The Age Of Warming

This segment was originally broadcast on April 1, 2007. It was updated on Aug. 14, 2007.

If you were waiting for the day global warming would change the world, that day is here. It's happening, far from civilization's notice, in a place about as remote as you can get.

Scientists believed Antarctica, at the bottom of the world, was too vast, too remote, to be bothered by climate change any time soon. But now glaciers are setting speed records for melting and whole colonies of penguins are disappearing.

Why does it matter?

Antarctica is a climate giant, driving ocean and wind currents worldwide, with enormous potential to raise sea levels.

To find out what's happening down south, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley set out on an expedition; the first stop was the high mountains of Patagonia in Chile, where you can actually see a new age beginning.

O'Higgins is spectacular for its beauty, but for a scientist like Gino Casassa it's breathtaking for the speed it is disappearing – the glacier is morphing into a lake, retreating more than any glacier in South America.

The location where Pelley interviewed Casassa was covered by ice a hundred years ago. "I think it's a very clear picture that the world is getting warmer and that the impacts that were projected even 10 or 20 years ago are happening right now," Casassa explains.

The glacier has fallen back nine miles in 100 years, throwing off icebergs that roll, as they dissolve into the lake.

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Photos: Go behind-the-scenes with 60 Minutes in Chile and Antarctica

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Casassa is a glaciologist, who surprised 60 Minutes when he revealed what he used to think of global warming. "I just didn't believe in global warming. I mean in global warming being produced by mankind, by us contaminating the atmosphere, I just refused to believe that," he explains.

He says, now, the evidence has convinced him. Pelley set out to find more evidence, as Casassa went to measure the height of O'Higgins. The 60 Minutes team climbed to a spot where Casassa had crossed from earth to ice in 2004. But now, in 2007, that spot was covered by water.

Much to his surprise, there was a thousand feet of water where he had walked three years ago. The group had to hike for hours to get to the ice. When they got there, they found it blackened by earth and volcanic ash. Casassa set up a receiver to measure the distance from the top of O'Higgins to satellites overhead.

He measures the distance to get a contour line at the top of the glacier. "As we walk, the receiver, which is in my backpack, is capturing data every one second," Casassa explains.

And the data showed Casassa that glacier O'Higgins has thinned 92 feet in seven years.

And it's not unique. More than 90 percent of the world's glaciers are retreating. And if you're looking for early trouble from climate change, this is it. Glacial runoff provides water for 1.5 billion people, mostly in South America, China and India.

"In the medium term, depending on the size of glacier…30 years, just a few decades, the glacier will start to waste away in such a degree that you will see the runoff the glacial melt coming from that glacier starting to decline," Casassa says.

Cities around the world, says Casassa, will be starved for water. And he says we now are seeing the first impacts.

60 Minutes wanted to see the evidence of warming nearer the bottom of the world. So Pelley and the team set sail from the last city south, Ushuaia, Argentina, on a two-day voyage to Antarctica.

It is more than 1,000 miles from glacier O'Higgins in Patagonia and across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic peninsula.

Here, 60 Minutes found there's green where the white used to be; on the coast, in summer, there's grass where the scientists used to ski. The area is called "Paradise Cove," and it is home to fur seals, lazy elephant seals and the Chinstrap penguin.

American biologists Sue and Wayne Trivelpiece were the first to find trouble in Paradise Cove. Wayne Trivelpiece says, over the years, the population of Chinstrap penguins has changed by about 60 percent.

The Trivelpieces live in a tiny American outpost, where they've studies penguins for more than 30 years with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

"I'm curious about the evolution. How long have there been penguins?" Pelley asks.

"Oh, millions of years 30, 40 million years," Sue Trivelpiece says. "There have been six-foot penguin fossils found … and with ten-inch bills and I really don't think I would want to band one of those guys."

Banding modern penguins led to their discovery. It starts with a roundup: they've squeezed ID bands on 70,000 penguins to see if they survive their migration.

Penguins migrate up to 5,000 miles in the coldest water on earth. And if you think penguins don't "fly" you've never seen them underwater, where they can hit 25 miles an hour.

But, after millions of years of endurance, many Chinstrap and Adelie penguins aren't surviving anymore.

"We knew something was drastically wrong. Something had changed in the ocean," Wayne Trivelpiece tells Pelley.

What do they think was happening?

"We didn't really know. We knew it had to be something that was going on once they left land and went out to sea," Sue Trivelpiece explains.

"We love working with the Chinstraps. They are far and away the most cooperative," says Sue's husband Wayne.

"But you know what, Wayne, I'm not sure they like working with you," Pelley remarks.

Getting manhandled may ruffle their feathers, but it was key to discovering their fate.

There were some grown penguin chicks, chasing their mothers for food which she delivers beak to beak. Soon, the chicks will go to sea to hunt a shrimp-like crustacean called "krill."

Krill grow beneath the sea ice, but in the warming ocean, the sea ice is melting away.

"So the penguins have been going to sea and starving to death?" Pelley asks.

"The chicks are declining and we think they just can't find the krill," Sue Trivelpiece says.

"When you can link a change in warming in air temperature to ice to krill to penguins and show a 50 percent reduction in the penguin population here and connect all the dots you really can't make it any clearer than that," her husband adds.

If it's clear the south is warming, Paul Mayewski is also in the region to find out why. He is among the most accomplished Antarctic scientists. He's director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and he has been exploring Antarctica since 1968. They've even named a mountain after him here.

Asked what some of the big questions are that he is trying to answer, Mayewski tells Pelley, "We'd of course like to be able to demonstrate that over the last few thousand years this temperature change truly is different."

Is warming caused by man's pollution in the atmosphere? Mayewski says the answer is under our feet. With the help of scientists from Poland's Arctowski Research Station, 60 Minutes set out to climb to the top of a glacier that was fractured by deep crevasses covered in snow.

Mayewski trekked thousands of miles to discover what the climate was like before humans walked the earth. He's found evidence all over the Antarctic continent.

Antarctica is one and a half times the size of the United States. It is covered in ice that averages a mile in thickness.

"If you want to learn about the climate you've got to get here and you've got to experience the place," Mayewski tells Pelley.

One of the reasons you work so hard to get to a place like this is because it is just about as remote as one can imagine – there is dead silence. 60 Minutes was on the Warsaw Plateau, which is about 1,500 feet or so from sea level on King George Island in Antarctica.

The other reason one comes to the Warsaw Plateau is to see some of the most dramatic evidence anywhere in the world of climate change. Over the past 50 years, this region, the Antarctica peninsula, the northwestern part and the islands around it has been going up in temperature about one degree every decade and that makes the region the fastest warming place on earth.

Mayewski is on the plateau to drill an ice core because, when ice is laid down, it captures everything in the air. Drilling down is drilling through time.

"The ice cores are really the only way we have of demonstrating what greenhouse gas levels were like prior to their first measurement by humans," he explains.

By chemically analyzing the core, he can see what was in the air thousands of years ago. Back in Maine, Mayewski has a vault of hundreds of ice cores. He once led a team that drilled a glacier core two miles deep. He and his colleagues have found some of the most powerful evidence that man is changing the climate.

What do ice cores tell him about greenhouse gases?

"Now we know from the ice core record that the levels and the speed of rise are significantly, significantly greater than anything in the last 850,000 years," Mayewski explains. "And the levels that we expect to get by the end of this century are going to be double what we have today."

Mayewski and his colleagues have timed the sudden rise in greenhouse gases to the start of the industrial revolution about 150 years ago. If, as expected, greenhouse gas pollution doubles by the end of the century, temperatures are predicted to rise four to six degrees.

"You could very well see sea level rises on the order of several feet and perhaps even several tens of feet," Mayewski predicts.

Asked what that would mean for coastal areas around the world, Mayewski tells Pelley, "If sea level were to rise like that, that would be tremendous changes. Immense migrations."

"It would be the largest catastrophe that the modern world would have experienced," he adds.

That rise in sea level would play out over decades. Some of it may be inevitable. It turns out that many greenhouse gases last a long time in the atmosphere—there's a lot up there already.

"If we stopped every automobile every factory, every emission of a greenhouse gas, would the world continue to warm?" Pelley asks Mayewski.

"It would certainly for a while. And I think that's one of the important thing for people to understand," Mayewski says. "It is important that everybody really begins to make reductions in greenhouse gases all the toxic elements that go along with it in order to impact or to have a change in the future. And once we start it's not going to be an immediate solution. We're going to have to pay for a while for what we've done."