B2 · Upper Intermediate
13 min
climate sciencepalaeontologyenvironmentgeology
Warm Enough for Giants
El dinosaurio que vivió donde ahora hay hielo
A dinosaur bone collected in Antarctica in 1985 has just been identified as the oldest ever found on the continent: the tail vertebra of a titanosaur that lived 80 million years ago, when the South Pole was a temperate forest. Fletcher and Octavio ask what that single bone tells us about the climate we're heading toward.
Un hueso de dinosaurio encontrado en la Antártida en 1985 acaba de ser identificado como el más antiguo jamás hallado en ese continente: la cola de un titanosaurio que vivió hace 80 millones de años, cuando el polo sur era un bosque templado. Fletcher y Octavio se preguntan qué nos dice ese hueso sobre el clima que viene.
7 essential B2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| titanosaurio | titanosaur | El titanosaurio era uno de los dinosaurios herbívoros más grandes que existieron. |
| casquete polar | polar ice cap | En el período Cretácico no existían casquetes polares permanentes. |
| punto de inflexión | tipping point | Los científicos advierten de que el deshielo puede alcanzar un punto de inflexión irreversible. |
| desestabilización | destabilisation | La desestabilización de la capa de hielo occidental podría ser irreversible. |
| resultó ser | turned out to be | Lo que parecía un fragmento sin importancia resultó ser el fósil más antiguo del continente. |
| paleoclimatólogo | palaeoclimatologist | Los paleoclimatólogos usan los registros fósiles para entender los climas del pasado. |
| vértebra | vertebra | La vértebra encontrada en la isla James Ross pertenecía a la cola del dinosaurio. |
Forty years.
A bone sits in a drawer for forty years, and then one morning somebody looks at it again and goes, wait, that's the oldest dinosaur ever found in Antarctica.
I've been thinking about that bone all week.
Sí, lo leí.
Yes, I read it.
Un paleontólogo recogió esa vértebra en la isla James Ross en 1985, y durante décadas nadie supo exactamente qué era.
A palaeontologist collected that vertebra on James Ross Island in 1985, and for decades nobody knew exactly what it was.
Ahora los científicos confirman que pertenece a un titanosaurio, un dinosaurio herbívoro enorme, que vivió hace unos 80 millones de años.
Now scientists confirm it belonged to a titanosaur, a massive herbivorous dinosaur, that lived about 80 million years ago.
And the titanosaurs were not small animals.
We're talking about some of the largest creatures that ever walked the planet.
On the continent that is now the coldest, most barren place on Earth.
Exacto, y eso es lo que hace que este descubrimiento sea tan interesante desde el punto de vista climático.
Exactly, and that's what makes this discovery so interesting from a climate perspective.
Para que un titanosaurio viviera en la Antártida, el clima tenía que ser completamente diferente.
For a titanosaur to live in Antarctica, the climate had to be completely different.
No había hielo.
There was no ice.
Había bosques, ríos, vegetación abundante.
There were forests, rivers, abundant vegetation.
Which is one of those facts that sounds wrong the first time you hear it.
The South Pole.
Trees.
Dinosaurs.
It's almost impossible to hold in your head alongside the Antarctica we know today.
Es que en el período Cretácico, hace entre 145 y 66 millones de años, la Tierra era un planeta muy distinto.
During the Cretaceous period, between 145 and 66 million years ago, Earth was a very different planet.
Las temperaturas medias eran entre 8 y 10 grados más altas que hoy.
Average temperatures were 8 to 10 degrees higher than today.
No existían casquetes polares permanentes.
There were no permanent polar ice caps.
El nivel del mar era unos 60 metros más alto que ahora.
Sea level was about 60 metres higher than it is now.
Sixty metres.
That's not a rounding error.
That's the map of the world redrawn entirely.
Completamente.
Completely.
Y lo que me parece importante subrayar es que eso no ocurrió por un meteorito ni por una catástrofe repentina.
And what I think is important to underline is that it didn't happen because of a meteorite or a sudden catastrophe.
Ocurrió porque las concentraciones de CO2 en la atmósfera eran mucho más altas.
It happened because CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were much higher.
El mecanismo es el mismo que estudiamos hoy, solo que en una escala temporal mucho mayor.
The mechanism is the same one we study today, just on a much longer timescale.
So the titanosaur isn't just a fossil.
It's a data point.
It's physical evidence of what a high-CO2 world actually looks like, not a projection, not a model, but a bone in the ground.
Eso es exactamente lo que piensan muchos paleoclimatólogos.
That's exactly what many palaeoclimatologists think.
El registro fósil es una de las mejores pruebas que tenemos de cómo responde el clima de la Tierra a cambios en la composición de la atmósfera.
The fossil record is one of the best pieces of evidence we have for how Earth's climate responds to changes in atmospheric composition.
Y la Antártida, en particular, es un archivo increíble.
And Antarctica, in particular, is an incredible archive.
The ice cores alone go back 800,000 years.
You can pull a cylinder of ice out of the ground and read atmospheric CO2 levels from before our species existed.
That still gets me every time.
Y lo que muestran esos núcleos de hielo es una correlación muy clara entre el CO2 y la temperatura.
And what those ice cores show is a very clear correlation between CO2 and temperature.
Cuando el CO2 sube, la temperatura sube.
When CO2 rises, temperature rises.
Siempre.
Always.
Sin excepciones en 800.000 años de datos.
Without exception across 800,000 years of data.
Es un patrón que no deja mucho margen para la duda.
It's a pattern that doesn't leave much room for doubt.
And yet the doubt industry has been remarkably productive.
I spent years watching that argument play out in Washington.
The data was never really the problem.
No, claro.
No, of course.
El problema era económico y político, no científico.
The problem was economic and political, not scientific.
Pero volviendo al titanosaurio: lo que me parece fascinante es que ese animal estaba perfectamente adaptado a vivir en una Antártida con oscuridad polar varios meses al año.
But going back to the titanosaur: what I find fascinating is that this animal was perfectly adapted to living in an Antarctica with polar darkness for several months a year.
Eso nos dice que los ecosistemas pueden adaptarse a condiciones extremas, aunque sea despacio.
That tells us ecosystems can adapt to extreme conditions, even if slowly.
Slowly being the operative word.
Millions of years of slow.
What we're doing now is orders of magnitude faster than anything in that record, except maybe the asteroid.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
La transición del Cretácico a un mundo más frío tardó millones de años.
The transition from the Cretaceous to a cooler world took millions of years.
El calentamiento actual está ocurriendo en siglos, en décadas.
Current warming is happening in centuries, in decades.
La velocidad es el problema central.
Speed is the central problem.
Los ecosistemas no tienen tiempo de adaptarse.
Ecosystems don't have time to adapt.
Let me ask you something that I keep coming back to.
When we talk about the Cretaceous Antarctica being ice-free, scientists point to that as a kind of analogue for where we could end up.
How far away are we, realistically, from an ice-free Arctic?
Según los modelos más recientes, podríamos ver el primer verano ártico sin hielo marino antes de 2040, posiblemente antes.
According to the most recent models, we could see the first ice-free Arctic summer before 2040, possibly earlier.
No es lo mismo que la Antártida del Cretácico, porque estamos hablando de hielo marino, no de la capa de hielo continental.
It's not the same as the Cretaceous Antarctica, because we're talking about sea ice, not the continental ice sheet.
Pero es una señal de alarma muy significativa.
But it's a very significant warning sign.
There's a distinction that gets lost constantly in public coverage.
Sea ice melting doesn't raise sea levels, because the ice is already floating.
But losing the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, that's the scenario that puts coastal cities underwater.
Correcto.
Correct.
Y la capa de hielo de la Antártida Occidental es especialmente vulnerable porque gran parte de ella descansa sobre roca que está por debajo del nivel del mar.
And the West Antarctic ice sheet is especially vulnerable because much of it rests on rock that is below sea level.
Si el agua cálida del océano llega por debajo, el proceso de desestabilización puede ser irreversible, aunque dejemos de emitir CO2 mañana.
If warm ocean water reaches beneath it, the destabilisation process can become irreversible, even if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow.
Which is the concept of a tipping point.
And I always struggle to convey this to people who haven't spent time around climate science, because it sounds like an abstraction until it isn't.
Es que un punto de inflexión climático es exactamente eso: un momento a partir del cual el sistema ya no puede volver atrás por sí solo.
A climate tipping point is exactly that: a moment from which the system can no longer return on its own.
Como cuando calientas agua: puedes enfriarla.
Like when you heat water: you can cool it.
Pero cuando ya está en vapor, el proceso ha cambiado de naturaleza.
But once it's steam, the process has changed in nature.
No puedes simplemente revertirlo.
You can't simply reverse it.
That's a better analogy than most I've heard in thirty years of covering this.
The water-to-steam thing.
I'm writing that down.
Gracias.
Thanks.
Mira, lo que me parece importante en el contexto del titanosaurio es que no estamos hablando de ciencia ficción.
What I think is important in the context of the titanosaur is that we're not talking about science fiction.
Estamos hablando de un estado del planeta que ya existió, del que tenemos evidencia física, y que fue el resultado de una atmósfera con mucho CO2.
We're talking about a state of the planet that already existed, that we have physical evidence of, and that was the result of an atmosphere with a lot of CO2.
La Tierra puede volver a ese estado.
Earth can return to that state.
And the bone in the drawer makes it concrete in a way that a graph never quite does.
I used to struggle with this as a reporter.
You can show someone a temperature chart and their eyes glaze.
You show them a dinosaur that lived at the South Pole, that lands differently.
Completamente de acuerdo.
Completely agree.
Los científicos llevan décadas compitiendo contra el problema de la escala.
Scientists have been competing for decades against the problem of scale.
El cambio climático opera en escalas de tiempo y espacio que son difíciles de percibir para el cerebro humano.
Climate change operates on timescales and spatial scales that are difficult for the human brain to perceive.
Pero un hueso, una vértebra concreta de un animal concreto, eso es tangible.
But a bone, a concrete vertebra from a concrete animal, that's tangible.
I want to come back to something you said earlier about the 40-year gap between collecting the bone and identifying it.
That detail keeps nagging at me.
Why did it take that long?
Bueno, en parte es un problema de recursos.
Well, partly it's a resource problem.
La paleontología antártica es carísima.
Antarctic palaeontology is extremely expensive.
Cada expedición requiere logística de alta complejidad, y hay muy pocos laboratorios especializados en este tipo de análisis.
Every expedition requires highly complex logistics, and there are very few laboratories specialised in this type of analysis.
Muchos fósiles se recogen y luego esperan años, a veces décadas, hasta que alguien tiene tiempo y dinero para estudiarlos.
Many fossils are collected and then wait years, sometimes decades, until someone has the time and money to study them.
Which raises a fairly uncomfortable question about what else is sitting in drawers.
If one forgotten vertebra turns out to be the oldest dinosaur bone on the continent, what are we missing because someone doesn't have the funding to look?
Es una pregunta muy legítima.
It's a very legitimate question.
Los investigadores calculan que probablemente hay muchos más fósiles en la Antártida que nunca se han recogido, simplemente porque el continente es inmenso y la mayor parte es inaccesible.
Researchers estimate there are probably many more fossils in Antarctica that have never been collected, simply because the continent is enormous and most of it is inaccessible.
Y encima, el deshielo está exponiendo nuevas rocas, lo que significa que podrían aparecer más evidencias precisamente cuando el clima cambia más rápido.
And on top of that, the thawing is exposing new rock, meaning more evidence could emerge precisely as the climate changes fastest.
There's something almost unbearably ironic about that.
The very process destroying the climate is uncovering the evidence of what destroyed it before.
Sí, es una ironía cruel.
Yes, it's a cruel irony.
Aunque hay que ser preciso: en el Cretácico el CO2 alto no fue causado por ninguna especie.
Although we have to be precise: in the Cretaceous, the high CO2 wasn't caused by any species.
Fue el resultado de una actividad volcánica intensa durante millones de años.
It was the result of intense volcanic activity over millions of years.
Lo que estamos haciendo ahora es diferente: estamos comprimiendo ese proceso en doscientos años de industrialización.
What we're doing now is different: we're compressing that process into two hundred years of industrialisation.
I covered the Kyoto negotiations back in '97.
And I remember the argument that was used endlessly to slow things down: the climate has always changed naturally, this is nothing new.
And technically, that's true.
But technically is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Es el argumento más deshonesto del debate climático.
It's the most dishonest argument in the climate debate.
Nadie niega que el clima haya cambiado antes.
Nobody denies that the climate has changed before.
La pregunta es la velocidad y la causa.
The question is speed and cause.
Y en ambas cosas, lo que está pasando ahora no tiene precedentes en el registro geológico reciente.
And on both counts, what is happening now has no precedent in the recent geological record.
What's your read on where Spain is on this, genuinely?
Because I've heard very different things from different generations when I'm there.
España es un país que siente el cambio climático de forma muy directa.
Spain is a country that feels climate change very directly.
La sequía en el sur, los incendios forestales en Galicia y Valencia, la desertificación en Murcia.
The drought in the south, the wildfires in Galicia and Valencia, desertification in Murcia.
No es algo abstracto.
It's not something abstract.
La gente lo ve.
People see it.
Lo que varía es si la gente conecta esa experiencia personal con las políticas necesarias para afrontarlo.
What varies is whether people connect that personal experience with the policies needed to address it.
That gap between lived experience and political response might be the defining problem of the whole crisis.
People feel it, but the systems that would have to change are so large, so entrenched, that the feeling doesn't translate into action fast enough.
Y esa es la lección más importante que podemos sacar del titanosaurio.
And that's the most important lesson we can take from the titanosaur.
No es que el mundo vaya a acabarse mañana.
It's not that the world is going to end tomorrow.
Es que los cambios climáticos grandes son lentos al principio e irreversibles al final.
It's that major climate changes are slow at first and irreversible at the end.
Cuando el proceso está claro, ya es demasiado tarde para frenarlo fácilmente.
By the time the process is clear, it's already too late to stop it easily.
A bone in a drawer for forty years.
And when someone finally looks at it properly, it turns out to be a warning from 80 million years in the past.
I keep coming back to that.
Oye, Fletcher, una cosa que dijiste antes me llamó la atención.
Hey, Fletcher, something you said earlier caught my attention.
Dijiste que el dato de los 60 metros de diferencia en el nivel del mar te resultaba difícil de imaginar.
You said that the 60-metre sea level figure was hard to imagine.
Quiero que notes algo: usaste la palabra "resultar" en ese sentido, y es una construcción que confunde mucho a los angloparlantes.
I want you to notice something: you used the word 'resultar' in that sense, and it's a construction that confuses a lot of English speakers.
I did, didn't I.
And I'm fairly sure I would have used it wrong if I'd been speaking Spanish.
"Resultar" trips me up constantly.
I always want to make it mean "to result in" the English way.
Claro.
Of course.
En inglés, "to result in" implica una consecuencia directa: algo causa otra cosa.
In English, 'to result in' implies a direct consequence: one thing causes another.
En español, "resultar" a menudo significa "parecer" o "ser" en función de una valoración.
In Spanish, 'resultar' often means 'to seem' or 'to be' based on an assessment.
Decimos "me resulta difícil" para decir que algo nos parece difícil, no que produce dificultad.
We say 'me resulta difícil' to say something seems hard to us, not that it produces difficulty.
También decimos "resultó ser" cuando algo que no sabíamos acaba siendo de una manera concreta: "ese hueso resultó ser el más antiguo".
We also say 'resultó ser' when something we didn't know turns out to be a certain way: 'that bone turned out to be the oldest'.
So "me resulta difícil" is closer to "I find it difficult" than "it results in difficulty." And "resultó ser" is basically "it turned out to be." Two completely different gears on the same verb.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y como en esta historia: ese hueso resultó ser el más antiguo de la Antártida.
And as in this story: that bone turned out to be the oldest in Antarctica.
Alguien lo miró bien, y resultó ser una advertencia de 80 millones de años.
Someone looked at it properly, and it turned out to be an 80-million-year-old warning.
Ya que estamos hablando de dinosaurios, es un buen verbo para recordar.
Since we're talking about dinosaurs, it's a good verb to remember.