[electronic beeping and static crackling]
- Hey, Philip. What's up?
- The glaciers carved all this out.
- Okay.
[adventurous music]
- Science is a tool.
It's just a process that we use
to find out things about our world.
I'll find you one of those glacial lakes.
[indistinct chatter]
I think the best science is done
because of this sense of awe and wonder.
[water rushing]
- When I'm outside learning about the natural world,
I don't really need anything else.
Part of the left side is still evolving,
so it's still an active landslide.
- The opportunities are endless here
for research, for scientific exploration,
and it makes me feel like,
"Oh, my gosh, I don't know anything,"
you know, 'cause I want to learn so much more
about everything in the park.
[birds trilling and chirping]
- Denali has a really rich history of scientific research.
- All too few of us are concerned
about the rapidly progressing extinction of wildlife
in the United States.
The preservation of wildlife
is an important part of park planning.
- Denali was originally set aside
for its wildlife populations.
These biological processes exist in a landscape
that's pretty much unchanged by humans.
[bird trilling]
- From a scientific point of view,
having this huge, intact ecosystem,
it is an amazing opportunity to learn
about the natural world.
- People study things here so we have a baseline
for what is and what was in the past
so that we know how much we're changing it
as human beings.
[bird trilling]
- It's basically a living laboratory.
Denali's a place where you can watch life cycles...
- Got a damselfly larva that time.
- And really see animals acting the way they have
for hundreds of years.
- Dragonfly comes out like that, wham.
[bird trilling]
- Alaskan insects all have kind of a unique story.
[indistinct chatter]
And part of the reason we're at Denali is,
we know there's insects here,
but we know they just haven't been looked at.
[indistinct chatter]
[water splashing]
[light instrumental music]
The thing about insects is that
if a grasshopper was the size of a cow,
I think people would find them much more interesting.
Itsâthat leg has...
- It's such a little spider.
- Let me see him.
[light percussive music]
- We're out here doing
the small mammal monitoring project.
We're gonna all go to RR1.
- Sure.
- With monitoring, it's really exciting
because you start to figure out the pieces of the puzzle
on how the ecosystem is working.
- We're capturing moles and shrews primarily.
So much of the biodiversity of mammal life on the planet
is made up of actually small mammals like this
[electronic beep]
- This is a tundra vole.
It's scientific name is Microtus oeconomus.
I think it's fun to be able to say
that I work in a place like Denali National Park.
It's a big legacy.
You can see all the different names of the people
who have been researchers in the past.
[bird trilling]
[projector whirring]
- Who knows what qualities,
what discoveries that could be made
that be for the great benefit of man?
Because there are certain elements in the wilderness
that once exterminated
never can be replaced,
like taking a book from the library,
and if the book isn't returned,
then after a while, the library is less and less,
and there's less to be found and less to be learned.
- We study just about anything you can think of here.
[light piano music]
- The fossil record here is really special.
This is a hadrosaur.
This guy would've been a big herbivore.
In the same way that we can go out
and explore the park today,
we can actually explore Cretaceous Denali
70 million years ago.
They were truly arctic dinosaurs,
and that's really unique to the world.
That's definitely, definitely dino track...
When you find fossils of different things
that lived here in the past, it kind of just reminds you
that you're part of this bigger picture
that has existed over, you know, a really long time.
We're monitoring it.
- This is one place in the rocks
where I could actually see how they're oriented.
[bird trilling]
I grew up and liked going outside
and got really, really interested
in just why the earth looks the way it does
in a certain place.
That white stuff over there could be volcanic ash.
To me, that's really fascinating,
to be able to go to a place and look at a landscape
and see why it looks the way it does
and how it's changing.
So let's doâlet's do a transect, like...
There are a lot of big changes happening in Alaska
that are consistent with a changing climate.
Maybe a temperature measurement...
And I get to learn about it as it happens
and to tell people about it.
- We're at the leading edge
of thawing permafrost in Denali,
and it has a lot of implications for the park resources.
[pensive music]
- You have these huge glaciers
coming off of the roof of North America.
Is the rate of volume loss of the glaciers increasing?
[indistinct chatter]
We go out, and we backpack
into one of the glaciers collecting useful science.
That's it. That looks good.
Collecting the data about glacier change
lets us know even the glaciers here are suffering.
[water rushing]
The overall trend is loss of ice
across the whole Alaska Range.
[light instrumental music]
- 95% or more of all the glaciers in Alaska
are receding, and it's receding...
- These students are here
as part of a Global Explorers' Climate Change Academy.
To be able to come here
on the frontlines of climate change
deepens their understanding of the science infinitely.
- Like 50 yards of a span...
- It's really important for young people to get involved...
If we plant this native plant,
then, hopefully, invasive plants won't come.
So that we can keep these wild places wild.
[indistinct chatter]
- Being a part of a legacy project like this, to me,
is a lot more meaningful than sitting in a classroom.
both: Girl.
It makes it a lot more applicable.
It doesn't just seem like you're memorizing facts
for no reason.
It makes it less abstract and more personal.
[bird trilling]
- I mean, I just think it's such...
a unique story,
and I think we're still writing it.
There's new discoveries that happen here all the time,
and we're still really exploring it.
- It is very valuable to be able to use science
to understand a place like this.
That's how we view and understand the world,
is through science,
and that's how the best decisions are made.
[birds chirping and trilling]