Marco Tedesco: The Snowman

Glaciology wasn’t an obvious career path for Italian-born Marco Tedesco. Growing up in Avellino, a mountainside near his native Naples, his parents had very different expectations of him. Get a degree and find a job. Tedesco found himself with other plans. Today, Tedesco is one of the most respected and cited polar experts in the world, having traveled eleven times to Greenland and two to Antarctica (not counting the number of times he has visited mountains); has written a book, The Hidden Life of Ice: Messages from a Disappearing World (National Geographic and Washington Post Best Travel Books of 2020); and published nearly 150 peer-reviewed research papers.

He describes his passion for studying ice and snow as a love story. His father was a construction supervisor, working 10-hour days in all weather conditions. While Tedesco studied electrical engineering at the University of Naples and was on a path that his parents thought would lead to well-paying industry jobs, he found himself drawn to a research life.

“I’ve always been drawn to science and academic careers. No one in my family has done it, so there’s no history. I applied for a PhD in Florence. I didn’t get in at first.” He decided to prepare to apply again, but a month later, he college counselor called him. “My advisor said, ‘Look, we have a project on snow. Are you interested?’ I said yes. That was my key. I started working on snow; I fell in love with the job. Leshan, basically married to this medium.”

Ultimately, he received his Ph.D. at the Italian National Research Council in Florence, focusing on the interaction of electromagnetic waves and snow particles in satellite applications.

“On the first day of my Ph.D., my advisor came to me with three books totaling about 1,000 pages and told me to come back to him when I was done absorbing. I only had a desk and a lamp with a computer None.” Three months later, Tedesco went to his advisors and finished drafting the book and first paper.

In 2002, Tedesco began a research role at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, leaving Avellino and moving to Washington, D.C.

“I had a thousand dollars in my pocket and my wife was pregnant with our first daughter,” Tedesco said. He also has an hour-and-a-half one-way commute through the city every day. He used his time on trains and buses to read and study, learning to speak and write better English.

In 2008, Tedesco moved to the City College of New York (CCNY) as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2012. At CUNY, he founded and directed the Cryosphere Process Laboratory and served as a rotating program manager at National University. Science Foundation between 2013 and 2015. In January 2016, Tedesco joined Lamont. Here, he continues to study the dynamics of seasonal snow and ice sheet surface properties and conduct fieldwork exploring exoplanet biology and global climate change on icy surfaces and their effects on economically, real estate, and socially disadvantaged groups.

Much of Tedesco’s work and writings focus on Significant reduction in Arctic iceIn the summer of 2021, Tedesco and other climate scientists recorded seven times the usual rate of daily melt.

A heatwave in mid-August brought the first rainfall on record at Summit Camp, the highest point on the ice sheet. Seven billion tons of water fell on the ice sheet. Tedesco called the rain event unique and shocking.

“In my life I never thought I would see rain on the summit. It’s called Greenland’s dry snow for a reason,” he said. “Imbalances in the Arctic system suggest significant changes are taking place, characterized by multiple events rather than a single snapshot. This is consistent with what we expect to see based on models and our understanding of physical processes. There is little hope that things will be reversed, Because the processes that we know are driving accelerated melting in Greenland and Antarctica have been around for some time, they cannot be stopped easily without severe intervention in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.”

Tedesco has observed with great interest the rate at which projected changes in polar ice are being realized.

“Change is happening faster than even the most dire predictions would suggest.”

Of particular concern is the injustice of the consequences of climate change. Communities that produce the fewest greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming tend to be those suffering the worst climate consequences.

In the summer of 2021, Tedesco and colleagues released the Socioeconomic Physical Housing Eviction Risk (SEPHER) dataset. It combines socioeconomic information with the risk of wildfires, droughts, coastal and river flooding, and other disasters, as well as financial information from real estate databases, and data on race, ethnicity, and gender.The goal is to take into account the economic vulnerabilities associated with the housing market, including factors of race, gender, and ethnicity, so that stakeholders can take appropriate action to address protect vulnerable groups. SEPHER covers the entire United States and Tedesco has made all data publicly accessible as one of the pillars of the project.

“The tool is designed to quantify an objective analysis of the role of climate impacts in social and racial injustice, such as climate gentrification and displacement or climate injustice.”

Tedesco will take his next expedition to Greenland in 2022, when he and Lamont paleoclimatologist Brendan Buckley will travel to a forest in southern Greenland to collect tree-ring samples to reconstruct Greenland’s climate in the 1800s.

“We want to know what’s going on before we can measure it,” he said. Since trees can live for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, a tree may experience a variety of environmental conditions: wet years, dry years, cold years, hot years, early frosts, forest fires, etc. Tree rings can show the age of the tree and the weather conditions for each year of the tree’s life. “The plan is to get to the only forest in Greenland, a piece of land no more than six miles, close to where Eric the Red Devil arrived, and named after Greenland as we know it today. It will be an exciting trip!”

The pandemic forced the postponement of the field study, which was scheduled to take place last year. The pandemic and its many constraints have also offered Tedesco something troubling, given the global cooperation needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid some of the most catastrophic future climate consequences.

“As a species, we cannot come together with masks and vaccines. If we cannot face such a large and imminent threat together [as COVID-19], how can we convince people that we need to act for future generations? In this regard, the pandemic has given way to questioning the world around me. “

However, Tedesco remains optimistic, especially when he considers the power of a new generation, and the ability to adopt a lifestyle that considers economic aspects as well as sustainability as well as moral and ethical values.