To observe the Greenland ice sheet from above is to see an endless expanse of bright white, occasionally tinged with blue: a frozen desert seemingly devoid of life.

The closer you get, the more complexity you will find. “It seems lifeless and inert, but to look at the same glacier surface under a microscope is to reveal a rich abundance of life,” says Dr. Joseph Cook, a microbiologist and Rolex Awards for Enterprise Young Laureate. “There are diverse life forms that inhabit the ice surface, with a foundation of photosynthetic life supporting several layers of food web, just like a rainforest.”

Cook has devoted his career to learning more about these organisms and their incredible hidden lives, a study that might hold the key to one of the most urgent scientific problems of our time.

As the second-largest body of ice in the world, the Greenland ice sheet covers more than 1.7 million square kilometres and contains enough water to elevate global sea levels by over six metres. With the ice sheet melting at unprecedented speed – about a million tonnes per minute as of 2019 – forecasting its retreat and the effects in the coming decades is a crucial step in securing humanity’s future.

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“Glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking globally because of Earth’s rising temperature, [and] this is a problem for many reasons relating to water security, agriculture and sea-level rise,” Cook says. “However, there are still several knowledge gaps that we don’t account for when we project melting into the future.”

One of these, Cook says, is the effect of micro-organisms growing on the ice, which change its colour and speed up the rate of melting. The more the microbes grow, he explains, the darker the ice becomes and the more it warms up in the sun.

“The worry is that as the climate continues to get warmer and the melting zones expand, these microbes will colonize larger areas, grow to greater concentrations and accelerate the melting of glaciers ice sheets beyond the expectations of our current forecasts.”

Faced with a massive remote area and harsh conditions on the ground, Cook likens directly observing the changes on the ice sheet to being in a boat on the ocean and trying to notice sea level rise.

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“As scientists on the ice we can only cover a small area and only take a limited number of samples, but the process we study happens at the scale of hundreds to thousands of square kilometres,” Cook explains. “This means we have to take to the sky if we want to understand how the ice and the microbes inhabiting it operate at scale.”

Satellite images are helpful, he says, but drones have been a game-changer.

“Over my career, I have seen the introduction of what now seem like very rudimentary drones rapidly become standard equipment for field studies on the ice, and the sophistication of the drones has advanced extremely quickly. We are now flying advanced cameras that replicate the sensitivity of the major satellites over large areas of the ice, and we can do this two or three times every day, each time generating huge images of the ice surface at sub-centimetre resolution.”

When Cook was named a Rolex Awards for Enterprise Young Laureate in 2016, at the age of 29, it provided him with the means to design and build a drone especially suited to flying in Greenland’s harsh conditions.

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Of equal importance, however, was the connection it provided to the global scientific community. “The Rolex Award has been transformative because it has allowed me to explore the real technological and theoretical frontiers of this topic, not only by funding the work but by introducing me to a wide network of people from very diverse fields that have lent their thoughts, opinions and expertise. I have benefited greatly from collaborations with other awardees.”

Despite the high stakes and the ever-more-grim realities on the ground, Cook remains hopeful that humankind – with the help of the data he’s gathering and making freely available to the scientific community – can still avoid a worst-case scenario. “I still find it mind-blowing that invisibly small microbes can affect the fate of a continent-sized ice sheet,” he says.

“This is frightening because it shows the non-linear effects of small, hidden processes on the Earth system at large, but on the other hand, if microbes can collectively influence the melt rate of the ice sheet, humans can collectively influence it the other way, too.”

Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Rolex. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.