Konrad Steffen: The Global Warming Prophet

This year, Steffen will add two more weather stations to his network, as well as more GPS and seismic instruments to record ice quakes. He will also attempt to descend into a moulin, a vertical shaft that channels rushing meltwater down to the bedrock. If all goes well, he will install laser instruments that may lead to a new understanding of the dynamics of ice-sheet plumbing. Both Steffen and Zwally suspect that moulins, which move meltwater and the heat it carries almost a mile through the ice, have a potentially significant effect on the health of ice caps and, by extension, on climate change around the world.

After a double-espresso nightcap, I drop Steffen off at the Holiday Inn. It's now 12:30 a.m., three hours before wake-up call. At the reception desk, polar scientists and their support teams are still straggling in, hoping to catch a few hours' rest. It's looking like it's going to be a crowded flight up to Kangerlussuaq. "That's another good thing," Steffen says. "I'm no longer working alone. Now we have teams of physicists, geographers, atmospheric chemists, geologists, engineers and many others who have the same interest in the science of the environment, seen from different perspectives."

Many of those researchers became part of what NASA's Abdalati calls "the ice-sheet community" as Steffen's protgs. Abdalati himself still has a vivid memory of his first landing on the Greenland ice sheet, accompanying Steffen as a young Ph.D. candidate. "It was windy and cold and just unbelievably bleak," he says. "The helicopter put us down and then it took off, and we were left in this cold silence, alone and hearing nothing but the wind." It was, Abdalati says, among the loneliest moments he had ever experienced. Then he looked over at his mentor. "Koni was leaning backward, arching his back, with his arms wide open. He was in his element, just reveling in it. And I remember thinking, 'Here is a man who is really doing exactly what he should be doing.'"

Tom Clynes wrote about the future of energy in the July 2006 issue.