Gina Moseley has stepped foot in places no other human being has likely ever stepped before. A British paleoclimatologist at the University of Innsbruck, Moseley has built a career exploring ancient cave systems in search of geological samples that will tell us stories about the Earth’s past climate. Since 2015, her focus has been the harsh Arctic regions of northern Greenland, where many cave systems are previously unexplored. “It's a privilege, I think, to be the first person or the first of a group of people to set foot in these places,” Moseley says. “There's a high chance no one will ever go back as well. We really have a duty to get the most out of that experience.”
The planet is warming. Since the 1970s, the Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the global average. “As a consequence of that, there’s very major changes that have taken place in the Arctic today,” says Moseley. “The ice sheets are melting, sea levels will rise, the sea ice is disappearing. And all this has a big effect on weather systems and climate. Not just in the Arctic—it will have knock-on effects around the rest of the world.”
Predicting the impact of climate change on our weather systems is typically a job for climatologists and rigorous computer models. But the Earth, of course, has been warmer before. “Since its beginning, it’s naturally experienced climate variability,” says Moseley, who in 2021 was named a Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate for her work on deep cave systems.
For the last two million or so years, the Earth’s geophysical conditions have been relatively stable. “The continents are in the same place as they are today, the oceans are the same size, the ocean currents are all set up rather similar. This is a baseline for what's ‘natural’ in terms of what should be going on today,” Moseley says. “We can tap into periods in the past that were naturally warmer than today; that information can be used as an analogue to what we could expect to happen in the future.”
The data that Moseley collects can help give deeper insight into our past, and our future. Using samples from cave systems can help data scientists produce more accurate climate models, which in turn will help us prepare for a warming world.
For the latest episode of Planet Pioneers, a new video series in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, Moseley sat down with WIRED’s Greg Williams to discuss the potential for paleoclimatology and challenges of going to such extremes to collect data.
In the summer of 2023, supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, Moseley led her most ambitious expedition to date: the Northern Caves expedition to Wulff Land, a remote northern area of Greenland. The target was a series of cave sites, including the so-called “Cold War Cave,” an unexplored cave system, first sighted by a US military expedition in the 1960s looking for remote places to land aircraft.
The trip was arduous, requiring trekking scientific equipment into remote stretches beyond the reach of roads and even air. “If there’s a bad weather window, or the helicopter or plane isn’t available, we might be stuck there for 10 days, two weeks,” Moseley says. The team set up trip alarms around the camp in case of a polar bear or wolf encounter. “That was used three times on the last expedition.”
Spending time in such rarified environments means that Moseley and her team get to see and handle specimens that are millions of years old. “We have samples that are 5 million years old and 15 million years old. And that has given me a whole new excitement again because the world was very different 5 million years ago compared to 500,000 years ago. I have all these questions racing through my head about what the world was like 5 million years ago and what can a tiny little rock from a cave in the far north of Greenland tell us about that time.”
“It's about taking a small piece of a puzzle,” says Moseley, “connecting it to other pieces of the puzzle and understanding how the climate system works in a warmer world.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
