14-Ice: Glacier tourism on thin ice
Glaciers around the world are melting because of climate change. Yet, while glaciers might be smaller than they once were, that’s not stopping tourists from flocking to see them. We talked with Heather Purdie, a glaciologist and former glacier guide, about how exactly glaciers are changing and how glacier tourism is adapting to these changes.
This episode was produced by Molly Magid and mixed by Collin Warren, with production assistance from Jace Steiner.
Transcript
Shane Hanlon: 00:00 Hi Vicky.
Vicky Thompson: 00:00 Hi Shane.
Shane Hanlon: 00:01 So now that it’s summer, I guess, man, we’re halfway through summer at this point.
Vicky Thompson: 00:05 Are we?
Shane Hanlon: 00:05 I guess not technically. Summer starts, what, the 21st of, okay, this is not the point of our prompt.
Vicky Thompson: 00:10 Ooh.
Shane Hanlon: 00:11 Now that it’s summer, do you have any plans to travel or have you done your kind of quote unquote, summer travel already?
Vicky Thompson: 00:17 No, I haven’t. Actually in August, my husband is going to Scotland for like three weeks, which is very exciting. But what that means is that I’m going to go to the Poconos, for more than a week, and have just like a really long, slow week. It’s going to be great, relaxing.
Shane Hanlon: 00:35 That’s exciting.
Vicky Thompson: 00:35 Yeah.
Shane Hanlon: 00:36 What are you going to do?
Vicky Thompson: 00:38 Swim, probably. Hopefully a lot. Watch movies.
Shane Hanlon: 00:42 Nothing? Not have an itinerary?
Vicky Thompson: 00:43 Just lay about in the woods, yeah. How about you?
Shane Hanlon: 00:44 Yeah. Those of you who aren’t familiar, the Poconos are in, I guess like East Central Pennsylvania? Rural Pennsylvania, very beautiful. Beautiful part of the state.
Vicky Thompson: 00:53 Oh, yeah. It is really beautiful. Where I’m going specifically is like more north. It’s like right where Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey touch.
Shane Hanlon: 01:00 Gotcha, okay.
Vicky Thompson: 01:01 Obviously I have to say New Jersey in the conversation.
Shane Hanlon: 01:03 I know. Every single thing we talk about. Actually, funnily enough, I’m in Pennsylvania right now. If anyone with a discerning ear can tell, I sound a smidge different. I’m in a bit of a different setup. But every summer I take three weeks off from AGU and I teach a field course for undergraduates. As we are in this moment, I am sitting in the Assistant Director of the Field Station’s office, because it’s the only place that has good enough internet to do this.
Vicky Thompson: 01:27 That’s amazing. Wait, so are you teaching about lizards or herbs?
Shane Hanlon: 01:32 It’s a disease ecology class.
Vicky Thompson: 01:33 Oh.
Shane Hanlon: 01:33 But we do lots of really cool stuff. Yeah. We go out. We do catch like frogs and salamanders and lizards.
Vicky Thompson: 01:40 Cool.
Shane Hanlon: 01:40 We catch turtles. We were doing plant stuff today. And one of my favorite parts is we get a lot of experts from different federal agencies and state agencies and different things and folks come in and talk about rabies. And do you know how you detect rabies or test for rabies in raccoons?
Vicky Thompson: 01:58 Do you have to kill them?
Shane Hanlon: 02:00 Oh, caveat. They’re already dead. This is like roadkill and stuff.
Vicky Thompson: 02:04 Oh, oh, oh, oh. Their brains, brains.
Shane Hanlon: 02:06 You decapitate them.
Vicky Thompson: 02:07 Yeah. Mm.
Shane Hanlon: 02:09 It is for the betterment of raccoon populations, all mammal populations, and human populations.
Vicky Thompson: 02:14 I feel like you’re going to end up on a list.
Shane Hanlon: 02:22 Science is fascinating. But don’t just take my word for it. Join us as we hear stories from scientists or everyone. I’m Shane Hanlon.
Vicky Thompson: 02:32 And I’m Vicky Thompson.
Shane Hanlon: 02:33 And this is Third Pod From The Sun.
Shane Hanlon: 02:38 All right. So I wanted to ask this question of producer Molly Magid. Hi Molly.
Molly Magid: 02:44 Hi Shane.
Shane Hanlon: 02:45 So are there any trips that you are taking this summer?
Molly Magid: 02:48 Yeah, actually I’m going to Northern California and the Pacific Northwest on a road trip. And I’m super excited about seeing the Redwood National Forest. I’ve never been there.
Vicky Thompson: 02:58 Ooh, I’m excited about that too. Are you going to get to drive through one of those tree tunnels?
Molly Magid: 03:04 That’s the hope.
Vicky Thompson: 03:05 That’s so cool.
Shane Hanlon: 03:06 That’s awesome.
Vicky Thompson: 03:06 Yeah.
Shane Hanlon: 03:07 I think I went to the Redwoods, well, I definitely did, but it was, goodness, years ago. I don’t even remember it, but okay. So we could talk about summer trips for quite a long time, but we are here, well, I guess we’re discussing vacations. Why? Why are we talking about vacations?
Molly Magid: 03:24 Yeah. Well, it has to do with our topic today, which is glacier tourism. So we’ve been seeing as the planet is heating up due to climate change, there’s been a big demand for people to go see glaciers. And so that’s been heating up as well.
Shane Hanlon: 03:41 Ah, okay. So I bet this means lots more people swarming to get a look at a patch of melting ice essentially.
Molly Magid: 03:50 Well, that’s a bit depressing, but I guess, in a nutshell, yes.
Shane Hanlon: 03:54 You’re welcome.
Molly Magid: 03:56 Yeah. So as the glaciers are changing the way that people can go, see, experience them, that’s changing as well. We talked with Dr. Heather Purdie, she’s a glaciologist who studies both glaciers and glacier tourism in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Heather Purdie: 04:18 I’m Heather Purdie. I’m a lecturer, Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury in the School of Earth and Environment. So I’m a physical geographer, and a glaciologist, so my research area is snow and ice and glaciers.
Heather Purdie: 04:35 So the kind of things I explore is looking at how our snow and ice, how our glaciers and seasonal snow respond to climate change, how the way snow and ice is changing impacts other things like our use of snow and ice, from both a recreational perspective and from things like glacier tourism. How changing snow and ice influences people, where we go and what we do.
Molly Magid: 05:03 So how did you get interested in this work?
Heather Purdie: 05:07 I grew up not that far away from Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, like in a small rural town called Waimate. And so a family holiday went to Aoraki National Park when I was only about seven years old. And that’s when I first saw a glacier. And I can remember being incredibly fascinated by the fact, when I was told by the Park Rangers there that, glaciers had once been way larger than they had before and there’s this idea of ice ages. And so I thought that seemed very cool.
Heather Purdie: 05:34 My first glacier project, as a researcher was actually on the Fox Glacier in South Westland Tai Poutini National Park on the West Coast of the Southern Alps in New Zealand. And it’s a very fast responding glacier. It’s well known, tends to be well known, and does attract a lot of visitors. And I started there many, many years ago as a master’s student, measuring the speed of the ice and how fast it melted, how fast the ice flowed.
Heather Purdie: 06:03 I’m a field scientist so I had a very intensive field program because that’s what I like, walking around on the glacier every single day for a few months. And at the end of that, actually, because I worked very closely with the company that was doing the glacier guiding at the time, they were Fox Glacier Guides and they were an immense help. The guides, when I was out working on the ice, they would bring the clients over to me to have a chat about what I was doing and took a real interest in what I was finding out and wanting to pass that information on to the clients that were coming to visit the glacier. And so we did training with them, helping sort of up-skill the guides in learning more information to pass on.
Heather Purdie: 06:43 And so at the end of that stint, I got offered a chance to work as a glacier guide, which I said yes to because I just thought that seemed like the coolest job out and it was great. And so I did some time there as a glacier guide as well. And it was fantastic because I still today sometimes think that when you’ve got a group of people behind you and you’ve got them on the ice and they’re actually there, they’re touching, they’re feeling, they’re seeing, they’re looking at crevasses, and you’ve got this real sort of captured audience. And it’s a great opportunity to talk about climate change. And so it formed this really neat working relationship, which then led to me becoming a glacier guide for a while, which then of course has led to my real interest in how things like glacier tourism are being impacted by glacier change, how they can contribute to education, but also how they’re being impacted by climate change.
Vicky Thompson: 07:40 That really does sound like a cool job. So being outside in a beautiful remote location, climbing mountains, teaching people about climate change.
Shane Hanlon: 07:48 But it’s not as exciting as co-hosting this podcast with me, right, Vicky?
Vicky Thompson: 07:55 Ooh.
Shane Hanlon: 07:57 Right? Right? Right, Vicky?
Vicky Thompson: 07:57 So I wonder if Heather has any favorite part of doing this work?
Molly Magid: 08:03 Yeah. She talked about how she just loved to walk up the mountain and then actually introduce people to what a glacier looks like for the first time.
Heather Purdie: 08:12 One day when I was walking up the valley with a group of people and we were actually getting really close to their getting onto the glacier that was in front of us in the valley and a lady said to me, “Oh, when are we going to get to the glacier?” And it really, it did make you chuckle, but it also really reminded you that for many people, it’s such a abstract concept. If they’ve never grown up around mountains and around snow and ice, they’ve actually no idea where they’re heading to or what to expect.
Heather Purdie: 08:40 And another thing that’s really different for people is a lot of people have experienced snow. So a lot of people know what it’s like to walk through soft snow. They may have been up to a ski field and things. And so a lot of people get quite a surprise when they actually get to a glacier because particularly on the lower parts of the glacier, the area that we call the ablation area where it’s hard ice and that’s where a lot of the activity, a guiding activity occurs and where a lot of the work I do there, it’s completely different. It’s nothing like snow at all. And if you trip up and then on a glacier, A, it’s very slippery, but it’s also really hard. It’s essentially, I always used to say to people, it’s like falling over on concrete. It’s not like falling over in the snow.
Molly Magid: 09:25 Yeah. I definitely would have not pictured that when thinking about a glacier. So because of your experience, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes. How broadly have glaciers changed since you were a guide, just by seeing them and then how does the science back that up?
Heather Purdie: 09:47 I was actually just back at Fox Glacier just two weeks ago, just to do some more round of monitoring. And it’s quite shocking how fast it’s receding, from those days where I was fortunate to see its most recent advance, which that advance there started at around 2004, 2005 and culminated it about 2008, 2009. And so ever since 2009, Fox Glacier, along with many others in the New Zealand Southern Alps have been receding.
Heather Purdie: 10:15 And we lost about over a kilometer, over a kilometer of ice in the valley, in terms of length. And of course in terms of ice thickness, that’s 150 sort of thickness, a kilometer long, has all gone. And just in that time. And so it is a really shocking how quickly recession can happen and it’s one of the things that’s part of my research is looking at what we call feedbacks.
Heather Purdie: 10:39 So the things that change as the glacier’s getting smaller that actually make the rate that it’s melting increase. So we kind of call these things positive feedback. So it’s like a feedback, a change that is happening gets kind of enhanced due to some of the other things going on, as the glacier is sort of getting thinner and we start to get sort of dust and debris melting out of it, we get very thin. If the surfaces of the ice are just a little bit dirty, they actually can absorb heat and melt faster. And one of the things that those of us that have been studying snow and ice for many years are very aware of is that at the very top of the mountains at the moment, for nearly the last decade now, at least for the last seven or eight years, we’ve been losing more mass, more volume, going into the top of the glaciers high in the mountains than we’re gaining.
Heather Purdie: 11:30 So we know, I guess I know, when I go there and see a very retreated glacier, I also know that there’s nothing going into the top over the last few years to turn that trend around because we always have a delay. So glaciers, they respond to climate, but there’s always a delay and it takes a certain amount of time for that snow going in at the top to be compressed into ice and to flow down the valley to reach the glacier terminus, the end of the glacier, which is a thing that most people engage with when they’re going to visit a glacier, as a tourist or as a recreationalist. And so if you’ve not been getting enough snow going into the top, you’re not building up a reservoir to flow down to the tongue. And I think that’s one of the things that’s most dramatic at the moment is year upon year, we’ve been seeing the top of the glaciers showing that they’re not getting as much input, which means this thing, this retreat, this recession we’re seeing at the terminus, there’s nothing to turn that around as yet.
Heather Purdie: 12:32 I mean, glacier will respond to shorter term regional trends. And we’ve seen that with the recent advances at Fox and Franz. Glaciers that react quickly can react to decadal trends. But certainly in the last decade, there’s been nothing going on up high in the mountains that’s going to turn this recession around. And that’s the thing that’s quite disheartening, I guess, a wee bit quite shocking, when you sort of see how small it is now. Fox and Franz Joseph are the smallest we’ve ever seen them in recorded history, and they’re going to get smaller in the near future.
Shane Hanlon: 13:15 This is a really uplifting topic we got here. I mean, losing one kilometer of ice, in only 13 years. Plus they’re probably just going to keep getting smaller, right?
Molly Magid: 13:27 Yeah. Well, it is kind of depressing and that’s part of the reason why Heather says it’s so important for people to see these glaciers so they can really see what climate change is doing.
Vicky Thompson: 13:40 That’s a good point. So Heather’s talking about how glaciers are changing because of climate change, but how is glacier tourism changing?
Molly Magid: 13:48 Well, she started at the beginning describing how glacier tourism used to work over 100 years ago and how it’s changed over time.
Heather Purdie: 13:57 Glacier tourism has been around for many, many years and at its most basic and as its sort of original form was simply going for a walk from the valley floor. And this happened at Fox and Franz Joseph and also over the other side of the Southern Alps Aoraki Mount Cook National Park on the Tasman Glacier. And so guides would put people on a bus, drive them out a bit of a road, and then people would get out and actually sort of just walk out onto a glacier. And when I first started guiding at Fox, we did use to have trips from the valley floor. So you could take families, you’d drive them out the valley, you’d get out and you go for a walk and you’d walk up the valley and then up onto the ice, walk around on the ice, and then walk back.
Heather Purdie: 14:41 So lovely trips, like real journey, all just under people’s own people power. And of course, reasonably affordable too, because it was just all about walking, they were walking trips. But what’s been happening particularly on the West Coast at Fox and Franz Joseph is as the glacier’s have been receding, and so they have been getting smaller and shorter, the position that the glacier terminus is getting further up into the mountains and sort of ending up in an area that’s much steeper, and with much in the thinning, meaning there’s a lot more exposed rock around, we’ve started to see this increase in rockfall from the valley sides that actually meant that the walking access, like walking from the valley floor, just wasn’t as safe as it used to be. And this meant that the walking access was abandoned and all the trips at both Fox and Franz Joseph now are helicopter supported.
Heather Purdie: 15:35 They always did helicopter trips. That was always the sort of top end. You could either go for just a walk from the valley floor and walk around on the glacier on the lower part of the glacier, or you could catch your helicopter, fly higher up onto the glacier and walk around up there. And so there used to be a choice with that, but now using those helicopters to access the glacier is the only way those trips are running. So what we’re seeing is it is a bit of a paradox in many ways. We’ve got climate warming, because of our use of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions and our glaciers are reacting to that, and yet one of the only ways that we’re actually accessing the glaciers to see them and educate people about them is by using helicopters.
Heather Purdie: 16:19 The other thing that’s been quite interesting in terms of glacier recession and glacier tourism is over on the Eastern side of the Southern Alps, you’ll see that big valley glacries have formed really large what we call proglacial lakes at their terminus, at the end of the glacier. And so we’ve seen also some diversification in tourism. So like at the Tasman Glacier, we actually have companies that operate boat tours and kayaking tours. So instead of actually getting onto the ice, what they’re doing is putting people into watercraft, power boats or kayaks and having a look at the icebergs and paddling around the lake that way. So it’s sort of this evolving thing. As the lakes are receding, as the glaciers are receding, they’re kind of creating these lakes that for some companies are presenting new opportunities and providing different ways of engaging with the glacier.
Molly Magid: 17:21 Now that the glaciers are melting and creating these lakes, it reminded me of a lot of the talks around climate adaptation. It sounds that tourism is adapting to these changes and may even lead to new or different modes of tourism. So I’m curious what you think what the future of glacier tourism is or what you think might change or be different?
Heather Purdie: 17:49 Yeah, so it is adaptation. I think the lake first started forming back in 1990. And the trips started not too, probably by about year 2000 or so. So they’ve been running for quite a while now, but as each glacier retreats, the kind of terrain it’s in will dictate to certain amounts or will dictate kind how that glacier can be interacted with from a tourism perspective. But we are seeing adaptation, and even just a couple of weeks ago, over on the West Coast, we were shown a sort of new trip that the company that’s normally done the guiding on the hard ice and are still running heli hikes, but they’ve also got e-bikes now and they’re taking people up a road that you used to be able to drive up, that now because of flooding and things the road’s not maintained to a standard to have a vehicle anymore, but you can still ride a bike up.
Heather Purdie: 18:42 And so they’re actually got running e-bike trips to then walk people to a glacier viewing point. So that’s great. That’s a form of adaptation that’s providing a low cost option for people to be able to still engage with the glacier. And when they’re taking them on that journey they can show people where the glacier used to be and talk about some of the processes. So, yeah, so we are starting to see these companies thinking outside the square a bit and thinking, “Okay, how do we still give people a glacier experience?” But at the same time, perhaps thinking of different ways of doing that.
Molly Magid: 19:20 Do you think that if the glaciers disappear, people will still go to see them? Will there be tourism in those areas?
Heather Purdie: 19:30 Because of where New Zealand is and because of the way, the sort of amount of precipitation, the amount of rainfall we get, where our Southern Alps are, where we kind of are situated on Earth, there’ll be glaciers. There’ll always be glaciers for the foreseeable future. It’s just they’ll be a lot smaller and they’ll be much higher in the mountains. So it’ll become a different sort of trip, but you will still be able to go see them, but you’ll need to go a lot further.
Heather Purdie: 19:56 And the thing is, they are still really amazing locations. They’re Alpine locations, they’ve got incredible mountain peaks and steep sort of bluffs. And in some ways when the glaciers pull back, the severity of the landscape, the scale of it’s, almost revealed even in a more full way. Tourism is definitely something that will evolve and people will still go to see these, there’s some incredible lakes and things, often a glacier retreats and you get an amazing lake left behind.
Heather Purdie: 20:25 And so the landscape will evolve with climate and there’ll still be tourism. There’ll definitely still be tourism and people, but what people see will be different. And it might be more that they’re looking at a trail, a track that is a glacier trail that sort of follows where the glacier used to be and shows the key kind of neat landscape features that they leave behind as opposed to walking up and just having it right there in front of you. But, yeah, they will need this adaptation. They will need people’s perhaps expectations, it’s all about expectations sometimes too, what people are expecting to see and what people actually see. But yeah, certainly the New Zealand Southern Alps are incredibly amazing and beautiful anyway and even with less snow and ice on them, they’re still going to be majestic and the rock faces will be in incredibly impressive, and the lakes will still be beautiful.
Heather Purdie: 21:20 So I think for these little communities that are really reliant on tourism, they’ve still got an amazing place to go. And I guess there’ll be a transition of people starting to, for many years they’ve relied on the glacier being the draw card that’s brought people to these places because everyone wanted to go see the glacier. And if the glacier gets harder to see, it might just be a matter of reminding people of the other things they can do there and the other neat things they can see.
Molly Magid: 21:48 Hmm. That’s really bittersweet. It makes me feel better that people will still want to go to these places and they’ll still want to see them and support the towns and the people who live there. But at the same time they’re maybe not going to be even able to see the glacier anymore, and that’s really striking.
Vicky Thompson: 22:23 Okay. So it sounds like glacier tourism is going to be around even when the glaciers aren’t.
Molly Magid: 22:29 Yeah, that’s right. So right now there’s a lot of interest in seeing the glaciers before they melt. But even when they change and become more difficult to see, the landscapes will continue to be really striking and unique.
Shane Hanlon: 22:44 Right. But so I’m struggling with this idea that seeing these glaciers might involve burning a lot of fossil fuels that contribute to climate change and to the melting of the glaciers. How is glacier tourism dealing with that contradiction?
Molly Magid: 22:57 Well, Heather says that the glacier tourism industry needs to start thinking about that, how they can become more sustainable.
Heather Purdie: 23:05 Up till now, I think, like a lot of things, it’s been very reactive. As the glaciers change, the approaches to getting people to the glacier has responded to a change. So a more of a reactant thing. Something happens, so we solve that problem. And I guess what needs to happen in the future is becoming more proactive, thinking a bit longer term and thinking, “Right, well, what can we do to have a tourist product that’s more sustainable? What options can we put on the table?”
Heather Purdie: 23:36 So I think it’s important for people to be thinking about that and if they are going to visit a glacier utilizing aircraft, can the companies offset their carbon or can the people offset their carbon or just sort of trying to think about how, if this is the way we’re going to get people to glaciers, how can we make that more sustainable? Because certainly getting people to the glacier is I think quite important in terms of connecting them to them and helping educate people about climate change, getting them to actually care, getting them to actually think, “Wow, perhaps I do need to think about can I take the bus or ride my bike to work instead of driving by myself every day?” Or just getting people to maybe reflect on their own lifestyles.
Heather Purdie: 24:27 We had a really cool project actually working with Department of Conservation. One of the managers there, Wayne, he’s really passionate about these things and he had this vision for developing interpretation in the glacier valleys as they were being faced with having to push the viewing points further back up the valley. And we kind of brought together the glacier measurements, like the glacier was here at this time. And then on the back side of his signs, he worked with people to develop kind of neat little climate messages about things you could do. So kind of as they walk up the valleys now, in the Franz Joseph glacier valley when people now walk up to the glacier on the way up, they see these neat interpretation panels that talk about how big the glacier was and when the glacier was here and there. And then when they turn around and walk back out, there’s these cool little messages about ways to reduce their carbon footprint, which I thinks really cool.
Heather Purdie: 25:23 Because certainly when we were talking to people there, for a lot of them they are there because they’ve kind of got an awareness that things are changing. And that’s why I think this maintaining the ability, it does for a lot of people, this need to see things with their own eyes to really get on board with things. I’d love to see more of that around the place, the kind of blending the environmental education with some sort of glacier tourism or Alpine tourism with some cool little messages about living more sustainably.
Molly Magid: 25:57 It is one of those times where you can reflect on your own life and say, “What things can I do so that this is a place that continues to be available for all people to see and to interact with?” And to have their own moments of realization, “I want this to stay around. What can I do?” So I think that is a positive thing, even though it can be difficult.
Heather Purdie: 26:23 And I think that’s a really important thing going forward, because the last thing you want is to people to essentially give up and think there’s nothing they can do. So it is really interesting times and I mean, we’ve seen this really cool climate report come out in New Zealand and there’s been some great conversations on the news about electrifying the vehicle fleets and stuff. And I mean, all that stuff will help. We’ve got to just kind of keep somehow keep people’s initiative and momentum, momentum to keep going in the right direction.
Shane Hanlon: 26:56 So, Molly, what is the answer?
Molly Magid: 27:12 I think it’s complicated. I think everyone needs to consider what they can personally do to try and make their travel more sustainable. Can you take a bus? Can you go see something nearby? Can you think about offsetting the carbon from wherever you’re going? And those choices shouldn’t make you feel like you can’t go on vacation, but it should just make you consider how to make that vacation more Earth friendly.
Vicky Thompson: 27:42 So probably kind of like enjoy responsibly.
Shane Hanlon: 27:46 I think that’s probably a good slogan to have and for many things, but yeah, especially with this. Yeah, I think we can all do our part personally and be thankful for folks like Heather for their work.
Shane Hanlon: 27:58 All right, folks. Well, that’s all from Third Pod From The Sun.
Vicky Thompson: 28:02 Thanks so much to Molly for bringing us this story and to Heather for sharing her work with us.
Shane Hanlon: 28:07 This episode was produced by Molly with production assistance from Jay Steiner and audio engineering from Colin Warren.
Vicky Thompson: 28:13 And we’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. Please rate and review us. You can find new episodes on your favorite podcasting app or at thirdpodfromthesun.com.
Shane Hanlon: 28:22 Thanks, all. And we’ll see you next week.
Shane Hanlon: 28:29 Okay. So we’re talking about vacation.
Vicky Thompson: 28:32 Yeah.
Shane Hanlon: 28:33 And so I can talk about being up here.
Vicky Thompson: 28:37 Yeah.
Shane Hanlon: 28:37 Right? Because this is what it is. Do you have any summer plans?
Vicky Thompson: 28:41 Mine was Pennsylvania too.
Shane Hanlon: 28:43 Oh. Here we go. Okay. All right. We’ll do that. I’ll ask you.
Vicky Thompson: 28:45 Okay.
Shane Hanlon: 28:46 You can do PA. I’ll do PA. We’ll giggle. That’ll be great.
Vicky Thompson: 28:49 Okay. There you go. There you go.
Shane Hanlon: 28:54 Ha ha ha.
Vicky Thompson: 28:56 Ha ha ha.