You may not realize it but your brain actually processes information in two very distinct ways. Like when you look a photo, you instantly know she has blond hair, is visibly angry, and likely has some choice words to yell. Without any effort you experience fast thinking, but if you look at the following problem something different happens. Sure, you immediately know it's a multiplication problem, and you knew you could solve it if you had the energy but didn't. If you do try, your muscles will tense and your pupils will dilate and you heart rate will increase. Now, you've experienced slow thinking. These two systems of fast and slow thinking, dictate much of our perception and reaction in life. Take these lines for example, it's clear that they're different lengths, but if you measure them, they're actually the exact same length. Even now that you know, system 1 or your fast thinking, can't stop seeing the illusion because it acts automatically. Similar effect to seeing here, which figure's the largest? Again, they're all the same size, but the suggestion of perspective in depth causes your system 1 to interpret the picture as three-dimensional, even though it's on a flat two-dimensional surface. It's making quick work of the available information, and so your conscious system 2 or slow thinking must compensate after the fact and choose not believe your intuition or instinct. Wanna see your system 2 in action? We'll show you a string of four digits, you read them out loud then add one to each of the original digits. If the card reads 3795, the correct response would be 4806. We'll then go to the next card and you'll do the same, followed by the next card. Ready? Go! Few people can cope with more than four digits, but even harder is add 3. The interesting bit is that though your pupils would have dilated you often become effectively blind when you fully engage system 2. Did you notice the color of the text change? Or how about the fact that the numbers completely changed when I put them off to the side? Listen to the following puzzle. A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Chances are, your system 1 intuition was yelling 10 cents But this appealing system 1 answer, we know, is wrong In fact, the correct answer is 5 cents Even if you worked out the correct answer, you likely thought of 10 cents along the way System 1 is trying to work out an answer as quickly and seamlessly as possible Which is extremely beneficial in everyday life If every activity required full mental effort it would be exhausting. But, knowing this allows us to understand that not all of our first impressions are correct. How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark? So few people detect what is wrong with this question that it's been dubbed the Moses illusion. In fact, Moses took no animals, Noah did. Again, our brain invests as little resources as necessary so that things run quickly and smoothly. Because Moses is not abnormal in the biblical context, System 1 unconsciously detects an association between Moses and ark and quickly accepts the question. In a similar way, System 1 generates context without you knowing. Reading each of the following may seem fairly simple ABC, Ann approached the bank, and 12 13 14 But your brain actually interpreted these ambiguous statements without you ever knowing You could have read it as A 13 C or 12 B 14 But your brain created the context unconsciously Also, you likely imagined a woman with money on her mind walking towards a building with tellers But if the sentence before this was: they were floating gently down the river. The entire scene would've changed because 'Bank' would no longer be associated with money. Without an explicit context, System 1 quickly generates one based off similar experiences In this case, you've likely visited more banks than rivers and so the context is resolved accordingly This ties into a context called "Priming" For example, if I said "Wash" How would you complete this word fragment? Most would see soap, but had I just shown you the word "Eat" you'd be more likely to see "Soup" In this way, both "Eat" and "wash" prime your thoughts Though system 2 likes to think that it's in charge and knows what's going on The truth is that priming effects even been shown to affect and modify behavior These arrive in system one and you have no conscious access to them If you'd like to learn more about the thinking system in your brain

it's a mystery continent at the bottom of the earth of the world And the largest single mass of ice on Earth. for longer than humans have walked the planet. ice has dominated Antarctica but what about the future. "ice melts from this continent... ...Sea Level goes up." as earth gets warmer what will happen to Antarctica. "We're going into uncertain lands uncertain future. how will the earth respond?" Today a pioneering team is searching for answers, with a bold new plan and a revolutionary new machine no one has ever drove through an ice (unintelligable) and I present these challenges they must drill down nearly a mile and more than 20 million years deep into Antarctica's ancient history in this unforgiving place it's never been done before it's quite amazing when you think about where we are and what we're doing anything can go wrong at any minute the stakes are high because the secret to Earth's future lies buried in Antarctica's past right now on nova secrets beneath the ice it's the coldest windiest driest and most desolate landscape on the planet with few permanent residents except penguins and seals. This frosty continent appears locked in a perpetual Ice Age a colossal cloak of ice covers almost every inch of land and in some places the ice is so thick and so heavy it depresses the Earth's crust almost half a mile Simple for call it Earth's freezer but scientists call Antarctica the ice Antartica plays a fundamental role in the way the earth functions for polar researchers Antarctica is a giant laboratory more than one and a half times the size of the United States and home to 90% of all the ice in the world anything that happens down here anything that changes will affect the rest of the world most people don't think that change in Antarctica matters to them but when we look at New York City and we looked at it's in front of the ocean it matters what would happen if all of Antarctica's ice were to melts antarctica melts sea level goes up twelve stories in New York City sea levels would rise by more than 150 feet flooding coastal cities displacing hundreds of millions of people that would be a change that you could see from space earth would look different in any case even a loss of just 10% of Antarctica's ice would be catastrophic it would raise the sea level over there in Manhattan about 19 feet right up along the edge big sections of Brooklyn would be underwater certainly the Mediterranean some of my favorite cities like Venice would look very different tens of millions of people would have to be relocated to be almost different different planet if sea level changes in the climate around the coastal regions change it's going to affect the climate where you live it's going to affect the things you can you can grow is going to affect how you have you live there may be a list of things in store that come as a result of raising sea levels that we haven't even thought about yet could this be our fate is Antarctica heading for a major meltdown if so it may happen over centuries but it could already be starting because the climate is changing and it's changing because burning fossil fuels has increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today we have something that's completely man-made and that is the addition of carbon dioxide and put into the atmosphere by humanity by us carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas it prevents the sun's heat from escaping I'm in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in a greenhouse greenhouses there are basically like heat motels where the sun's rays can come in and they get trapped inside the greenhouse they can't get out so like glass in a greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trap solar energy in our atmosphere but now those levels are increasing the result is our earth is now warming up and the ice is melting both in Antarctica and the Arctic in the north there's two clear signals in the Arctic Ocean you have lots of floating ice and not sticking around through the summer that's one sign of it getting warmer the other side the edges of the Greenland ice sheet are changing and the loss of Greenland's ice is now speeding up in August 2010 and iceberg four times the size of Manhattan broke off the edge of Greenland but Antarctica has nearly ten times as much ice as Greenland and in the past decade alone rising temperatures have caused giant pieces of coastal ice to shrink or crumble polar researchers fear that this could be just the beginning of a chain reaction but have Antarctica's ice sheets ever collapsed before that's what an international team of geo detectives wants to find out here we actually have some running water some melt water coming out of the ice to get a more precise picture of Antarctica's future they plan to dig deep for answers in the past with a giant drill by drilling into areas around the Erika we're able to perceive a history that has an impact for where we're headed as a planet Antarctica was not always locked in a deep freeze 160 million years ago it was part of an enormous supercontinent closer to the equator at the time earth was much warmer than today and fossil evidence suggests this giant landmass was a tropical habitat teeming with Dinosaurs eventually the supercontinent broke apart and Antarctica drifted south as Earth was getting colder falling carbon dioxide levels and powerful ocean currents cooled the isolated continent even further and then around 34 million years ago ice slowly began to form it would take millions of years for Antarctica to finally lock into a deep freeze and during that time it remained warm enough for plant life to survive evidence of that was recently unearthed in a relatively ice-free Valley in the interior here geologist Alan Ashworth and Adam Lewis find a remarkable fossil oh wait is that a leaf there's a leaf right there that leaf fell into the mud maybe 20 million years ago suddenly do the best is yet that's a sweet leaf and then they find something extraordinary this is like a peat peat moss and then if we take T some of this out there flight freeze-dried under the microscope these brittle mosses are in pristine condition these moss fossils are not rock but actual plant tissue the last vestiges of vegetation from a time when Antarctica was still warm they were found under a layer of volcanic ash that dates back millions of years this is the original moss tissue and even the cells are preserved in these fossils these plants were flash-frozen when an article plummeted into a deep freeze that preserved them until today it's mind-boggling the only way is to say the climate remained very very cold it remained very very dry and it did not warm up for even relatively short periods of time in this location otherwise these things are gone now as Earth is heating up what will happen to Antarctica will it melt raising sea levels all over the planet how sensitive is this frozen land to the temperature changes we currently face but before researchers can investigate in Antartica. Last-minute testing is taking place here over 2,000 miles away in the countryside of New Zealand, with a brand new drill. Yeah, its a shake down. we've got a few leaking connections and things that don't quite fit as well as I need to a little bit of modifications required pretty common with a brand new piece of equipment weighing in at a whopping 40 tonnes this mechanized marvel is as heavy as a humpback whale and just as large towering some 5 stories high the giant rig will soon dwarf everything in sight except the ice this will be the largest Rorick in Antarctica that's used on land in this mammoth rig can drill in more than one place that's because it's mounted on a sled I think it probably is unusual all of the equipment is on sledges so in Antartica we pull it all with pygmy bulldozers it's been specially designed to drill from the ice in order to extract hidden secrets from beneath Antarctica itself this unique multinational enterprise is called an drill the Antarctic drilling project for team leader David Harwood it's a dream come true as a scientist there's a passion there's a passion that comes in trying to figure it out trying to identify what has been the past history of the ice sheet and wondering what the future might hold soon the giant drill will be dismantled and ready for a long sea voyage this will get you to take your extreme cold weather days off but now the andrel team gathers at Christchurch New Zealand for the six-hour flight to Antarctica in a c-17 cargo plane jam-packed with people and gear their flight passes over the Transantarctic mountains which divide the continent into two regions with colossal glaciers called ice sheets blanketing both The giant East Antarctica Ice Sheet is ten times the size of the West it's frozen firmly to bedrock high above the sea and in some places the ice towers almost three miles into the sky the smaller West Antarctic Ice Sheet is less stable that's because it rests on land well below sea level and it extends hundreds of miles over the ocean in floating ice shelves it's likely East and West Antarctica will respond very differently to a warming world the andreal team touches down in the West on an icy runway at McMurdo Station the largest US research base in Antarctica. As David Harwood and Richard Levy stepped out of the ice, the first thing they notice is the weather. It is a bit chilly but it's beautiful. It is good to be back. it's October springtime and it's minus 20 degrees the earliest I've ever been down to Antarctica and it's very cold when the wind picks up it's rather an unpleasant place to be working when the wind isn't blowing and the sun shining it's actually really quite nice but very cold. but even a sunny afternoon can turn nasty in a moment's notice. It's a beautiful day. Come on guys! McMurdo Station has been a vital hub of research for over half a century. what began as a tiny outpost as over the years grown into a small town McMurdo houses a population of 200 people year round but during the research season it becomes home base for over a thousand Every year Mc Murdo supports scores of research projects providing lab facilities food and supplies . and survival training of scientists who will head out to remote field camps. this season, those numbers include the andrel team of over 50 technicians and researchers From the U.S.. New Zealand Germany and Italy and Andrill is funded by their governments and the National Science Foundation There's probably a week at least of work in McMurdo where we have to get all of our gear sorted out getting everything we need in order to be able to work and survive on the field as they gather supplies for more than a month on the ice one item is in high demand. sugar actually heats your body it gives you a quick energy especially if you're like freezing and we expect to be very cold we don't really know how much chocolate is enough we can take up to 560 candy bars but I'm looking at this and I'm already getting queasy I'm like oh I don't know if I can eat this or not. Hey David. As Andrill researchers prepare for life in the field they join hundreds of other scientists fanning out across Antarctica and many are focused on the same question could Antarctica be headed for a meltdown. Over here is Mount Boreas we're gonna have a lot of scientists working together there is a little bit of volcanic ash and you know challenge each other's theories challenging what we know. Look at that. As a community we are gonna find the answers. But the continent won't give up its secrets, easily. The star beauty of Antarctica masks a treacherous nature more than seventy percent of all the fresh water in the world is harbored here. But most of that water is frozen and with less precipitation than the Sahara Antarctica is the driest desert on Earth. Raging winds of up to 200 miles per hour sometimes blasts the frozen terrain. where temperatures can drop to a hundred degrees below zero. Only during the short Antarctic summer can most researchers gather precious scientific data from this giant mystery continent. A four hour flight and 400 miles for McMurdo is the center of the West Antarctic Ice sheet. And for one team, this is This is the best way to find out about the past. This is the side of a snow pit it's a thin wall between two pits the other side is open so that can light can shine through and you can really see the different layers in the pit. So this is one year's worth of of snow accumulation and there's a second year's worth of snow accumulation here below it. Two years of record right here in the snow pit. Ofcourse, you want to go back a lot further in time with that. In order to do that we can't just use shovels and chainsaws like we did here. so we have to use a drill ken Taylor's team is drilling through ice their goal is to gather samples from the nearly two mile thick West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the deeper they go the further back in time they travel. Here about 480 meters deep right now this is right around the time when Jesus lived it's right about zero ad right when BC years turned into 80 years. These ice cores contain tiny bubbles of ancient atmosphere that were trapped each year as the snow was compressed into ice. Ice bubbles in this one it's ancient area there when we crush samples like this I don't get the cows out there and we can sample the ancient atmosphere we can also get a record of how things like temperature and sea ice changed in the past by combining these different records we can understand how the climate system is operating the past but the ice work valuable as it is only goes back about eight hundred thousand years a tiny fraction of geologic time to get a more complete picture of Antarctica's climate history you have to drill farther back in time and that's what the Andrill team is trying to did. They want to paint a picture of Antarctica as it changed from warm to cold millions of years ago in order to do that Andrill will have to drill deep into the earth but finding the right location is a major challenge on a continent covered by ice and even in those few places where the ice has receded it's still not easy Andrills David Harwood and Richard levy are searching for places to drill but as they fly over a field of rubble they see the gathering evidence for a chronological history is not possible here. something has stirred things up and that something is the ice itself that's because ice moves for tens of millions of years glaciers have slowly scoured the land gobbling up rocks and debris and spreading them all across the landscape in random order this we call glacial paleontology some call it garbage pile paleontology because we're looking and sorting through these Marines to try to get pieces of information that the ice sheet has brought to us. A marine is the chaotic accumulation of rocks and debris deposited by glacial movement this one here she has abundant shell fossils this shell brought here by a glacier comes from a time when the continent was warmer and water ran through these valleys. This landscape is a treasure trove of a Nordica's climate history but the ice has scrambled all the clues we're looking at a jigsaw puzzle yet there's one place where the evidence remains intact that's in the seafloor beneath the Antarctic ice shelf where the glacial movement has also deposited layer after layer in chronological order drilling gives us an opportunity to get a serial history in time each layer goes back in time and we know that a rock was younger than a rock below so we could put it into history . The Andrill team aims to drill through the Antarctic ice and the sea below then like a straw thrust through a layer cake they'll bore deep into the ocean floor in order to recover millions of years of rock and mud the trace Antarctica's climate history. Even after ice began to form in Antarctica around 34 million years ago the continent remained warm enough for plant life to survive a lot like areas of New Zealand today where ice can be found bordered by trees and plants but when did Antarctica plunge into a solid deep freeze and how did it happen was it gradual or abrupt will the story of how Antarctica changed from green house to ice house reveal new clues about the continents climate future and our own. Charlie, Charlie, I am David Harwood The Andrill team will spend the next few weeks searching for drilling locations from the surface of the ice. But David Harwood remains focused on what lies below when I'm driving across there I'm always thinking about what's beneath this I'm over about 15 feet of ice and over that I'm over about 1,500 feet of water and then the sediments below that here at the bottom of the world the Sun never sets in the summer and his night blends in today the work begins in earnest. The team heads out to McMurdo South. A place where the ocean freezes annually creating a precarious platform of floating sea ice that will only last a few months we're standing right now in the southern part of the proto Sound seasonally this region will break out the sea ice that are standing on the melt out it's now strong enough perhaps 20 feet beneath us is a thickness of ice and then 15 hundred feet of water beneath us as well just to be sure they're in the right place fire in the hole the team blasts powerful sound waves through the sea ice and into the sea floor below the result is a sonic street map of layer after layer of rock and mud each one representing a different era of the past by looking in the past we can may be projecting to the future how dynamic has been the behavior of the ice sheets have they been static and slowly changing act of a player have they been Finally it's time to tow the giant drill out onto the ice to ensure that the weight of the rig isn't supported by the sea ice alone divers attach flotation devices to the drill pipe and at the end of that pipe is a whirling tool with a unique cutting edge a drill bit made of diamonds that can bore through almost everything in its path the diamond core system that we have it's almost like melting the core down through the rocks just cuts through whatever's there if you hit a big boulder you'll just end up with a cylinder of that Boulder but it just keep going. Now, the real drilling begins. there's not a minute to waste because the Antarctic research season is so short the crews work around the clock to recover cores of rock the trace Antarctica's ancient past the powerful drill bores down over three-quarters of a mile bringing up 12 feet of core at a time each foot averaging a thousand years of climate history it's an astonishing feat it's quite amazing when you think about where we are and what we're doing we've got a drill rig a 60 ton 290 ton with all the equipment on a drill rig sitting behind us here on eight meters of sea ice above 380 meters of water and then we're drilling down into the sea floor below there with a three to four inch diameter pipe that's turning round and round like a a piece of spaghetti hanging down through the water and into the ground and it's wobbling around a bit and we're turning around and bringing Cora from deep within the earth anything can go wrong at any minute with this process and all too soon it does sometimes even a drill bit made of diamonds can run into trouble we haven't been getting particularly good quality core and we're suspecting that the drill bit has been damaged in places it's a little bit narrower it should be for the size of the diamond bits and that means we have to pull our pipe out about 1700 meters and replace a bit right back down the hole and that's going to take us about 24 hours to 36 hours removing and replacing nearly a mile of pipe is no easy task especially when it's your job to change it all out piece by piece but for other members of the Andrill team it's a welcome break in an extreme environment like Antarctica nobody's on a diet your body is working so hard to stay warm packing away 6,000 calories or more a day is not an indulgence it's a necessity and because Antarctica is drier than the hottest desert dehydration is a constant concern and keeping the drill up and running is another finally after a day and a half of hard work the new bid is in place and drilling is back on track they recover a 12-foot length of core wrapped in a protective cover workers carefully carry it back to the lab to be examined when they crack it open it's in perfect condition this mud and rock is more valuable than gold because each core is a time machine we're currently down to the depth of body 440 meters that's about a quarter mile down corresponding to a time at least 15 million years ago when Antarctica was still warm as the cores are recovered each section is sliced lengthwise x-rayed and scanned in labs at the drill site and back at McMurdo this course came out of the ground three days ago they were split yesterday they were imaged yesterday sedimentology stew worked the night shift 12 hours describing these pours millimeter by millimeter looking at the color size ratios any kind of structure they see in a core trying to understand how these sediments were deposited each core tells a story depending on its texture color and contents and some of those stories are spectacular we're seeing some macro fossils some large shells these shells are evidence of warmer times even as Antarctica is icing up this is one the most particular fossil found within and really decision this is a scallop now this kind of scalloped simply do not live in extreme polar waters and there are other clues some of them nearly invisible hidden inside these cores are shells of microscopic algae called diatoms for Andrew climate detectives these tiny diatoms create a highly revealing picture of the past because not all diatoms are alike some species are adapted to colder conditions while others flourish in warmer waters we use them as biological markers index of different environmental conditions cold or warm frozen waters or open ocean waters again the andrel team examines cores from around 15 million years ago they find smooth green sands containing diatoms that thrived in relatively warm water confirming this was a time before antarctica finally froze over this is very well-defined warm period iceberg free waters open waters where diatoms are growing and thriving you can see this persistent for quite some time a picture is beginning to form of a long period of transition starting 34 million years ago when a cooling climate led to the formation of ice but even so conditions remained relatively mild but when did Antarctica finally slip into a deep freeze the answer lies in cores from around 14 million years ago instead of smooth and green these cores are rocky and gray and some contain diatoms that thrived in cold glacial waters this amazing discovery reveals a rapid change from cool to frozen it fills in what has always been a blank page in Antarctica's climate history next season they'll attack another crucial question after Antarctica froze 14 million years ago did the ice ever melt or has it remained a frozen wilderness right up until today that answer will have to wait cracks in the sea-ice tell the team it's time to return to base we've seen the ice break in quite a bit in the last month but it's not broken in anywhere anywhere further south than it is right now we can only be on this site for so long before the sea ice starts to melt before the conditions change and for safety reasons we have to get off the sea ice the precarious sea ice of West Antarctica may come and go with the seasons but what about the giant East Antarctic Ice Sheet a mountain of ice so high it covers mountains this is like an MRI of the ice sheet some places it's really thick two miles thick and pretty flat and boring but then there are other places where what we discovered were hidden mountain ranges the size of the Appalachians but totally hidden by the huge you said Artic ice sheet there's ten times as much ice in the east as in the west but a small portion of the East has almost no ice at all it's an unearthly location that defies the very image of Antarctica these are the Dry Valleys cold barren and except for a few scientists almost completely devoid of life the landscape is so alien nASA has used it as a test site for space programs it's a fantastic place you can't find this anywhere else on earth it's closest analogue is the surface of Mars. Mullens valley is the ultimate remote field camp. it serves as home base for a pioneering band of glaciologists led by Dave Marchand Marsh aunt and his team are conducting research the rugged old-fashioned way they'll live in tents and won't be picked up for two months they need to be self-sufficient and for the most part they like it that way Buritos. The good thing about working out here is it's actually double-edged sword you come out here you have no contact with the outside world no email no real telephone contacts so you can totally immerse yourself in the science and that allows you to think 24 hours a day about what you're doing the other side of that is you have no idea what's going on outside right beginning of the season I didn't like it when there you would breathe and the frost would form on the outside of the sleeping bag but it hold up now and it's a little more comfortable and a lot easier small setups like we have which are helicopter supported are isolated they're among the most isolated in the region and as a result we have to check in daily with McMurdo I'll try to heat the batteries up so that we can get a signal out right now there appears to be no satellite coverage and the batter is a little bit cold so I'm trying to warm it up sometimes you have to contort your body in various ways to get the signal no not we don't have enough signal yet well here we go we've got something that might work Mac ops this is gone for Mullins Valley we have seven on board and all as well over are we lost transmission this valley holds an incredible record this area is so dry and so cold that the landscape is pristine the rocks we see here are millions of years old more shock believes that little has changed here for millions of years what to me is exciting is that we're walking on an ancient landscape imagine living ten million years ago in Antarctica this is what you'd see exactly as it is today hardly modified at all but when marshawn's team drilled beneath this rubble they found something totally unexpected a hidden glacier that extends hundreds of feet below the surface this is in my opinion the oldest dated berry glacier on earth the evidence comes from volcanic ash the dry valleys are surrounded by extinct volcanoes that erupted millions of years ago we're finding ash deposits on top of ice ash dates are coming back as old as 8 million years and according to more shot this volcanic ash shows this hidden glacier once frozen has never melted this volcanic ash that erupted from a volcano and has been sitting there for millions of years it shows no chemical alteration which you'd expect if there were any amount of liquid meltwater over that duration the fact that it's dry and pristine tells me it's always been here which is incredible equally astonishing and just three hundred miles away there appears to be a completely different picture exploring East Antarctica closer to the South Pole and riyals David Harwood found leaf fossils and pieces of wood surprisingly according to Harwood these date to a relatively recent time when Antarctica was not only warmer than today there were plants and trees this is a piece of southern beach this wood is not fossilized in the sense that it is petrified it could still burn to find the wood and leaves together it is pretty phenomenal it's really phenomenal for Antarctica particularly for Antarctica in the in this time period about 4 million years ago this season the drill is setup to find evidence of what happened in Antarctica during this period three to five million years ago it's a time known as the Pliocene now what's important about that is that the Pliocene was globally warmer than today the same temperatures as our earth may be headed for at the end of the century if climate change predictions are correct if we go back three to five million years into the geological past we know that there was a time when Earth's climate was warmer than it is today perhaps by 3 to 4 degrees so it's the best example we have of where the climate is heading in the next hundred years the drills new location is on the giant Ross Ice Shelf which extends out and over the ocean it's the largest ice shelf in the world and it helps hold back the massive Antarctic Ice Sheet from flowing into the sea these ice shelves are very important what they do is hold back the flow of ice that's actually trying to flow out into the ocean we call that buttressing if warming oceans cause the Ross Ice Shelf to break up and melt into the sea the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would eventually follow right behind the andrel team is looking for the answer to a critical question when Earth was warming during the Pliocene what happened to the ice did the Ross Ice Shelf melt taking the giant ice sheets with it drilling on an ice shelf brings with it a unique set of technological challenges including constant problems with mud and water unlike drilling through sea ice which is just 26 feet thick the ice shelf here is 400 feet we're looking at at least doubling or trying to double our capability below the sea floor and penetrate 2,000 meters or better into the sea floor but that's only the beginning no one has ever drilled through an ice shelf and they present these challenges the ice shelves they float up and down with the tide so you've got to deal with this vertical elevation change they move sideways they flow so eventually your drill pipe is going to get bent can the drill bore through a thick layer of ice that's constantly moving without breaking or getting yanked out of the sea floor to confront this unique challenge head-on the Android team invents a new tool a hot-water drill this marvel of engineering is a moving ring of heat that blasts jets of steaming water to melt a wide hole so the drill can operate freely through four hundred feet of shifting ice and once again time is so precious the team must work around the clock not only retrieving cores but also analyzing them it's 2:00 a.m. but you wouldn't know it geologists are busy logging cores like it's early afternoon we're laying out the cores and a proper sequence from top grade highest point in the core all the way to the very slowest point of the quarter an 80-foot core that dates back about three million years is closely examined it contains micro fossils of single-celled animals known as forums they're from the crucial warm period called the Pliocene and these tiny shells are precise indicators of ocean temperature these guys are about the size of a grain of sand because the same species lived through time we can use the chemistry of modern examples to allow us to calibrate if you like the chemistry of the ancient examples what Gabe's doing here is he's measuring the amount of two metals magnesium and calcium that are in the ocean and get incorporated into the shell of the 4m when it's growing in that ocean and that process is dependent on the temperature of the ocean so if we know the magnesium we know the calcium we can determine the temperature of the ocean at the time that forum lived and because of that Andrew researchers can now calculate Antarctic water temperatures during the Pliocene what this is telling us as temperatures were three to four perhaps five degrees above prison even just one degree rise notion temperatures in the waters surrounding Antarctica will attack and begin to melt the ice shelves from below very quickly the air temperatures will stay cold enough to keep things frozen at the surface but what we're worried about is the ice being attacked from beneath not from above and the cores revealed that this is what happened during the Pliocene when global climate was warming but they display even more change than expected revealing not only a patchwork of glacial rubble but also smooth mud from open seas indicating that ice both froze and then melted many times there's a really important change right here this involves us quite a dramatic change in the environment there was ice and then there was no ice the ice shade has gone backwards and forwards it's advanced and it's retreated as they examine core after core from the Pliocene they continue to see surprising signs of change the results of the drilling are simply spectacular they give us a picture of a dynamic ice sheet coming and going regularly more than 60 times what we're seeing and this record is telling us that Antarctica's not just a benign spectator it's a playa what this means is while it was generally warm during the Pliocene there were also brief periods of cooling and the ice was exquisitely sensitive to even small changes in climate just a few degrees could tip the scale from ice to no ice so what's in store for our future as Earth continues to warm how much Antarctic ice will melt and how high will sea levels rise and Andrill scientists turned to computer models by Rob de canto and Dave Pollard we developed these climate models based on our best understanding of the physics of the climate system and in this case ice sheets and now information from anvil is added to the climate model this is a computer model simulation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet over the last several million years and covers a good chunk of the interval that was recovered by the andrel sediment core so we're looking for the same kind of behavior in our models that we're seeing in the geological record as the model simulates the warming periods of the Pliocene all of the ice shelves disappear followed by the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet and edges of the east and as temperatures change the ice refreezes and melts again and again and that's important because the changes in the ice sheet that we're seeing here reflect pretty significant changes in sea level according to the cantos model sea levels rose about 23 feet during the Pliocene temperatures back then were three to five degrees higher than now just what's projected to take place by the end of the century but there is a lag time in the way ice responds that may delay the impact for hundreds if not thousands of years regardless coastal cities all over the world would be at risk potentially displacing millions we would be remapping places like Boston in New York the Bay Area not to mention of course places like Louisiana Miami New Orleans of course but even that might not be the worst-case scenario things were very similar to today in terms of our climate Tim Nations robbed a Kanto to New Zealand to look at a possibility that's even more frightening this is the first time I've seen the actual direct evidence for what the models are doing you seeing a deepening syllable rise up through here we're going to look at some rocks set at the same age as rocks look drilled and Antarctica that give us the record of global sea level changes here along the ranga tiki river tectonic forces have raised the land and the river has cut into the earth to expose layer after layer of sediment that once was the sea floor what they find our shells dated to the warming era of the Pliocene these shells provide a way to chart sea level in the past because some of these species still exist today many of these Shoals you see in here actually live today so they live around the coastline and we know the water depth they live in today so by breaking them out of these rocks and identifying them we can say the depth they were living here over three million years ago because these shellfish live on the seafloor and can only survive in water at specific depths they suggest that sea levels in the Pliocene were much higher than even the computer models predict this is really a troll this is where we would say we had the evidence for sea level being up to as much as 20 meters about Britain that's over 60 feet in order for sea level to arisen that high an enormous amount of ice must have melted and this raises a startling possibility that a large part of the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet melted along with the West and if it melted once could it melt again? could be a very bad thing because that would actually produce a contribution to future sea level change that we really haven't been thinking about this presents an even more dangerous and unpredictable picture of Antarctica what's been surprising is even geologists thought that glaciers and ice sheets were these large static features which we would never really see change in our lifetime but glacial processes are no longer quite as glacial things are moving faster than we had thought what's driving these changes are rising levels of greenhouse gases in the next five years greenhouse gas levels will be like they were in the Pliocene but we're not just going back to the Pliocene some of the projections put co2 levels at twice the concentrations of the Pliocene by the end of the next century we're essentially going back to the time of the dinosaurs when there was very little ice on the planet and there were forests covering Antarctica and signs of change are already here. Scientists were completely caught by surprise when in 2002 the Larsen Ice Shelf shattered apart without warning in just a few weeks. And today the Wilkins Ice Shelf a block of ice approximately the size of Connecticut barely hangs on. I would say it's inevitable that Western occur will disappear. How long it will take you start occur to engage is something that's that's not yet known in the coming years the Andrill team will continue to explore Antarctica's climate history in order to gain valuable insight into Earth's future with each new core we gain new knowledge about a continent that's always been shrouded in mystery but it's faith remains very much tied to our own this nova program is available on DVD at Shaw PBS org or call 1-800 play PBS you

we are in a race the race is against time we have to build cities we need them but we have to make them in a different way we need a wave of innovation not only for our way of life but also the planet the consequences would be enormous if we lose this battle I'm Thomas gets executive editor at Wired magazine and wired we look at the innovators innovations that are changing our world in the next hour we'll see three stories from acclaimed film makers about the future of energy will explore cutting-edge innovations in how we drive how we live and in our first story how we fuel our hearts they're all ideas that promise to shape the path to the world of 2050 all the world has right now close to a billion cars and by double the number of cars of the plant addicted so we doubled our vehicles we really increase the amount of fuel they consume and that's gonna have a big big footprint in terms of our demand for resources to move on most vehicles around we're pulling up carbon has been stored underground and burning in our automobiles and putting all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we don't reduce that can have changes in the climate that we could never recover from there's a number of forecasts for what type of Transportation economy we could move into one vision is that we will use more and more liquid fuels another one is will use more electricity right now more of the industrial activity is focused around liquid biofuels the thing about the fuel is it's really unparalleled on a weight basis how much energy is in a gallon of fuel and even if batteries develop as some of the advocates hope they develop we're not going to see batteries running large trucks and we're certainly not going to see an electrified air plate we're going to need transportation fuels for those that will directly replace the petroleum-based fuels that were using today this is kicked off people looking at whole range of other alternatives to petroleum in your tank commercial production of ethanol as fuel started in Brazilian 1975 when we started the ethanol program nobody talking about reducing emissions this was not the issue at that time first and most important we didn't have money to buy oil anymore after the first oil shock we were importance of oil and today more than fifty percent of all cars use ethanol set of gasoline Brazil made a very conscious choice to try to find a way to reduce their fossil fuel dependence and they didn't have to look very far because Brazil's climate is ideal for growing sugarcane when you have sugar cane plantation you have only two things who make sugar methanol my family has been in sugarcane business since nineteen fifty-five and about 30 years ago who i thought there is opportunity to make more ethanol now we are producing 120 thousand cubic meters of the tunnel Brazil today has very close to 400 sugar mills the overall sales sturdy billion US dollars on this number is increase if you look at how they make ethanol and how efficient the process is it it's really a model for all of us they grind the plant up extract the sugar from the cane the sugar goes into these large fermentation tanks which combines sugars together with yeast that naturally produces ethanol they use the rest of the plan to generate heat to distill the ethanol and turned into fuel they also use that heat generate electricity renewably not putting excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere brazil has God to a point today where they're using about forty percent less petroleum and they would be otherwise but Brazil cannot supply the whole world of ethanol because they would have to cut very strongly in food production and into critical natural areas like the Amazon to make that happen and this really boils down to the fact there's only so much arable land and growing fuel for our gas tanks is yet another demand on that landscape we cannot get ourselves into thinking that we found a general solution for the world problem i think we will have to face the awarding this way today we have no oil and very large plenty of this anymore you have no call transforming the clean way in the meantime we'll have to do the best weekend the best at the moment is that they can do biofuels sugarcane ethanol is an incredibly efficient process you get out about seven times the energy you put into growing the sugarcane in the US when we produce ethanol from corn for every unit of input of energy we get about the same amount of energy out so we're really not gaining anything we need a better process we don't have to take what nature has given us we can actually engineer plants and yeast to be more efficient and that's the basis for a lot of the work that we're doing what we need to look at though is which of the pathways that come out of this are not only good financially but those that are also good news sustainability and this equation is is really wide open right now we are in a race to develop fuels the race isn't with other countries the race is against time to meet they mediate and future demands we made the energy solution spring from the ground Brazil is the most efficient is an old producing country in the world sugarcane alcohol from Brazil can reduce the total carbon footprint right up to seventy percent compared with the castle the biggest challenge for field providers and common factors is to reduce co2 emissions over the next 20 years demand for mobility will continue to grow we believe that biofuels are very important because they help in immediate way all forms of fuels are going to be needed hydrocarbons natural gas biofuels all of them are going to be part of the energy means for the future of transportation brazil has been very successful at taking a resource they had and finding the process to make that into ethanol and people call those first-generation biofuels we have lots of lab work around the world that are looking at the second generation that's generally turning cellulosic material from for example weeds into biofuels and United States is very much at the forefront of the innovation park equation for centuries we have been using yeast to consume glucose and produce wine and beer we're trying to do something very similar only wear engineering the east to consume that glucose and turn it into a fuel or drug chemical we call this synthetic biology and when I started in this area many of my colleagues that oj this is great work but where's the application what are you gonna do with these tools who cares malaria is an enormous problem in any one year a million or so people die of the disease and most of them are children under the age of five so we thought this is a great opportunity to engineer yeast to produce an anti-malarial drug called argument this drug is derived from plants right now but it's too expensive for people in the developing world so my laboratory engineered yeast to produce small quantities of our innocent now that process is being scaled up and we'll have this drug on the market shortly but at a substantially reduce costs it turns out that anti-malarial drug is a hydrocarbon and it's very similar in many ways to diesel fuel we thought gosh we can turn our attention now to fuels we could make a few changes in that microbe to turn it into a fuel producing micro if we imagine that glucose is going to be our new petroleum we need a source for that glucose and so the crops that we're looking at our crops like switchgrass this is a native grass that grows without a lot of water and our marginal lands we could turn into energy farms the challenge though is that unlike sugar king is very difficult to get the sugar out of that violent so we use what we call pretreatment process to extract the glucose from the plant and then we feed that glucose to a yeast that we've engineered to produce hydrocarbons and that East takes in the sugar and it changes its composition that gives us this high energy molecule a float to the top you skip them off you put them in your tank but it takes a lot of work to get from that small test tube all the way up into the million gallon tank so we have to give it time but i think that some of the discoveries that are happening might be applied by the end of the decade terms of a sustainable equation for the planet roll biofuels is quite tricky there are a variety of crops that do not compete directly with food and finding ways to utilize those types of crops first that's very attractive so solving the science is part of the story but then evaluating all of the new fuels terms of the land use impacts that they could have that is even harder story than doing the good sign imagine that you could have one process that could take in sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn it into fuel and imagine if that didn't involve growing anything at all the synthetic biologists are trying to take plants and make them do things that they wouldn't normally do on the other hand materials chemists like myself want to do artificial photosynthesis to improve on the process that nature does in real photosynthesis we should follow the blueprint of plants converting sunlight into fuel but take the approach that it could be much simpler all we really need is a light absorber that absorbs sunlight we also need a catalyst like iron or nickel so when you see the hydrogen coming off of a photoactive material that's an example of a semiconductor breaking the chemical bonds of water make hydrogen and oxygen ultimately our pieces are going to be contained in something that is easy to roll out like bubble wrap or in would come sunlight and water you would vent the oxygen to the air but the bottom would work out your liquid or gaseous fuel but then you could collect and use our cars and planes and storage our goal is within two years you have the first artificial photosynthesis solar fuels generator that we can hold in our hands and then get to scale beyond that time we're certainly not good at predicting the future but electric vehicles looks like a sustainable option we've heard proposals about things as far as nuclear power planes and even some proposals grade around with lighter than air vehicles and so if the future 2050 does include a friend olive oil what it means would be that we haven't deployed as many of these clean technologies as we already know where possible if you think about how long it's taken for us to build up for petroleum industry we can't hope to reverse that overnight it's huge change in our infrastructure yes we should have been working on it 30 years ago we didn't we're trying to make up for that and that means basic research needs to be done now and buy as many people as possible we have a long way to go but i'm confident that we'll get there in the future 3d maps are going to help people get places more efficiently as we just saw the race to produce cleaner energy is charging ahead in the meantime demand for cars continues decline by 2050 its predicted they'll be 2 billion cars on the planet and fuel consumption will have tripled to keep pace left to radically change the way we drive here's our next story driven by design the auto bill came around in many ways it was the future we thought of it as one of the more positive changes that happened to society suddenly our ability to get a job changed we can be further away with bigger plots of land with better quality of living it all looked quite good but there are limitations to swearing by the car if it gets congested your quality of life drops immediately to spend so long in the car it's very inefficient use of fuel consumption things start making sense all the sudden doesn't bring you closer to where you want to get it actually sometimes bring your father the average american spends nearly 300 hours a year in their car 38 of them stuck in traffic annually congestion consumes over 1 billion dollars in gasoline in the united states alone the inefficiency caused by traffic both financial and personal is enormous Dirk sheen and Carmen white story is not that unusual today Dirk works an hour and a half away in warren go Illinois generally he wouldn't leave work until six or 630 and i would say usual time for him to get home around eight usually when i wake up on the only one up sometimes the kids wake up with my routine more often than that I don't see them in the morning I think about my commute when I wake up I check the traffic report see if there's any delays the worst-case scenario it takes me two hours to get to work we are already so limited in the amount of time you can spend with the kids and our expenses are crazy-high you're spending 400 bucks a month on gas it takes away from our food budget and we never paid for gas like that before ever there's technology that would allow me to spend less time in the car spend less money on gas and spend more time at home I'd be all for that the cost of traffic is people's time fuel wasted it's an emotional toll of frustration utilizing the roads more intelligently is a much more efficient approach to the inability to have supplied keep up with traffic demand if you took a satellite picture of the highway you can see that there's actually a lot of open space and if we had the technology for cars to drive more closely but safely then you can increase the utilization of the road network what this means is that to be more efficient to use less fuel we need to see the road differently we need cars that can navigate through the urban landscape in a radically different way maps in the future are going to be able to help people get places either more safely or more efficiently today just helps you get from point A to point B but what if i want to get someplace and use the least amount of fuel possible or if I've got a hybrid vehicle i want to make sure I've got plenty of charge not only get there but to get back home so information that is going to help people achieve the more efficient or the safer route is more detailed information about the road than a lot of people realize as possible to collect today here in Chicago Nokia's location & commerce is developing the next generation of mapping lidar sona 360-degree video all are components of what Nokia calls digital mapping we use 64 lasers that rotate and they collect data in a 3d way about the world that creates what we call a point cloud of information that point cloud allows us to measure distances than between the points that we collect that system combined with the cameras with higher precision location detection through inertial measurement units that whole data system allows us to collect 1.3 million points of data per second probably within two to three years you're going to see 3d maps that are going to integrate the traffic information into your routing help you understand i've got five different routes to take which one is the most efficient today given way to stoplights are running giving away traffic is running all of those factors are going to be taken into consideration to make sure I've got the best route but better mapping that can integrate topography infrastructure and density is only part of the answer another key to improving transport efficiency is building cars that drive themselves autonomous vehicle technology has tremendous potential to improve efficiency of a road infrastructure by removing humans from the equation we eliminate all the things we do wrong time will be speeding changing lanes too often merging haphazardly and by marrying autonomous vehicles with sophisticated 3d maps we can make driving safer and more energy-efficient that next generation vehicle is being built right now by the swedish trucking company scania the solution is to see it is that the vehicles too can utilize intelligent maps three-dimensional maps with traffic information the vehicles will be intelligent and communicate with each other they will talk to each other they will talk to the infrastructure and we'll see completely autonomous driven vehicles ok the goal was to have multiple robots and see if they could go 60 miles fully autonomously my name is helen taylor my husband John and I were very passionate about fuel economy yeah it's great to break world records but that's not the order and all them it's more important to educate people together with showing drivers around the world simple techniques to improve their fuel efficiency from these education programs get people on the road with us and we finally tweak their driving techniques things like just checking the higher pressures before you even getting to car for everyone psiu tires are under-inflated be wasting three percent of the fuel efficiency and the difference between 65 and 75 miles prayer is a saving of 23% when you talk to the general public they're very surprised that an energy company like shell is trying to educate people how to save money how to reduce co2 emissions and here we have shell sending us around the world to do that we always hope when you on this planet but you can make a real difference in people's lives when you get emails from people saying save this amount of money this year looking for food on the table when you know you are really making a difference by displaying traffic density in the urban infrastructure in a revolutionary way 3d digital maps will help create a more fuel-efficient future but these technologies are limited by the drivers who sit behind the wheel some believe that for cars and trucks to be truly energy-efficient they will need to drive themselves the technology is coming into play through sensors and and capabilities for cars to drive autonomously in 2007 the united states department of defense held a competition to see if a completely autonomous self-driving vehicle as possible DARPA stands for the defense advanced research projects agency they have a competition to develop self-driving robots that could drive themselves in traffic the goal was to have multiple robots turn them loose on a course and see if they could go 60 miles in six hours fully autonomously driving maybe one of the most complex things we do everyday drivers make dozens of decisions at any given moment one study found that drivers were exposed over 1,300 items of information per minute we make so many decisions when we're driving without even thinking about it so in creating our vehicle a great component the enterprise was developing software to handle lots of sensors feeding lots of data and generating a bunch of potential paths that the vehicle might follow and even though the robot doesn't have the ability to predict the future by using this fast random path generation the robot could anticipate potential accident and choose a path to avoid it because it's always thinking about what things could the car do next no one expects millions of cars driving themselves anytime soon but there is a place where self navigating technologies are being optimized to create the vehicle of the future be honest kanya test track outside Stockholm where we have basically looks like in highway but it's a separate test track when conducting experiments scania the Swedish trucking company has recently begun testing its next generation of long-haul truck utilizing radar sonar and intelligent mapping they've been able to drastically reduce fuel consumption we have this example with platooning where we make use of the reproduction in air resistance or a drug that you get from driving close to each other with heavy-duty vehicles and in order to control this you need to know where the other vehicles are where they're positioned the velocity their actions in the near future to be very close to the vehicle ahead of you that requires that you have very accurate control if you look at robotics broadly there's wonderful set of research and people looking at schooling fish and and and trying to develop the ability for robots to work together like that so they're wonderful examples from nature of how cooperation can lead to more efficient resource utilization you can see it when people are competing into the france they platoon to reduce air drag they are not bicycling behind each other that close because its father or because they are racing it is because they are reducing air drag sitting behind the man who is leading a truck traveling 55 miles per hour expense half its energy just to move the air around it at 65 miles per hour that number jumps to almost two-thirds even if platooning can reduce the energy used by ten percent the savings would be substantial if a vehicle in front of another vehicle wants to break it immediately sends out the break message to be other vehicles so they actually break at the same time the way we do this is by we have an automated system so now for instance if i take my feet off the acceleration pedal and turn the system on the velocity is automatically governed by getting information from the vehicle ahead through his wireless system we want these vehicles to maintain a short relative distance through this system we can reduce the fuel consumption by utilizing the Air drag reduction by ten percent and ten percent would mean he will be able to save approximately eight thousand euros per single heavy-duty vehicle per year it may be some time before autonomous vehicles make up the majority of cars on America's highways nevertheless some of these technologies are already making their way into our lives now this polar baby wants to sleep you get to pick up books every day or is it just something I can put takeout look sometimes ok when we look toward the future systems will absolutely make it safer and more efficient and less costly for you and also make your life easier because you're spending less time on the roads the city begins to talk begins to tell you where they're congestion what's going on in different areas of town suddenly the car becomes a part of a much bigger ecosystem we can look at how cars interact with other cars are car interact with infrastructure and us the drivers you start to make smart decisions about how to move around suddenly mobility becomes a whole other thing no matter how much money they have no matter how much oil they have everybody has to go in a different direction we've seen that changing the way we drive can improve transportation efficiencies what if we change the way we build and live in our cities that's the subject of our next story searching for utopia will travel to the United Arab Emirates and discover a city rising out of the desert let's take a look from the beginning we dreamed of utopia a place where we could live in harmony with each other and in balance with nature many have imagined it tried to design it but the dream always slipped away then I heard they were building a new city called Masdar near abu dhabi in the Arabian desert it sounded like an unlikely place for you told you and I wanted to see it the last half century has been a pretty bad time for the making cities the natural tendency has been to accommodate to the automobile more than anything else try walking around abu dhabi it's impossible to obtain car everywhere dubai the same thing they are among the least pedestrian friendly places in the world they are not bringing by any other measure either and leaving that easy things to fit master is still under construction and it doesn't look like much from the highway but they claim it's going to redefine the way cities are designed built and Power Master city in abu dhabi will be the city of the future and the role model for the world once you see what they have envisioned for this utopian city it's very impressive its carbon neutral pedestrian-friendly and powered by renewable energies but I do notice we're going to have to change our relationship with cars welcome to muster city and in beacon to medina just that we are driving and they're in the bowels of mouse are set in an electric transportation system slightly unnerving to seeing this for the first time and where we go in the first big move the architects at foster and partners made was to put all transportation underneath the city leaving the streets of Masdar totally free of cars the place reminded me of a medieval city and actually many design elements are adapted from ancient Arabic towns and villages it's all about looking back into history to move forward with some very very simple ideas I have a huge impact this is the pedestrian zone there's no cars here this and this is enabled us to push the streets together take the advantage of shade channel the cooling breezes through the whole scale here is based on the human being is not based on the motorcar soon as you lift up the potassium playing by seven meters you've certainly captured this breathe what you can see here in the balconies we've got a modern interpretation of an ancient Arabic screen we must avoid is direct sunlight hitting any piece of glance soon as the Sun hits the glass the heat transferred into the building and we have to use more energy to cool it down and this will make all that much of a difference yeah absolutely for example Downton Abbey 60 meter wide streets black asphalt mirrored reflective buildings no relief from the Sun holiday in September the air temperature in both places was 39 t greens and I'm gonna be the temperature measured at the asphalt was 57 degrees in master the temperature measured on the ground 33 degrees so we've actually lowered the air temperature we're trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible these simple design moves cut air conditioning needs by sixty percent but this place is also technically very sophisticated the roof panels not only provide shade they also generate electricity and the walls themselves are made of glass reinforced concrete literally sand taken from the desert everything here is geared towards maximizing energy efficiency nazdar does represent a whole different value system it represents an acknowledgement that eventually everybody has to go in a different kind of Direction no matter how much money they have no matter how much oil they have no matter anything else all the cities here in this part of the world have come out of nowhere there was nothing here not so long ago except small settlements in the desert and then all of the soil and all of his money and suddenly you know wham the city started popping up but they sprung up in a false love of a Western model that was already out of date the model of the late 20th century automobile based energy hogging city for most of the world energy is very expensive but the united arab emirates is sitting on ten percent of the world's oil and energy is cheap sochi you can run a ski slope in a shopping and build the world's tallest skyscraper but even here cheap energy won't last forever and the people behind Masdar are determined to find alternatives one of the most crucial aspects of our energy modeling and scenario quantification is how much energy in total is the world going to use in 2050 scenarios team is a bunch of people with rich imagination i would say we have political scientists economists geopolitical experts really be tried to simplify the complexity all around us we in the seriously not currently putting a lot of attention into cities and city development a lot of mega cities are going to be built in the coming decades we're talking about the equivalent of a new city of a million people every week that is an incredible demand most of the world's resources are consumed by the city's but if we could offer a blueprint for a better City public transportation information energy we understand man will rise we understand the current supplies will struggle to keep pacing so we have to of course find ways of bridging the gap between the demand and the supply decisions that we take now are going to have a major impact on decades to come there's enough oil under these sands to last a hundred and fifty years but fundamental to the Masdar ideal is getting energy from renewable sources from geothermal and wind and most of all from a source they have in abundance in the desert the Sun this field of solar panels makes more than enough electricity to run master and the excess power is sent to the abu dhabi grid but silicon panels are expensive and the price of solar power needs to drop if it's going to be competitive from Africa to Asia to Arizona in the future master hopes to get energy from this prototype called the solar beam down using highly reflective mirrors the solar beam down may generate power more cheaply and ecologically than silicon panels the mirrors bounce the sun's rays up to the tower and then down to a point reaching a temperature of 600 degrees steam can be generated to run turbines to make electricity there's just one problem neither of these solar technologies work at night so master needs to draw power from the grid when the Sun Goes Down and that power comes from natural gas the reality is it's just not yet possible to power mast are entirely without fossil fuels the great challenge with Masdar will be how do you make it a place that will not be just this ideal city that no other place could actually aspire to cause it doesn't seem real what Masdar has to be is a laboratory that develops things that then can be applied in existing cities all around the world because that's where it will pay off there's no payoff if it's just about itself the payoff is how can everything it's trying to do matter in the rest of the world right now there's only a store to restaurants a bank and a few hundred students living here it's too early to tell if master will work as a city when it's finished but much has been achieved they are carbon neutral and largely powered by renewable energies solutions here won't work everywhere though many cities are in cold climates and cooling is not their energy problem they need to let sunlight in not keep it out cities like Los Angeles or houston are built around cars can masters lessons be applied to them still it's a step in the right direction and it's impressive that this step is being taken by country that doesn't need to take it i met a guy who said actually they did need to take it he took me to the desert to explain God says widen the man at the ala similarity well be with G Betty God talks about man's place in in the university that this world is a trust and God offered this trust to the mountains to the heavens 22 to the land to earth and all and all refused to refuse to take this trust but man being adventurous vain may be too ambitious being manned accepted now accepting it and there is a responsibility taking responsibility isn't always easy utopia may be unattainable but we must reach for it and master does give us a clue to what cities will be like in the future they may not look quite like mass star but they will be shaped by the same concerns by energy where it comes from and how it's used the way we've been building cities lately is unsustainable we can't go on building them that way but to say that we can't build cities the way we have been building them doesn't mean we can't build cities in the future in fact we have to build cities cities are the essential statement of human civilization so we will continue to make them but we have to make them in a different way what we've seen is that the world of 2050 won't look drastically different from the world today but the challenges of a growing population increased energy demand real solutions its innovations like those we've just seen that will be critical and charting our path to the world of 2050