Environment
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
I heard the squelch of Anil’s feet on the waterlogged path well before he arrived at the door of my hut.
“Problem with boat,” he announced in a very matter-of-fact way.
“Problem?” I asked groggily, having just emerged from under my thick mosquito net.
“Yes,” he replied. “Boat sank. You want tea?”
All night the heavy rain had pounded our huts. It came in intense waves, the wind rattling doors and window frames, and by morning the village was sitting in a mud soup, the bloated river lapping high against protective dirt walls.
Our small boat had been among several moored in what the night before had been a protected inlet, and several young boys were now working with old pans and leaking buckets to bail them out and pull them further up the receding river bank. They chatted and laughed, slipping and falling in the mud. But with the rain still falling it seemed like a hopeless task.
For Anil, our taciturn Bengali host – a man who could coolly describe the latest cobra attacks or the tiger tracks he’d found in the village – the tropical storm sweeping from the Bay of Bengal was little more than an annoyance.
Within two hours he’d rustled up a bigger boat – “this one will make it,” he told us in an attempt to reassure - and the mud-splattered NBC team, guided by the helping hands of scores of amused villagers, was soon making its way gingerly across a thin plank and onboard the bobbing vessel for the five-hour river and road journey back to Calcutta.
The village in which we’d spent the night was on a small island in the Sundarbans, which lie at the mouth of the River Ganges, where India’s most revered river empties into the Bay of Bengal.
The monsoon rains here are intense, and being caught in the middle of it does leave you wondering how India could possibly have a water shortage.
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By Anne Thompson, NBC News Chief Environmental Affairs Correspondent
After two days camping on Greenland's ice sheet, exploring melt rivers and peering into a giant moulin, I thought nothing else on this island could amaze me. And then we went with photographer Jim Balog to check his time lapse cameras at 4 glaciers.
It was a trip every bit as breathtaking and fascinating as our time on the ice sheet. Much of that has to do with the passion Balog has for his work. This photographer with a masters in geomorphology (land movement) says he was one of the initial doubters about global warming. But as the science moved from climate models to hard evidence he became persuaded. Now his mission is to record what he believes is an important moment in the history of the earth. He is doing that with time lapse cameras placed at glaciers in Alaska, the Alps, Iceland and Greenland. The project is dubbed "Extreme Ice Survey" but as you will see tonight, it looks more like an episode of the reality show "The Amazing Race."
We set out by chopper to visit the cameras. It is a dangerous trip over the ocean and in between mountains. Often our chopper was pushed around by swirling winds. At the insistance of his insurance company and wife, Jim travelled in a yellow neoprene survival suit. No one insisted Mario, Bruce, Curt or I wear such gear. Hmmmmm.
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by Anne Thompson, chief environmental affairs correspondent
Tonight, we will take you to Greenland's vast and forbidding ice sheet. Some 300 miles wide and 1200 miles long, it is the poster child if you will, for global warming. Here you can see the melting first hand. (WATCH ANNE'S VIDEO BLOG FROM GREENLAND)
Spontaneous rivers and streams that occur in the annual summer thaw... but getting bigger and faster every year as the temperature rises.
We went to the ice sheet with Konrad Steffen, a climatologist from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a rock star in the world of global warming. At our hotel in Ilulissat, he would hold court in the lobby and dining room. The Hotel Hvide Falk (white falcon) is the choice for scientists and Steffen is the magnet. Young researchers literally sat at his knee to hear his insights about what's happening to the ice.
Steffen has been coming to Greenland for 18 years, longer than anyone else. The Danish Meterological Center in Denmark says the summer of 2007 was the second warmest since records started being kept in 1962.
This towering Swiss-born scientist is a charismatic loner... revelling in the solitude of the ice sheet.
Since 1990, his base has been Swiss Camp, a group of three tent buildings on a platform plus a sauna. He chose the spot because the melt and snowfall are the same so the ice never changes. But it did this year. He saw record melt there losing about 4 feet of snow and 3 feet of ice. The melting now threatens the buildings.
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