.

But young krill need ice to survive.

So in the long term, less ice is going to mean less krill, which is going to support fewer whales.

We're out here studying humpback whales to understand how they are changing their behavior in response to changing conditions.

Shirel Kahane-Rapport, voice-over: We're studying them using biopsies and using tag data.

And that data will give us an idea about what the whales are foraging on, where and when.

These tags are pretty smart.

They are full of sensors.

They have a camera in them.

They have a radio so we can find them.

I mean, this thing basically can tell us everything that the whale is doing and film it for us at the same time.

Narrator: It's getting them on the whales that's the hard part.

Dave, voice-over: It's a light carbon fiber pole, but once you put a 4-pound tag at the end of it, it, all of a sudden is, like, pretty unwieldy and hard to--hard to use.

You sneak up on him, your adrenaline's going.

Your hands are cold.

You can barely see.

I'm trying to yell at the driver.

Dave: Whoa.

No, no, no, no, no.

I think I see some whales.

A little closer.

A little closer.

A little closer.

A little closer.

That's close enough.

Oh, right on.

Got it.

[Man chuckles] Shirel, voice-over: We also have a special biopsy dart on a crossbow.

We shoot that at the whale's back, and it doesn't make the whale bleed.

Often they don't even notice that we've taken a biopsy, and we can use that to understand pregnancy, health levels, and sex.

And so he sticks the tag on, I shoot the dart.

The GoPro on my head is running.

The GoPro on Dave's chest is running.

All of that's happening at the same time.

Tag on, biopsy taken.

The whale swims off, and then we get on to the next one.

Shirel: Ah, crap.

Dave: You're fine.

Fine.

You're fine.

Next time.

Shirel: It's still there.

Dave: Before it... Before, before.

Before.

Go, go, go, go, go.

Dave: Very nice.

Good sample.

One of the things I love is seeing these whales up close.

It's a huge privilege.

Not a lot of people get to do that.

Ohh.

Oh, my God.

Hi, Claudia.

Her name is totally Claudia.

She came over when I said "Claudia."

Oh, my God.

Hi.

Oh, my goodness.

Shirel, voice-over: I looked in a whale's eyeball, which is not something everybody can say, and it was a pretty magical moment.

And you can see that that whale, that it knows that you're there.

Shirel: She is 100% looking at us.

Dave, voice-over: When you see that whole animal underwater coming up next to your boat, you realize this is an animal that's bigger than your boat and has a lot of power and a lot of control.

Shirel: That was a bump.

So shall we go for a dart?

Dave: Yeah, go ahead and... Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness.

OK, I'm going to remove this arrow from the thing because it's starting to freak me out.

She's too close for me to shoot.

Dave: Oh, man.

Watch out.

Shirel: Claudia, what are you doing?

She's telling us that the tag's off.

That's what just happened.

Look.

That's it.

You goonie.

Narrator: They won't be getting any data from Claudia today.

And with snow setting in, it's time to return to the warmth of the yacht to examine the successful tags.

Dave: Almost 2 1/2 minutes just to get down to the first lunge.

Shirel: Yeah.

And not even at 400 meters or is this one at-- This is, yeah.

400 meters.

Yeah.

So just after we tagged it, it just went back to 400 meters?

[Imitates splash] Oh.

That's amazing.

Dave: It dove.

Nosedive.

Yeah.

The tags we've seen so far are awesome because these whales are switching between going down to 400 meters depth and then being up at the surface.

So these humpback whales are very adaptable, and they're trying to adapt to this kind of rapidly changing environment by using new strategies every year.

Narrator: The big question is how the whales will cope if we keep losing sea ice and krill numbers decline.

Shirel: Humpback whales will likely adapt because they do have that capability, but they may stop going to the Antarctic if there's not food for them there.

Narrator: Scientists say that all of Antarctica, not just the peninsula, is starting to feel the heat.

But the continent is so immense that we still have time to act and limit the damage.

Between them, the polar regions account for over 99% of the world's ice.

But the ice world has a third pole.

The Himalaya, the highest part of the chain of peaks that stretches over 2,000 miles across 8 countries.

Even though glaciers in the region account for less than 1% of the world's ice, their influence on people's lives is immense.

10 of Asia's largest rivers start in these mountains.

They supply water for over a billion people downstream.

But two-thirds of the glaciers in this region are likely to disappear by the end of the century.

Man: Since when I was a kid, there's a lot changed here.

There was a lot of snow in the winter, but 10, 15 years we didn't have any snow in the winter.

It's pretty dry.

And then a lot of rains in the summer and long summer, which is really changing here.

Narrator: Ang Temba Sherpa is a guide in the Everest region of Nepal.

He's taking glaciologist Jason Gulley on a grueling 3-week trek into the heart of the Everest region.

Ang Temba Sherpa: 5,700 meters... Jason wants to find if the world's highest glaciers are melting as rapidly as those at the poles.

Jason Gulley: I mean, this is amazing weather we're having.

I got to be honest, I was expecting it to be colder.

Yeah, this is the end of November, and it's supposed to have snow in the ground, but this is getting warmer and warmer every day.

Narrator: Jason has been studying glaciers in this remote area for almost 20 years.

Ang Temba's knowledge goes back even further.

Ang Temba, voice-over: I'm 56 now, so I saw a lot of changes here.

I've been mountaineering now 35 years.

Jason: In really remote environments, like the Everest region, the scientific record doesn't go back very far.

It's just a few short decades.

So being able to talk to people like Ang Temba and Ang Temba's relatives, you know, people that have lived here for 60, 70, even 80 years, we have the ability to tap their knowledge and understanding of how climate has changed.

One of the things I'm really excited about with this expedition is that fusion of Indigenous knowledge and scientific expertise that's going to allow me to learn a lot more about how climate change is affecting the villages.

I mean, that's giving me a totally different perspective than just coming up in here and looking at the glaciers themselves.

[Chimes clanking] Jason: The decrease in snowfall that the villages have been seeing in winter is affecting the soil that allows the grass to grow.

That moisture is not trapped in by the snowfall, and the soil dries out, the grass dries out, and then the yak farmers have to travel further and further and further to try to find food for their yaks to eat.

We're going to see my uncle and aunt here.

Ang, voice-over: My uncle at Tengboche, he's one of the oldest right now on this valley who's raising our yaks.

Raised the yaks for all his life.

[Speaking native language] Oh, yeah.

Here she is.

Here.

[Conversation in native language] Ang: OK.

Thank you.

Jason: How many yaks do you have?

Normally, many out here like to keep, like, 15 to 20, but this year, the baby yaks more than, you know, top of that.

Jason: OK. How many baby yaks this year?

Oh, there's 5 baby yaks.

-5?

-5 baby yaks.

Ang: Normally... he keeping with him if nobody buying.

But there's a lot of wolf and snow leopard here.

So sometimes the babies are taken by them.

So he doesn't know, you know, how long they will stay.

Narrator: Few people want to buy baby yaks because keeping them is becoming too hard as we turn up the heat on the Himalayas.

Yak farmers are being forced to take their chances at higher altitudes, closer to predators like the snow leopard.

On the other side of the mountains on the Tibetan Plateau, one former yak herder is actively seeking out an encounter with the big cats, and the warming climate is increasing his chance of success.

Narrator: These days, Dajie no longer herds yaks.

He's found a new living as a photographer.

His 9-year-old daughter is a keen apprentice.

Narrator: Dajie and Kangzhuo specialize in the stunning landscapes and wildlife of the Tibetan Plateau.

[Camera shutter clicks] Narrator: The rarest wildlife gives him his most valuable photographs.

But the ultimate prize would be a shot of the elusive snow leopard.

Narrator: But Dajie's decision to become a photographer turned out to be a smart move.

As the snow recedes, it's easier to reach altitudes where snow leopards live.

Narrator: Dajie's parents still eke out a living farming yaks... but it's becoming harder to feed them and keep them safe.

This taste of Dajie's former life is all Kangzhuo is likely to get.

[Indistinct conversation] Narrator: The pastures where the yaks graze depend on snow for water.

As the snows become unreliable, the only choice is to graze them higher up the mountains, in the realm of the snow leopard.

Narrator: Today, Dajie and Kangzhuo are trekking into the mountains above the farm, where snow leopards have recently been sighted.

Narrator: The first thing is to confirm the sightings.

Dajie has set up camera traps in the mountains above the farm to help.

Narrator: The trap confirms a snow leopard is nearby.

Narrator: As they push above the snow line, they find a stark reminder that the warmer temperatures are forcing yaks into the danger zone.

Narrator: It means they're on the right track.

Narrator: Further up, fresh tracks confirm that they're closing in on their ultimate goal.

[Cameras beeping, shutters clicking] Narrator: It's the rarest of sightings.

With their thick coats, snow leopards are perfectly suited to cold conditions.

They can adapt to a warmer climate, but can they adapt to the greater human presence that will follow?

Narrator: Raising awareness of changing conditions through photography is Dajie's way of giving back to the land he loves.

Back in Nepal, Ang and Jason are on day 11 of their epic trek.

At 14,000 feet, the air is thin and every step saps their strength.

But there are still 3,000 feet to climb to reach their study site on the Lhotse Glacier.

Jason: All of the glaciers in the Everest region are covered in thick layers of debris, in some cases 10 feet thick.

What that does is it insulates the underlying ice from melting.

Narrator: In theory, this high-altitude glacier should be staying cool.

But the only way to know for sure is to get right inside it.

And Jason soon spots a telltale warning sign... small lakes of meltwater are collecting in depressions.

Jason: Sometimes those lakes just disappear overnight, and what they leave behind is a big gaping hole in the ice that leads to extensive cave systems.

I don't know.

I'm gonna have a look around and see if I can find a way for us to get in here.

Narrator: Ang is an expert above ground, but he's never explored inside the glaciers.

Let's try over here.

Ang: All right.

There's another one down there.

Oh.

This looks pretty good right here, doesn't it?

Whoa.

You can go through?

Oh.

It's OK to come in?

Jason: Yeah, come on in.

Watch the ice.

It's really slippery around here.

Oh, yeah.

That's really slippery.

-OK?

-Yep.

-All good?

All right, Ang... -Yeah.

Jason, voice-over: Stepping in the glacier caves for the first time, there's, like, 8 million different things that are going through your mind.

The first is, like, Is this cave going to kill me?

We can actually see light coming through the ceiling over there.

Oh!

Look at that.

Yeah.

Which means the roof is really thin.

So we want to be aware of all of that up there.

And as we move forward, we want to make sure that's not going to collapse in on us.

There's a whole bunch of dirt, but if you look really closely, you can see we've got a crack that's located right here.

Oh, yeah.

I can see.

And then there's a big gap right in front of us.

So I don't actually know what this ice looks like.

This rock right here is good and frozen.

I'm going to use it as a steppingstone and just jump up to here, where I know that this ice is really good.

Oh, holy moly.

-Isn't it great?

-This hole here.

Yeah.

That'll ruin your whole day if you fall down there.

It's OK to jump?

Yep.

Go for it.

-Whoa.

-All right.

You good?

Yeah, thanks.

I've been in caves where the roof's collapsed.

I've fallen through the floor.

I've had walls collapse on me.

I've went swimming unexpectedly.

All kinds of different things have happened to me in glacier caves.

Yeah.

Careful, careful, careful.

Jason, voice-over: Now, we have, like, all this wisdom that we've accumulated over, you know, almost two decades of experience working inside of these glacier caves.

Jason: This is a false floor right here.

What happened is, is some meltwater backed up in here.

It refroze, all right?

It looks like it's probably super thin ice, and now it's been covered in dirt.

All right?

So I'm going to walk very, very close to the left-hand side... OK. right through here, so I can see out into this other basin.

All right.

Do not under any circumstances step out here.

Ang: OK.

I'll be here.

Let me know when I'm coming, OK?

Jason: All right.

Ang, if you want to come on up.

Uh-huh.

Ooh.

You all good?

Ooh.

Scary.

Scary one.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's all ice here.

Great.

So... Oh, look at that.

Yeah.

So looking out here, we can see, like, this is where the lake was.

It drained through the ice over here, formed this giant cave.

Narrator: They're looking at the dried-up bed of a lake that drained through the cave they've been exploring.

Oh!

Amazing.

This is the first time I saw it in my life.

Narrator: But the cave is unstable.

Jason: All these cracks that we have on the walls back here is the cave actively collapsing.

So it'll be collapsed one day, sooner or later, right?

Narrator: This is how the glaciers are melting so fast.

Pools of sun-warmed water are creating unstable cave systems underneath the insulating rock layer.

Go.

OK.

Thank you, Jason.

You good?

All right.

Jason, voice-over: So what you get is this network of lakes and cave systems that are turning the glacier into Swiss cheese.

They're literally rotting the glacier from the inside out.

That's allowing glacier surfaces to lower by about 1 1/2 feet per year, which is crazy fast.

You know, a lot of the work that we're doing up here is depressing because we're literally writing the obituary for glaciers.

But what that does is it gives us information that allows us to create models that will help people in other communities understand how much longer they have left with their glaciers for different climate change scenarios.

Narrator: One part of this mountainous region is rapidly running out of time with its glaciers.

Ladakh has long been a high-altitude desert because it sits in the rain shadow of the surrounding mountains.

The average rainfall is 3 inches per year, on par with the Sahara.

For centuries, people survived in villages like Kulum because they could irrigate their fields with glacial meltwater in the summer.

Narrator: The shrinking of the glaciers now means there is no longer any water here to grow food.

[Bell clanging] Narrator: Villages across Ladakh are facing a water crisis as the region's glaciers disappear.

Narrator: Morup's village is having its first good winter in years, but a few inches of snow isn't enough to make up for the loss of its glacier.

Narrator: The community needs meltwater in May, when the farming season begins.

Narrator: This year, Morup and 4 friends are doing something about it.

Narrator: In the dead of winter, they're storing up ice in the mountains above the village for use in summer.

Narrator: They're building an artificial glacier, an ice stupa, named and shaped like the local Buddhist shrines.

These are the brainchild of a Ladakhi engineer, who trains villagers to build their own.

They bring water in by pipes from a stream high up in the mountains.

Narrator: Each day, the team adds branches to provide surface area for the water to freeze on.

Narrator: To preserve the stupa for as long as possible, they're building in a narrow valley that receives very little sunshine.

The nights are hard.

The temperature plummets to -30 degrees Fahrenheit.

[Conversation in native language] [Rattling] Narrator: The biggest problem is the pipe embedded inside the stupa.

Narrator: It's now 2 a.m., and the friends are still hard at work.

Narrator: After 3 months of late nights and hard work, the stupa is now 90 feet tall.

No one is exactly sure how much water it holds, but every bit will help when the water shortage bites in summer.

Narrator: It's an achievement worth celebrating... [Speaking native language] with one last perilous climb.

[Men cheering] Narrator: It would take hundreds of these artificial glaciers to replace the natural ones that Ladakh has already lost.

But permanent planet-wide melting is not inevitable.

We still have time to save much of our fragile ice worlds.

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