As a rare individual who’s visited both the South Pole and North Pole, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco recently visited MIT to share observations on potential impacts of global climate change. “I was trying to understand what these incredible polar regions mean to us. I wanted to do that myself.”
What he saw and learned was presented before a large audience via a film documenting the Prince’s 17-day tour of the Antarctic continent in the summer of 2009. It was a long and sometimes arduous adventure, including an 8-kilometer trudge on skis while pulling a heavy-laden sled. The balance of the trip was mostly by air.
“Antarctica is a wonderful and dramatic place, just teeming with wildlife,” Prince Albert said. And it’s important to learn everything possible, and monitor what’s going on because “it’s a very special and fragile place.”
The Prince said he and his entourage spent several nights “out on the ice” in polar-style tents, braving the cold, hard winds, blowing snow and true “white-out” conditions. At other stops they were housed in more permanent and comfortable facilities. It was, of course, the austral summer, so the sun never set.
Much of the trip was devoted to visiting 22 of the permanent Antarctic research stations, most managed by individual nations. His visits included Russia’s ultra-cold Vostok facility where many years worth of ice cores are stored for research. He also visited Norway’s Troll research site, an Australian facility, and America’s large Amundsen-Scott research center that sits at the South Pole. Near the exact site of the South Pole stands a marker in the ice, which visitors can run around and then claim they’d circumnavigated the globe – on foot, very quickly.
At the U.S main base at McMurdo Sound, Prince Albert spoke before the large group of research scientists stationed there during the Antarctic summer, doing a wide range of experiments before winter shuts down many such projects.
The Prince noted that the research being done at these various stations is remarkable and important. Air samples are collected near the Antarctic coast, for example, and their chemistry is compared to similar samples taken many miles inland, looking for differences in pollution levels.
Also, at the big U.S. station at the South Pole, the Prince and his team visited the huge “Ice Cube,” an extraordinarily sensitive neutrino observatory that has its many sensors buried deep in the clear polar ice. The sensors are arranged within a cube formation that measures one kilometer on each side. It is designed to count neutrinos from space that pass through our planet from North Pole to South Pole. One research objective is to seek the “signature” of the universe’s origin, the cosmic birth event called the Big Bang.
Their visit also included stops at penguin rookeries, where the Prince learned of threats to species because of climate warming, which climatologists expect will be most accentuated at the globe’s poles. They also visited sites where early Antarctic explorers had set up camp a century ago.
Prince Albert’s extensive visit and tour of Antarctica was made in response to an invitation from the scientific community, with a goal of bringing “Antarctic science to the public eye.” The continent is a sentinel for the dangers of climate change. He said, “I truly loved this experience.” Prince Albert emphasized that Antarctica serves as a model collaboration of science and peace – an example worth noting well beyond the continent as well.
After the film was shown, a question and answer period was led by Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and Cecil & Ida Green Professor of Physics, Ronald Prinn, director of MIT’s Center of Global Change Science and TEPCO Professor, and Thomas Herring, professor, Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Science, whose research involves observations from space satellites of polar ice cover, changes in global ice patterns, and the rates of change being observed.
Prince Albert and the three discussants agreed there are numerous “canaries” (referring to the canaries once used to warn of danger in mineshafts) that should be monitored concerning polar region climate changes. These include the stability of the West Antarctic ice field, the changes being seen in Greenland’s huge mass of ice, and the receding of mountain glaciers around the globe. Prof. Herring noted that the last glacial ice is expected to disappear from Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, Africa, within a very short time.
Sponsors of the lecture were the MIT President’s Office the MIT Resource Development office, and the MIT Energy Initiative. After the lecture, the prince toured the MIT Electric Vehicle Laboratory and attended a Salon hosted by the MIT Energy Initiative in his honor at the MIT Museum.
An international diplomat, Prince Albert II has led Monaco’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly since 1993. He is also chairman of the Mediterranean Science Commission, which has met regularly in Monaco since its founding at the beginning of this century. The commission has 23 member states, 20 of which are located on the Mediterranean coast.