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Al Jazeera
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
In Taiwan, migrants flee oppressive workplaces for life on the periphery
This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. Taichung City, Taiwan – Bernard keeps a low profile. Heading to work on the streets of Taiwan, the 45-year-old Filipino migrant worker dodges glances and often checks his face mask to make sure his appearance is concealed. To hide his accent, he often speaks in a near-whisper. Often, he declines invitations to social occasions from his fellow countrymen, worried that a 'Judas' among them might report him to the authorities. Hired at one of Taiwan's many electronics factories, Bernard came to the island legally in 2016. But since June 2024, he has been among Taiwan's growing population of undocumented workers. He blames his broker, a private employment agent to which migrants are usually assigned, for his current predicament. Bernard's broker tried to confiscate his passport, he said, then tried to convince him to resign and forgo severance payments from his employer. He refused both times, he said, causing a rift between them. 'They [brokers] only speak to you when they come to collect payments or when they want to trick you,' Bernard, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of repercussions, told Al Jazeera. Brokers in Taiwan take a cut of their clients' wages and have significant influence over their conditions and job prospects, making their relationships prone to abuse. When Bernard's contract expired in 2022, he said, his broker blacklisted him among other employers. Desperate to support his daughter's education in the Philippines, Bernard ditched his broker and decided to overstay his visa to work odd construction jobs, he said. These days, he said, he feels 'like a bird in a cage'. In public, Bernard would not even utter the word 'undocumented' in any language, only gesturing with his hands that he ran away. Taiwan's undocumented workforce is rising fast. The number of unaccounted-for migrants on the island has doubled in the last four years, reaching 90,000 this January, according to the Ministry of Labor. Despite Taiwan's image as one of the region's rare liberal democracies, a growing number of Southeast Asian migrant workers are living under the constant threat of deportation and without access to social services. Taiwan institutionalised its broker system in 1992 in a bid to streamline labour recruitment. Brokers influence almost every aspect of a migrant worker's life, from where they live, to their meals, to the terms of their employment contracts, and even how they access public services. Migrant rights advocates say it is precisely this level of control that is prompting large numbers of workers to flee their workplaces. Over a third of all complaints made by migrants to the Ministry of Labor are broker-related, according to official data. As of January 2025, Vietnamese made up the biggest share of the undocumented at 57,611, followed by Indonesians at 28,363, and Filipinos at 2,750. Joy Tajonera, a Catholic priest who runs the Ugnayan Center, a migrant shelter in Taichung City, said the Taiwanese government has taken a lax approach to the issue. 'The system allows the brokers a power to be used to the disadvantage of migrants,' Tajonera told Al Jazeera. 'Meanwhile, employers play innocent.' Brokers typically charge migrants a monthly service fee of $50 to $60, and also collect fees for job transfers, hospital insurance, leave, and most of the necessary documentation to work in Taiwan. In some cases, they impose age limits for certain jobs. Tajonera said many undocumented workers can actually earn more without a broker, 'but then you lose all social protections and health insurance. It's not that they want to run away. It's their situation, they can't take it any more.' 'Shameless and stupid' Taiwan's Labor Ministry said in a statement that the increase in undocumented migrants was driven by pandemic-related disruption to deportations. It said it has taken various steps to improve conditions for migrant works, including raising the minimum wage, conducting regular inspections of recruitment agencies, introducing a new suspension mechanism for agencies with high rates of absconding workers, and encouraging labour-sending countries to reduce agency fees. 'Through pre-employment orientation for industrial migrant workers and one-stop orientation sessions for household caregivers, the ministry aims to enhance workers' awareness of legal requirements, inform them of the risks and consequences of going missing, and ensure employers fulfill their management responsibilities,' the ministry said. However, since last year, the Taiwanese government has also increased the maximum fines for migrants caught overstaying their visas from $330 to $1,657. Lennon Ying-Da Wang, director of the public migrant shelter Serve the People Association, called the government's move to increase penalties 'shameless and stupid'. 'Instead of addressing the reasons for running away, this will just prevent people from surrendering,' he told Al Jazeera. Wang said a lack of protections, particularly for those working in childcare and fisheries, is the key reason why many migrants abscond from their workplaces. Neither industry is subject to Taiwan's monthly minimum wage of $944, according to Taiwan's Labor Standards Act. Wang said migrants in practice often receive half that amount minus deductions by brokers. 'Migrants just want a decent salary,' Wang said. 'But there's an unspoken rule among some brokers not to hire migrant workers who ask for help from shelters. That forces them to run away.' Despite his sympathies, Wang, as the director of a state-funded facility, is not allowed to take in migrants who have absconded from their employers as they are subject to deportation. On a quiet, nondescript road at the edge of Taipei lies Harmony Home, an NGO catering to undocumented young mothers and children. While the women and children who stay at Harmony Home cannot be deported for humanitarian reasons, the state is not obligated to shoulder the costs of their care or medical needs. Harmony Home, which has taken in more than 1,600 children over the past two decades, has recently seen a sharp uptick in minors coming through its doors, founder Nicole Yang said. 'Last year, we had about 110 new kids. By April this year, we've already got 140,' Yang told Al Jazeera. 'We also care for 300 others who live at home while their mother works.' Li-Chuan Liuhuang, a labour expert at National Chung Cheng University, said that while the broker system will be difficult to 'uproot immediately', the government could improve oversight by 'making the recruitment procedure and cost structure more transparent'. In Lishan, a mountainous area of Taichung, hundreds of undocumented Southeast Asians pick peaches, pears and cabbages for local landowners. The presence of runaway migrants, many of whom fled fishing trawlers, is not only tolerated but relied upon for the harvest. Liuhuang said she would like to see such migrants being allowed to work on farms with proper labour protections, but she believes this would not be easy for the public to accept. 'The government will have to commit more efforts for this kind of dialogue,' she told Al Jazeera. Mary, who asked to use a pseudonym, said she absconded from her job as a childcare worker to work illegally at various mountain farms after becoming frustrated at earning less than half the minimum wage and having her grievances ignored by her broker. Sitting beside a cabbage patch, Mary, 46, said she always felt anxious around the police in the city. But in Lishan the rules are different, she said, as landowners have an unwritten agreement with the authorities about the runaways. 'There's no way the boss doesn't have connections with the police. He always knows when they come and tells us not to go out,' she told Al Jazeera. Even so, there is no guarantee of avoiding mistreatment in the mountains. After the harvest, employers sometimes withhold payments, threatening anyone who complains with deportation, Mary said. 'If I complain that the boss doesn't give me the salary, I will get reported. Who will help me?' she said.
Japan Times
06-07-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Ainu land rights in crosshairs as Hokkaido communities debate nuclear waste
This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. Plucking the resonant strings of a tonkori — a broad, sword-shaped instrument that's been played by the Indigenous Ainu people for generations — Oki Kano, a Japanese musician of Ainu descent transformed a club in Kyoto into a vibrant tapestry of sound, mixing together rock, Ainu folk and dub music as part of a tour earlier this spring. Refusing to be labeled an activist, Kano has woven his rebellious spirit and a nod to Indigenous rights into his music, which moved anti-nuclear activists following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Perhaps most notably, he made a speech at a United Nations meeting later that year that clued some people into the issue of using Indigenous land for nuclear plants and waste storage. Nuclear energy and waste are 'a poison,' Kano says, that don't fit into the philosophy of Ainu people, the Indigenous group which inhabited Hokkaido before it was annexed in 1869 by imperial Japan. These days, Indigenous land rights have added another layer to the division of opinions in Suttsu and Kamoenai, two wind-blown fishing communities in the prefecture, over whether to host a permanent underground repository for Japan's nuclear waste. Residents of the two municipalities, with fewer than 4,000 people combined, have expressed conflicting views on the prospect after their respective mayors volunteered for a feasibility study on the prospect in a bid to secure all-important subsidies. 'An Ainu problem' Kano's U.N. speech regarding Hokkaido and Japan's nuclear energy inspired American scholar ann-elise lewallen, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in modern Japan studies and Indigenous and environment rights, to start a yearslong research project into how a potential nuclear waste dumping ground in ancestral Ainu land might violate their rights. Although there are no current Ainu communities in these two villages, the professor told The Japan Times during her research trip in Hokkaido that any energy decisions in the prefecture are 'an Ainu problem' because of land rights issues. The professor decapitalizes her name as a gesture toward resisting hierarchy. Oki Kano, a musician of Ainu descent, plays the tonkori during a concert in Tokyo in April. | Chermaine Lee Vocal opponents like Kano aside, Ainu people have not raised the issue of nuclear waste en masse, with many more focused on salmon fishing rights. Still, lewallen says their consent is essential under United Nations principles to protect Indigenous rights. Without it, Japan is carrying out what she calls 'energy colonialism.' In 2007, Japan was among the 143 countries that voted in favor of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The declaration states that governments shall 'take effective measures' to 'ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of Indigenous people without their free, prior and informed consent.' But the declaration is nonbinding and Japanese law does not currently recognize the Ainu peoples' rights to Hokkaido's land, an issue that is currently a focal point in a high-profile court case over salmon fishing rights. It was only in March when the absence of Ainu consent on the nuclear waste study was mentioned for the first time during a meeting held by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan (NUMO) with Suttsu residents about the site, anti-nuclear activist and Suttsu resident Kazuyuki Tutiya said. Nobuyuki Kawashima, spokesperson for the nuclear waste authority NUMO, said the organization would be open to address Ainu people's concerns if raised, but stopped short of promising to obtain consent. The Hokkaido government's Ainu Policy Division said while currently there's no Ainu-specific measures on nuclear energy or waste, it stands with the prefecture's opposition to dumping nuclear waste on the island. The Ainu were nearly the sole inhabitants of Hokkaido prior to Japan's annexation but number less than 20,000 now. Like many places in Hokkaido, the names Suttsu and Kamoenai come from the Ainu language, according to Hiroshi Maruyama, director of the Sapporo-based Centre for Environmental and Minority Policy Studies. 'They feel closer to the land than Japanese settlers,' he said. Still, reaction to the idea of hosting a permanent nuclear waste storage site has been mixed. Fumio Kimura, an Ainu activist in Hokkaido, said that 'any nuclear waste on our land is horrible and our right to the land shouldn't be neglected.' 'Japanese people robbed our land, so why can't we make our voice heard?' he asked. Ainu activist Fumio Kimura stands in front of photos of his ancestors at his home in Biratori, Hokkaido, in April. | Chermaine Lee But Kazuaki Kaizawa, secretary-general of the government-funded Ainu Association of Hokkaido has a different view. He said that, as Hokkaido has been part of Japan for over a hundred years, land rights are no longer feasible. While storing nuclear waste is against Ainu philosophy, Kaizawa said that can't be fully applied in a world that is post-industrialization. 'The downside of any energy source is part of modernization. It's not only an issue Ainu are facing, but the whole of Japan and humanity.' Nuclear ambitions Nuclear power once held a crucial position in resource-poor Japan's energy mix, with nuclear power seen as a clean alternative to imports of fossil fuels and a way to ensure energy independence. After the 2011 meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, all of Japan's nuclear power stations were shut down while new safety standards were drawn up. Well over a decade on, only 14 of its 54 reactors have been restarted. Suttsu's large-scale wind farm was one of the first of its kind in Japan. | Chermaine Lee But as memories of Fukushima fade for some and global energy prices skyrocket, support for nuclear is again growing in Japan. In 2014, polls suggested 16% of Japanese people wanted an immediate phase-out of nuclear power but in 2024 that figure was just 5%. With this in mind, earlier this year Japan announced a contentious plan to boost nuclear energy in its mix from its current level of 8.5% to 20% by 2040, back up to its pre-Fukushima levels, as the country strives to realize its net-zero goal by 2050. Waste dumping ground Waste has always been an issue for nuclear power. When used up, the uranium rods that produce nuclear energy need to be disposed of. The rods are highly radioactive and hot, so they are usually buried — permanently — deep underground. This waste is currently being stored at an interim facility in Aomori Prefecture — despite some local opposition. This facility can only house the waste for 50 years and, despite less reliance on nuclear energy after the Fukushima disaster, 80% of the storage space was filled as of 2023. There had been a plan to reprocess the waste to recycle the energy, but the opening of the plant that would process the waste has faced delays and research took a hit after 2011, rendering the future of nuclear waste murky. Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that, although storing waste is 'actually pretty straightforward,' it is also often highly controversial around the world. He added that current technology can prevent leakages of high-level waste after they go underground, as long as the assessment for a site is done right. Takeshi Kuramochi, a climate policy researcher at the NewClimate Institute, said the waste issue is a 'showstopper' for nuclear development and that, if Japan fails to meet its nuclear targets, it will likely resort to fossil fuels to fill the gap. To convince local governments to volunteer to store it under their land, the Japanese government offered ¥2 billion ($14 million) to any municipality that consented to literature surveys, which include a deep study of past earthquake records. If the municipality is deemed to be a suitable site for storage, a further ¥7 billion will be paid out for entering the four-year second stage of the site selection process. The last stage, which lasts for 14 years, will see a more detailed assessment with test tunnels and mock facilities, but the subsidy amount has yet to be determined. Divided villages On visits to both villages in May, the nuclear waste issue was at the top of peoples' minds, although opinions on it differed sharply. Dotted with worn-down houses along a wavy coastline, the streets of Kamoenai were nearly deserted. At the tourist information center where she works, bespectacled Taeko Toritani said that 'nuclear waste isn't a big deal, but it has to be safe.' Besides, she added, 'It's set in stone already so no point in opposing.' Tazunori Sato, a silver-haired sushi chef, said the subsidy for the first stage helped with repairs of the fishing pier. Living near the Tomari nuclear plant for years has made villages accustomed to staying near nuclear facilities, so most people aren't too concerned, he added. But an hour's drive away in Suttsu, where one of the first wind farms in Japan was built, opinions were more polarized. Electrical store owner Noriyuki Tana noted that the money helps the village pay for resources like a dormitory for nursing workers and a school. Asked about Ainu land rights in Hokkaido and their consent of the site, he disputed the Indigenous people's ownership of the land and said they have no right to chime in on the villages' decisions because they are all Japanese. But Nobuka Miki, co-chair of a group fighting against nuclear waste and a mother to a teenage daughter, is worried that an underground disposal site would harm future generations and the reputation of the village's seafood industry. The harbor in Suttsu, where the fishing industry is a top employer. | Chermaine Lee Her view echoes that of Shaun Burnie, a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace East Asia. Burnie said nuclear waste containers would not be able to remain shut for tens of thousands of years — the amount of time the radioactivity in high-level waste needs to become neutralized. He added that any leakages or contamination of groundwater can lead to exposure to humans. Suttsu's nuclear fate may well be decided at the ballot box through November's mayoral elections. The current pro-waste mayor, who declined to be interviewed, is likely to be challenged by anti-waste 41-year-old Shingo Ogushi. Ogushi came to Suttsu in his early 30s to study the local cherry trout, but in 2020, in order to challenge the mayor's decision to volunteer for the site study, he quit his government job and eventually became a district counselor. He is concerned that a pier might have to be built to transport nuclear waste to the village, which could disturb the marine ecosystem and the fishing industry. NUMO has said that marine transportation is preferable if Suttsu is chosen for a nuclear waste facility. Ogushi added that Ainu people's rights to Hokkaido should be respected despite no known population of them in Suttsu. Shingo Ogushi, a former fish researcher in Suttsu who intends to run in November's mayoral election, has taken a stance against the village hosting nuclear waste. | Chermaine Lee A possible pathway for the Ainu people to participate in the nuclear waste site discussion, according to Morihiro Ichikawa, a Hokkaido-based lawyer focusing on nuclear waste and Ainu rights, is for the Ainu people who claim rights to Suttsu and Kamoenai to form a group and collectively decide on whether they agree to host the nuclear waste or not. 'If the Ainu group is reorganized, any development cannot take place without prior informed and free consent' under the 2007 U.N. declaration, Ichikawa said. Pro-nuclear voices argue that more needs to be done to win public support for nuclear energy and nuclear waste, while critics argue the technology should be dropped — at least in earthquake-prone Japan. Takatoshi Imada is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who has published research on the public opinion of the nuclear waste system. He said that, to avoid the division seen in Suttsu and Kamoenai, an organization outside of government should select around 20 sites and engage their communities in 'deliberative dialogue' to win their support for waste storage. But Kuramochi said that finding a nuclear waste storage site far away from people will be next to impossible in Japan and that nuclear energy should not be relied on as legal battles, local opposition and safety inspections will slow down its deployment. 'There's a huge risk of spending so much money on nuclear and nothing coming out of it at the end,' he said, adding that 'if you are betting on nuclear, that means they are not committing fully to a modernized grid network that can accommodate a large amount of renewables' and that 'delays the whole transition of the entire electricity system.' On the other side of the argument are proponents who see flaws in relying exclusively on renewables as nations scramble to decarbonize. Nuclear power can provide around-the-clock clean power that solar and wind — which are reliant on mother nature — simply cannot, Buongiorno argued. Essentially, nuclear power enables a clean renewables-based electric grid, he said. Kawashima from NUMO, agreed, saying that nuclear power 'will lead to both ensuring a stable supply and decarbonization.' But the biggest challenge, he said, is to gain the understanding of the public. Translator Yang Zhao contributed to this report. This report was co-published with Climate Home News
Scientific American
17-06-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
What Greenland's Ancient Past Reveals about Its Fragile Future
This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. Inside a tent fastened to the surface of Greenland's ice sheet, the members of the GreenDrill expedition huddled around a drilling rig. The machine whined and shook as it spun. For days the drillers had been inching through ancient, solid ice to reach the rock below. Outside, the sun burned down through a cloudless sky. The wind, having tumbled down 4,000 feet of elevation from the domed summit of the ice sheet hundreds of miles to the west, charged over the surface in wavelike pulses. The tent shuddered like some mad bouncy house at the end of the world. The nine members of the expedition—ice and rock engineers, scientists, polar-survival specialists—knew they should be close to bedrock. But Forest Harmon, the driller working the handwheel, said he still couldn't feel the core break—the moment when the metal catcher inside the drill head separates the bedrock core from its earthly tomb. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The GreenDrill site sat on the frozen edge of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, or NEGIS, a massive, moving tongue of ice that drains 12 to 16 percent of the ice sheet into the ocean. Upended and laid atop the contiguous U.S., it would look like a flowing mountain range more than a mile and half tall at its highest point and 20 to 30 miles across, extending from Boston to Washington, D.C. If the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, global sea levels would rise by about 24 feet. The NEGIS is how a good deal of that planet-altering flood would enter the sea. The sheet won't melt all at once, of course, but scientists are increasingly concerned by signs of accelerating ice-sheet retreat. A recent report showed that it has been losing mass every year for the past 27 years. Another study found that nearly every Greenlandic glacier has thinned or retreated in the past few decades. The NEGIS itself has extensively sped up and thinned over the past decade. Elliot Moravec, the mechanical engineer monitoring the drill-fluid pressure gauge, smiled, but only slightly. It seemed like something was about to go right, finally—in an expedition where almost nothing had before the team made it to the ice. So much in the weeks leading up to this moment had been uncertain. There were logistical delays and failed landings by military cargo planes. A more ambitious plan, which included a much larger drill and two different sample sites, had been scrapped. The project's two principal investigators were both forced to forfeit the field season at the last minute. One of them had come all the way to Greenland only to have to turn around. The other made the painful decision to not even try to make it to the ice. The rest of the team was marooned for weeks in Kangerlussuaq, a staging location on Greenland's southwestern coast, about 850 miles from the drill site. Then it had taken more than 10 flights over seven days to get them and tens of thousands of pounds of gear onto the ice. But at this moment, with just two weeks remaining in the expedition, their bit sat at the edge of discovery. The zone below was thought to hold within it a revelation: frozen in stone was a picture of this place but ice-free. Knowing the last time this area was actually green would help scientists answer a question of enormous consequence: Is the Greenland ice sheet even more fragile than we know? Since President Donald Trump announced his administration's desire to 'get' the world's largest island, Greenland has been the subject of sudden global attention. Climate change is exposing land formerly covered by ice, heightening political tensions on the island nation—and in the waters surrounding it as sea ice also disappears. But although the administration's plan to extract Greenland's natural resources is new, the American desire to occupy it, and pull value from underneath its frozen heart, is not. In 1956 and 1957 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment, or SIPRE, recovered the first long ice cores from Greenland. Europeans and Americans alike had been trying to cross and dig into the ice sheet for decades before then. The ' father of continental drift ' himself, Alfred Wegener, is still entombed there. Wegener made four expeditions to study Greenland's ice in his lifetime. During his final expedition, in 1930, he died out on the ice. Just before he became a part of the ice record, he wrote: 'We are approaching a new era of polar exploration characterized by the successful utilization of new technologies in a rational manner. Everything that we want to and can measure must be measured on the ground.' In 1956 American scientists were doing exactly that, but the reason they were there at all had as much to do with the cold war as it did with the cold ice. The government's real mission was to build Arctic capabilities so it could both operate and listen from somewhere much closer to the Soviet Union. The location where SIPRE pulled those first deep ice cores from was called Site 2, and despite its public science mission, it was also a top-secret radar installation watching 24-7 for Soviet threats. But the tense geopolitics allowed a scientific discovery that, until then, had seemed impossible: the recovery of deep ice cores that kicked off an international race to recover and interrogate deeper and deeper ice. Those ice cores, and all that would be collected after them, became a kind of high-resolution climatological bedrock on which much of our understanding of rapid climate change rests. Although it is difficult to count the number of ice cores in existence, adding up the length of ice in just the freezers owned by Denmark (Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark) and the U.S. gives you more than 21 miles of ancient ice. Researchers have dated them, measured the pressure of their enclosed air bubbles, characterized the structure of their snow, detected ancient volcanic cataclysms in their particulate content, and more. The results have given us an indirect way to track the timing of large and abrupt shifts in climate as far back as 123,000 years ago in the case of Greenland and 1.2 million years ago for ice extracted from Antarctica. 'They are basically a backbone of climate science in terms of giving us these continuous, high-resolution climate records,' says Joerg Schaefer, GreenDrill's co-principal investigator. I have a personal 25-year history with one of these backbones. As an undergraduate researcher, I lived for a month on an oceanographic research vessel off Baja California. The mission was to collect sediment cores from the ocean floor. I spent hours and hours taking measurements—more than 30,000 of them—with my face pressed close to stinking, methane-rich mud. Like ice cores, the sediment cores had visible horizontal bands. Ice cores' bands come from seasonal variations in snowfall; in this marine mud, the winter sediment from above showed up one color, the summer sediment another. I used a measurement technique that allowed me to pull a climate signal out of the alternating light and dark bands. But to confirm that those climate wiggles were real, I had to try to match what I saw with other records that climatologists were really sure showed a strong connection to the hot and cold climate swings of the past; enter Greenland's ice cores. In 1999, when I was doing my research, the gold standards for such climate-record wiggle matching were ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) or from the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP). These two projects were a kind of friendly arms race between two different teams—one led by scientists in the U.S. (GISP2), the other by researchers in Europe (GRIP)—but without all the cold war skulduggery. Starting at nearly the same time (the Americans got a one-field-season jump on the Europeans), the two projects, less than 20 miles from each other near the summit of the Greenland ice sheet, raced to the bottom of the ice. In July 1992 Europe won. That team reached the bed nearly 10,000 feet below the surface and stopped at the end of the ice. When the U.S. group finished a year later, not only did its core reach deeper than 10,000 feet, but the scientists were also able to collect a five-foot-long core of some of the rarest rock in the world—rock from under an ice sheet. These two deep climatic records became standards to benchmark other records against. My mud record stretched from the present back to about 52,000 years ago. I could take that record of wiggles from dark (cold world above) to light (warmer world above) and see whether the same temperature-related wiggles pulled from the ice core matched up. They did. Many other climate researchers saw the same thing. In the three decades since these two cores were pulled from the ice sheet, tree rings, coral, cave deposits, other sediment s and ice cores from across the world have all been successfully wiggle-matched to the records. But in all the years researchers spent hunting for ice and finding out all they could about its nature, they mostly neglected to interrogate the stuff the ice is sitting on. That is a critical gap in our knowledge that is just waiting to be closed. 'Those bed materials, whether it's sediment or hard bedrock contained within it, are the words, the stories of the history of the ice sheet—it's a book of information down there that we want to read,' says Jason Briner of the University at Buffalo, the other co-principal investigator of GreenDrill. 'The bedrock under ice sheets is the least explored remaining zone on Earth's surface,' Schaefer says. 'These are moon rocks for us—the most rare and the most hard-to-drill surface rocks anywhere on Earth—and we have practically no direct observations.' Schaefer and Briner have spent more than a decade fixated on this deep gap in climate science. What they have already found is sobering. 'I have, for the first time ever in my career, datasets that take my sleep away at night,' Schaefer says. 'They are so direct and tell me this ice sheet is in so much trouble.' The data that terrify him come from the rock collected in 1993 under the GISP2 ice core. The ice core went off to be immortalized in thousands of research papers as a centerpiece of climate science. The bedrock went into cold storage in the U.S. ice-core repository in Colorado. There it sat for almost two decades. In 2016 Schaefer, Briner and their collaborators exhumed the rock core and read it like a buried history book. They published a research paper in Nature entitled 'Greenland Was Nearly Ice-Free for Extended Periods during the Pleistocene.' The Pleistocene, a period that includes the last ice age, stretched from around 2.6 million to 11,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and the first modern humans roamed over earth and ice. From that one sub-ice rock core, the researchers learned that during that epoch there were periods—at least one, possibly many—when the ice sheet was completely gone or nearly so. 'You do one data point, bedrock underneath the thickest part of the Greenland ice sheet, so you basically have to melt the entire ice sheet to make that spot ice-free,' Schaefer says. 'Even there the bedrock was telling us, 'Hell, yes, I was ice-free a lot over the last geological period.'' 'It started what some people like to call the fragile Greenland hypothesis,' says Paul Bierman, an author and geoscientist at the University of Vermont. Bierman and others have found additional evidence to support the worrying idea. In 2023 he and his colleagues published a study that showed 'multiple lines of evidence' indicating much of northwestern Greenland was ice-free around 400,000 years ago. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then was less than 300 parts per million. Today we're at 428 parts per million. The GreenDrill team is preparing to publish new findings that are even more unnerving for humanity. Caleb Walcott-George, soon to be an assistant professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Kentucky, was a graduate student during the first two field seasons of the project. At a recent academic conference, he presented solid evidence that an area in northwestern Greenland three times the size of New York City and currently covered by ice a third of a mile thick was either completely or nearly completely ice-free as recently as about 7,000 years ago. That corresponds with a time called the Holocene Thermal Maximum, when temperatures were just a few degrees warmer on average than they are now. Walcott-George says that's within the range of warming we might experience by 2100. Not long after Moravec sensed that the drilling rig was on the verge of core break, the team pulled its first sample of the season up from 165 feet below. Minutes later the core sat inside the capped inner core barrel, ready for inspection. Walcott-George and Allie Balter-Kennedy of Tufts University stood shoulder to shoulder in a small, blacked-out tent originally designed for spearfishing pike over a frozen lake. The only light was a dim tangerine glow coming from a single LED strip taped to the ceiling. Balter-Kennedy and Walcott-George screwed off the drill head at the end of the barrel, tipped the tube up at an angle and gently shook it to get the material inside to slide out into the tray. This rock could tell them when it last saw the light of day. It also 'remembered' how long it had been buried. But that memory was delicate, and even a flash of sunlight could throw it off. Certain minerals in the rock act like batteries by 'charging' when they are buried. Radioactive decay in elements surrounding the grains strips their electrons, causing the grains to luminesce, although the rocks don't visibly glow. 'We can determine essentially the charge rate, and by doing this we can figure out how long these quartz and feldspar grains have been buried,' Walcott-George says. But even seconds of sunshine can reset this signal, so every time a piece of rock is unearthed from below the ice sheet, they return to the blacked-out tent. There is another source of stored memory in a subglacial stone, and it originates inside the hearts of dying stars. The cataclysmic explosions that mark the death of a star throw cosmic rays across the galaxy. Those rays blast their way to Earth, creating a cascade of elementary particles that buffet the planet's surface. 'When they interact with rocks, they create these nuclear reactions that create isotopes or nuclides that we don't otherwise find on Earth,' Balter-Kennedy explains. 'We know the rate at which those nuclides are produced. If we can measure them, we can figure out how long that rock has been exposed to these cosmic rays—or, in our field, how long that rock has been ice-free.' It's called surface exposure dating, and it works by revealing the total amount of rare isotopes in the rock sample. Over time, periods of sun exposure and burial create on/off spikes in the total amount of nuclides in the rock, with exposed being 'on' and covered being 'off.' If researchers take two of these nuclides—say, beryllium-10 and aluminum-26—and measure their relative levels along many feet of a rock core, they get what's called the decay clock. This clock runs down as each isotope decays at a different, predictable rate. When scientists see parts of the rock record where the clock has gained time, they know that the surface saw the sun. When the sample is buried, the clock slowly loses time in a countdown to zero cosmogenic nuclides. The two methods allow the scientists to interview the bedrock, so to speak. 'You ask: When have you been ice-free? For how long? And how many times have you been ice-free in the recent geological past?' Schaefer says. But that day in the tent it appeared that there might be no bedrock to interview. The core they had pulled up wasn't quite right. 'Where's that smooth bed?' Walcott-George asked, referring to the solid bedrock pay dirt they were looking for. 'I feel like it's gravelly ice, and then ...' Balter-Kennedy trailed off. 'Dirty ice,' Walcott-George said, completing the thought. They decided they'd try again tomorrow. Approximately 5,500,000,000,000 tons. That is how much water weight the Greenland ice sheet has lost to the ocean since just 2002. Sequentially dumped into Olympic-size natatoriums, it would provide a personal 660,000-gallon lap pool for every person living in Africa and Europe—all 2.2 billion of them. But how, exactly, future melt will bring more green to Greenland is one of the biggest questions that science has yet to answer. 'The scientific community right now does not know how the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates,' Briner says. 'We don't know what the mechanisms are and how long it takes for the ice sheet to get to its teeny-tiny state.' In discussions of Antarctica, the word ' collapse ' is now often associated with the loss of ice through ice shelves such as the Thwaites, a floating extension of the Antarctic ice sheet. Nearly 75 percent of Antarctica's coastal ice is in ice shelves floating in water. But the fate of Greenland is believed to be tied to that of its ice streams, which are more like small tongues that ring the island and are confined by deeply carved fjords. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a Danish ice-core climatologist, first came to the Greenland ice sheet in 1981. Back then, 'no one was talking about global warming,' she says. When she told people she was drilling ice cores for climate research, they assumed she was investigating when the next ice age would arrive. In her four decades of working on this ice sheet, Dahl-Jensen has seen changes happen in real time. One day in 2012 she was on the ice—and it rained. 'I saw it as a very pure sign of global warming that we actually got rain on the center of the Greenland ice sheet,' she says. More recently Dahl-Jensen led research for the East Greenland Ice-Core Project, which in 2023 managed to pull a 1.5-mile-long ice core (and some subglacial mud and stone) from close to where the NEGIS begins. The entire process had taken eight years. 'When you look at the balance of the ice sheet and how much it has lost, half of the extra loss is from melt along the coast of Greenland, but the other half is from acceleration of the ice in the streams,' she says. Dahl-Jensen knows that ice streams are a big factor in sea-level rise, but she's also aware that we don't yet know how they behave. 'We are not capable of modeling them properly into our ice-sheet models,' she explains. That is why the GreenDrill team wanted to get bedrock underneath the NEGIS from a site much closer to where it meets the coast. Measurements from each of these projects will feed into the mathematical models, which attempt to simulate how the real world works. 'We have so many gaps in our physical understanding of how an ice sheet actually responds,' Schaefer says, noting that current models have big error margins. Ice-sheet models work much like the climate models we use all the time—the ones that predict tomorrow's weather. They use mathematics to simulate the interactions among real atmospheric phenomena: wind, pressure, moisture, thermodynamics, and lots more. They are reasonably trustworthy over hours to days because they are loaded with real data: historical data; measurements from weather satellites and balloons; and observations from land, sea and commercial aircraft. Improving the ability of ice-sheet models to accurately predict how the sheet will respond to the warming it is experiencing now—and that yet to come—is no different. The models need data-based gut checks to make sure their predictions are informed and constrained by as much reality as we can feed into them. Schaefer believes reducing the error will make ice-sheet models better tools for adapting to climate change. 'If you are a politician and you want to make New York City—or any city that is close to the ocean—sea-level safe, you need precise predictions of what is going to happen,' he says. And those predictions will become increasingly vital as the world moves deeper and deeper into its climate-warmed future—a future that those who study Greenland fear will be societally altering. 'Think about the mass migration that will happen if we melt all of the Greenland ice sheet,' Bierman says. 'That's not tomorrow—that's centuries from now and even millennia from now—but when that happens, that will be the biggest movement of humans ever because they'll lose their farms, they'll lose their cities, they'll lose their homes,' he says. 'It will be creeping and slow, but it will happen.' The day after the heartbreak in the fishing tent, the team hit solid rock. It was what they had come for, and they found it just in time. A blizzard blew through camp hours later, shutting down drilling for the next two days. When the work resumed, the team decided to try for a second core. This one would be half as deep as the first, so, the researchers reasoned, maybe they could get even more precious rock from under the ice to interrogate in half the time it took to get the first sample. All work had to be wrapped up within a week to leave them enough time to pack up for extraction. With good-enough weather, the twin-engine ski plane would be landing at the site, and it wasn't going to wait for anything. Over the next two days they made good progress. Rather than setting up the drill tent all over again, they decided to chance a mostly unprotected drill hole. A small wind break was all that separated them from the wind and blowing ice. While Moravec, Harmon and Tanner Kuhl, the third and most experienced ice-drilling engineer, started again, the others fanned out onto the nunataks, dark peaks that broke through the ice-bound oblivion like the heads of whales surfacing through the ocean of ice. There Walcott-George, Balter-Kennedy and Arnar Pall Gíslason, the team's survival guide, used backpack-size rock drills to take a core from the surface of a nunatak. The rock was constantly exposed to sun and cosmic rays, and the luminescence signal and cosmogenic nuclides pulled from it would provide the baseline against which the under-the-ice-sheet rock cores would be compared. Just as it started to look like they might have this victory-lap sampling in the bag, a second blizzard blasted through the site. 'Let's get the hell out of here,' yelled Matt Anfinson, the camp mechanic. He emerged from the drill tent into a whiteout. The storm was still picking up. The drill tent, the only refuge aside from the mess and sleeping tents, was bowing ominously in the 50-mile-per-hour winds. It was time for the team to grope its way back to camp with only a line of red flags to guide it through the nearly zero-visibility conditions. For the past three hours the group had been involved in a kind of mechanical open-heart surgery. The patients were two backpack drills that had stopped working during sampling on the nearby nunatak. The team had brought two to be safe; both had died. The drills lay on the worktable, guts exposed. After fiddling with the ignition coils, Anfinson ripped on the starter pulls. As one drill spun into high gear through smoke and sputter, he looked like an ice-field Dr. Frankenstein, gleefully and maniacally gazing on his reincarnation. It was a rare victory amid a 'weather daze,' as Harmon, the driller, called it. Living through blizzards like these feels like what you'd expect inside a sensory-deprivation white-noise machine. This latitude sees no darkness in May and June, but without a break in the gale-force winds, the conditions outside are both bright and blinding. Wind-sculpted snowdrifts grow through the field camp like giant, icy fingers. They block the doors of sleeping tents and make walking treacherous; you either trip on a three-foot-tall snow wall that wasn't there hours before or fall off one into three feet of powder. There was a cruel monotony to the continuous winds. They forced the crew into smaller and smaller circles of living—sleep tent to mess tent to bathroom tent and back. Barbara Olga Hild, the polar bear guard, fought through the long, bright nights to keep the electrified wire fence around the camp from being covered by drifting snow. Walcott-George sat in the mess tent brewing carafe after carafe of strong coffee and engaging in Arctic self-care, using superglue to seal his dry, cracked fingers against drilling fluid. Balter-Kennedy patched punctures and tears in her favorite polar bib and pored over her core-sample logbooks. Moravec and Harmon played cribbage for hours. Everyone skulked outside into the whiteout on rotation to fill an orange five-gallon cooler with snow to be melted on a camp stove for water (it is ironic how much effort it takes to make drinkable water when we are surrounded by ice). Perversely, it was during the weather's harshest moments that people used to working on the ice opened up about why they seek out the cold and the isolation of polar work. 'The reason people go to the Arctic is [that] you can hear the silence,' Hild said. Dahl-Jensen, the Danish ice-core scientist, told me that the months of near-complete isolation from the rest of the world have become a prized part of the experience, worth any amount of cold and discomfort. 'We live in our camp and do our research, and the time where you can only focus on one thing is really wonderful,' she said. That feeling—of slowing down, of concentration—is something many on the team told me they miss when they're off the ice. 'I always dread the end of a field season,' Balter-Kennedy said. On the other side is the stark return to normal life, the avalanche of unanswered e-mails, the fact that things are different than when you left them. When the storm finally cleared after three days, the team practically launched through the tent opening to get back to work. Because of the blizzard, they had just two full days to complete the new drill hole. The first core took a week to get, and that was without any weather delays. Everything had to go right now. Just one day later the entire team was standing around the drill and taking in the last sample before packing up. The drill had burned through almost 70 feet of ice. The weather was sunny. The day felt unseasonably warm—about 15 degrees Fahrenheit above freezing—and the team easily cranked through the last drilling run. As the last rock core entered the bottom of the barrel, the sounds of the rock band Ween floated out onto the open ice. The core came up clean. The team closed the hole with a cheer and a small pour of the Danish liqueur Gammel Dansk, or, as it was better known here, 'driller's fluid.' It wasn't for the crew. 'You were a good hole,' Harmon said as Moravec poured booze down to the bedrock. Walcott-George hoisted the final rock core like a prize striped bass. Then, as they had done all season, he and Balter-Kennedy noted its lengths and features and stored it for transport, not yet knowing what story of Greenland's ice-free past, and our flooded future, it might tell.
Globe and Mail
10-06-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
The tides of change for endangered whales
With a population of 372, North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered. Although whaling is no longer a threat, human interactions still pose the greatest risks to the species. Recovering this population requires measures to mitigate fishing-gear entanglements, vessel strikes, ocean noise pollution and climate change. Success hinges on co-ordinated actions across the Canada-U.S. border. Here's a high-level timeline of critical policy and management measures taken by both countries, over the past century, along with the continuing challenges and achievements in protecting the species. The Globe and Mail will continue to update this timeline for the duration of the Entangled series. This reporting was produced for The Globe and Mail's Entangled series in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's Ocean Reporting are more instalments from the series. Shifts in habitat make North Atlantic right whales harder to track – and to save from extinction To keep eyes on North Atlantic right whales, scientists must first tackle perennial issues of plane safety Can motherhood help North Atlantic right whales to rise again?
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Science Fiction 'Hugely Shapes OpenAI's Imagination And Where They're Going,' Author Karen Hao Says
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman is 'deeply obsessed' with the 2013 film Her, according to technology journalist Karen Hao. 'Science fiction hugely shapes OpenAI's imagination and where they're going,' Hao said during a discussion Tuesday of her bestselling new book, Empire of AI, hosted by the Pulitzer Center in New York. More from Deadline Luca Guadagnino Eyes 'Artificial' At Amazon MGM As Next Movie With Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro And 'Anora' Actor Yura Borisov Circling Sky Boss Dana Strong Raises Artificial Intelligence Copyright Concerns: "I Can't Fathom How A Small Producer Keeps Up" Tastes Great, Less Filling? Report On Meta Plan For Cheaper, Fully AI-Made Ads Boosts Tech Giant's Stock As Media Agency Shares Slump Altman 'has evoked throughout OpenAI's history his idea that Her is the thing that OpenAI should building,' the author said of the film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix and the voice of Scarlett Johansson. 'Artificial generative intelligence doesn't have a definition, and so they actually use pop culture as the way to describe and put a shape to the nebulous thing that they're trying to achieve.' An 'under-talked-about' current in the world of AI, Hao said, is the 'deep, intertwined relationship between science fiction and pop culture portrayals of these things and, ultimately, the technologies that we get. Because a lot of these people are sci-fi nerds and they want these things, and then it shapes their beliefs, their ideas of what they want to do.' Hao was interviewed by Marina Walker Guevara, the executive editor at the Pulitzer Center who previously oversaw the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigative journalism projects. Empire of AI, which was published two weeks ago, is one of two new books to profile Altman, along with Keach Hagey's The Optimist. Hao, by her own description, is delivering a 'critique' of the arms race that AI has become. Much of her talk focused on her reporting around the world documenting the harmful effects of AI, including communities whose water supply has been compromised by data center construction. Low-paid workers in the global south, she writes, must sift through reams of objectionable content in order to train large-language models. Her book also traces the development of OpenAI, which began as a well-intentioned non-profit co-founded by Elon Musk before turning into a commercial entity worth billions of dollars and funded by Microsoft. A central question during the discussion was whether there are ways to push back against the immense wealth and dominance of Silicon Valley. 'Every community that I spoke to, regardless of that there were artists having their intellectual property taken or water activists who were having the fresh water taken, they were all saying the same exact thing. When they encounter the empire, they feel this incredible loss of agency, a profound loss of the agency to self-determine their people,' Hao said. If that loss is permitted, she argued, 'democracy cannot survive, because democracy is based on the fact that people feel that agency and they' willing to go to the booth to vote, because they know that it will matter. And so the theme that I find hopeful is that there are so many movements that I encountered around the world that are now trying to reclaim that the agency.' She cited a protest in Chile, where activists managed to hold tech companies to account for the way their AI projects were harming the water supply. 'If we we allow this to happen 100,000-times-fold, if we really amplify and support this work, that is how we can get this trajectory of air development to turn from a more imperial approach, and top-down, 'we just say whatever we want and it goes' to a more broad-based, democratically beneficial version of AI,' Hao said. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Everything We Know About 'Nobody Wants This' Season 2 So Far
