Ologies with Alie Ward - Cryoseismology (ICEQUAKES) with Celeste Labedz

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Glaciers: Where are they? What are they made of? What happens when chunks splinter off into the sea? There are ICEQUAKES? CalTech Cryoseismologist Celeste Labedz sometimes wears a cape with her snowpants and spends part of her career shooting explosions into giant chunks of ice and recording the seismic activity, analyzing the rivers that flow through glaciers, and keeping tabs on glacial melt. Also discussed: the most goth way to honor a glacier, and whether or not you should visit them IRL. Follow Celeste at Twitter.com/celestelabedz or Instagram.com/celestelabez A donation went to: https://theiagd.org Sponsor links: gabi.com/ologies; betterhelp.com/ologies More links at alieward.com/ologies/cryoseismology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's that guy on the train who fell asleep eating a sandwich. Alleyward. Back with another episode of oligies. So I'm working on this episode while I'm in Chicago and most of the research for asides was done while staring out a window into one degree weather. A degree, a degree, one. And I learned just how close you can get to an ancient radiator without getting hospital grade burns.

So for this episode, we're going cold. So glacier quakes. We're going to get into them. Okay, but first, we'll thank the folks who just melt my heart. All the people on patreon.com slash oligies who are submitting questions and supporting the show. All the folks out there who are wearing oligies merch from oligiesmerch.com. Everyone who boosts the show by texting links to friends and tweeting and gramming and braiding

and subscribing. And of course, for leaving reviews for me to just savor like leftover pot stickers that you forgot were in the fridge. And I read you a fresh one each week. So thank you to Elizabeth Anna for leaving this one. They said, I think this podcast got me in a med school. Storytime. I recently interviewed for med school and got a little too excited while talking about

this podcast in the interview. And I saw my interviewer write down oligies pod. A few days later, I got an email saying they couldn't offer me a spot in school, but then a few days after that, I got an email offering me a spot on the wait list. And I like to pretend it's because he got a chance to listen to the podcast and decided to give me a chance. Either way, I managed to plug this podcast in my med school interview and I'd say that's a win.

Elizabeth Anna, I hope he hears this and you get in. What a daymaker. Okay, let's get right into it. Cryo seismology. This is the study of the shaking of glaciers, icequakes, y'all. So I'm going to skip the etymology. You'll find out in a minute why, but just know this is not a seismology episode. An episode on earthquakes, a big one, if you will, will happen sometime in the future.

But just like a shaker, I cannot tell you when. But just know it will be imminent. Now this one, this is icequakes. So hold on to your snow pants. So this all just got her bachelors in physics and geology from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and is currently working toward her PhD in geophysics at Caltech in Pasadena, California. And I've been following her on Twitter after approximately one million of you just jammed

on your caps lock and we're like, find her, ask her our questions. And so I gleefully did. And last July, she snapped a photo of herself on a glacier wearing snow pants and a helmet and field gear was just one small addition, which was a gauzy blue cape like that worn by Elsa in Frozen. And she wrote alongside it, I firmly believe that kids should not be taught that girly things and sciency things are mutually exclusive. Therefore I packed a cape with my fieldwork just to show what a glaciologist princess Elsa

would look like. The hashtag the cold never bothered me anyway. And it started a great global discussion about glaciers and women in science and how pop culture can help people see themselves in empowered roles. So I navigated the rough terrain of LA Freeways and met up with her at Caltech's famed seismology lab up to the press room where you see all the news footage after an earthquake. And we talked about what a glacier is, why it quakes, how she measures it, why it's important, the biggest glaciers, the prettiest blue in the universe, and how we can feel

a little more hopeful in the face of a warming climate. So cozy up to the work and the wisdom of cryo-sysmologist Celeste Lebedes. I mean it's strange even like being there at a hard time believing that like those mountain peaks are really there. Yeah. And that's not just because I'm from Nebraska and I think all mountains are fake. That was going to be one of my first questions. And so now you are a cryo-sysmologist?

Yes, I am a cryo-sysmologist. What does that mean? So the way that I explain it to people is I tell them to take apart the word. So a seismologist is something you might have heard of on TV. After an earthquake they say, and now we're going live to talk with some seismologists about this. So I looked up the etymology once and seismos or something is actually Greek for earthquake. It doesn't have a different meaning.

It's just earthquake alone got its own Greek word. And so seismology is the study of earthquakes and then cryo in front you may have heard of like cryogenically cooled or something. Cryo means cold. So when we put those together, we get cold stuff and seismology. So yeah, instead of studying earthquakes and other ground motions in the solid ground, I am studying ice quakes and other motions in the ice. Is an ice quake, is that a real thing?

Yeah, ice quakes are real things. They're basically just like earthquakes. So in an earthquake you have sliding some kind of motion. You can picture tectonic plates that you may have seen in like seventh grade science moving past each other and that motion when it's a little fast can cause seismic waves that you feel. So that's an earthquake. An ice quake can be caused by a similar thing.

You can have little faults inside of a glacier or an ice sheet or any kind of big massive ice and you can slide along those faults within the glacier. A glacier can slide against the rock that it's on top of, but you can also get cracks that open up in the ice. Those make ice quakes too. And then there's other sources of not ice quakes, but other vibrations in the ice. So like my research is on the signals that come from flowing water inside of a glacier. Because you know, if you stand next to a rushing river, it's loud.

And yeah, you can imagine the ground vibrating a little bit next to a rushing river. Celeste says that the same thing happens inside of glaciers. Melt water moves through them and when it moves, it's loud. Oh my gosh. Okay. So now ice quakes are not a thing that I knew about before literally right now. How long have you known about ice quakes? So I was interested in seismology since high school.

I was in the Science Olympiad competitions that high schoolers can do. They're young and they're ambitious. So I was on my high school science team and there was an event that was about earthquakes and volcanoes and I was like, this is the coolest. I'm going to do this. This is great. And then I didn't get into the ice quake side of it. I didn't start looking at cryo seismology until I got to grad school actually.

I was going to be a non cryo seismologist, a regular seismologist. But then a project was brought to my attention that could take me to a glacier and teach me about motions inside of ice instead of inside of rock and I was all in. Hey, now you are from Nebraska. Yes. You got a lot of quakes or ice over there? No. Okay.

It gets snow every year and it's lovely. But yeah, there is every once in a while really tiny earthquakes in Nebraska. But yeah, no, I did not gain interest from experience in seismology. I wasn't feeling earthquakes as a kid or anything. Did you like earth science growing at all? Oh yeah, absolutely. So I always tell people that the explanation for why I am like I am is that I grew up in a science museum.

My dad works for the University of Nebraska State Museum and he is the collections manager for zoology and botany. So he is just in charge of like so many dead animals. You know, taxidermy. So yeah, I kind of grew up in a natural history museum which leads to a nice introduction to science. So I am really, really happy and definitely privileged that I had that opportunity growing up.

And so a lot of our family friends were other scientists working for the museum and stuff. So yeah, I grew up with entomologists and paleontologists and parasitologists kind of all around. And I was like, oh, well, of course I am one of these people and that's very nice. I'm very lucky to have had that experience. And so yeah, I liked geology a lot. My dad took me outside a lot. You'll find that with many geoscientists all around and geology, geophysics, geochemistry,

everything. A lot of folks got into it because they loved being outside. Oh, you know, that makes sense. I mean, the more that you're out camping or hiking, you see striations and rock and you see some shiny and it's a quartz or something. Yeah. Did that happen with you? Yeah.

Getting outside and seeing geology in place is definitely a way to spark an interest in the geosciences. Okay. Quick aside. I wondered what other jobs a geoscientist might do and if you're into earth science, you can study soils or wells or earthquakes or oil or space rocks and the median salary is like 80 to 90 Gs. So if you're like, how can I be outside more that way?

Bonus, not all of the jobs involve mittens. And now when you got this opportunity to start studying on a glacier, had you, you'd never been on a glacier before, right? I grew up comfortable with snow. There's lots of snow in Nebraska in the winters. I grew up cross country skiing. I just didn't know it was going to be a job skill later, but yeah, yeah. So I'd never, I had seen glaciers on like a family vacation, but I'd never like been

on one really. And this is such a stupid question, but what exactly is a glacier? So a glacier is basically a big pile of ice and how they form is year after year, snow falls in places like, you know, high latitudes or high altitudes, if you get enough snow falling that it doesn't melt between years, then it just starts stacking up and stacking up. Okay. By the by, sea ice is frozen seawater and it's not a glacier.

Glaciers only originate on land. I didn't know that. And they're on every continent, except for you, Australia, I'm sorry, but you do have really good coffee. I'm told and you have koalas. Now what is the smallest glacier? There's no set rule, but glacier scientists are like maybe 25 acres, which is about the size of Adele's estate.

I just got here and I think I'm losing signal already. In case that's of any help context wise. And yes, how are they formed? So imagine layers and layers of snow falling on land, kind of like a crepe cake. And then the pressure from just the snow above it will squish that snow down into nice, clear, solid ice. So after many, many, many years of a lot of snow falling and not all the snow melting, you can end up with a huge pile of ice.

So yeah, if you have a more localized mass of ice, that's just a regular glacier. If you have a lot of glaciers that sort of connect together among mountains, that's often called an ice field and you get even bigger and you're covering up whatever it's on top of completely, then that's an ice sheet. So like Greenland and Antarctica are ice sheets, then over time, under its own weight, that ice moves. Glaciers will flow downhill or outward, they're squishing under their own weight and they're trying to go somewhere.

Okay, so to recap, glaciers connecting become ice fields and ice fields connecting become ice sheets. And when they crawl and lurch and quake, they can boop to do through all kinds of stuff. So glaciers are just out there, they're doing their thing. And that's how half dome became a half dome, right? Yeah, yeah. So as glaciers are moving, they will carve out the landscape around them, which is really cool because it leaves some really stunning places like your somebody was carved by glaciers

and it's stunning, of course. And yeah, they leave very characteristic shapes. Glaciers will leave nice U-shaped valleys. So if you're looking at a valley, if it's shaped like a V, then a river carved it, if it's shaped like a U, then a glacier carved it. Whoa! Yeah, so they leave these very characteristic landscapes, they'll have these kind of sinuous U-shaped valleys with peaks in between.

And yeah, so you can tell when a place was glaciated in the past. And what was it like the first time you saw a glacier you were going to work on? So it was a little bit hectic because I had gone to Juneau, Alaska with my collaborators because the closest to city to where we were going to work, then we were waiting for the weather to clear to get a helicopter flight up to this glacier because that's how you get to a glacier. So you get yourselves and a lot of equipment up to a glacier. So yeah, we had to wait for the weather to clear and then once it did, they were like

we got to go, go, go in case the clouds come back. So yeah, we hauled all of our gear into a helicopter and then we got in the helicopter too and then they flew us up to the glacier and then we got up and we had to get all the gear out. So it wasn't able to like stop and appreciate it because there were so much to do. So then once we got all of our gear out and the helicopter left, I remember it left and then it just got really, really, really quiet and then I was actually able to look around and appreciate like, holy moly, I am on the ice and there is so much of it.

How tall was that glacier like in what kind of elevation? So the glaciers I worked on are actually not that high up. So they're only about like a thousand meters elevation. You can actually, one of the glaciers I've worked at, you can hike there from Juno in a day just uphill from like Juno Airport. You can hike up there. So the glacier that I worked on for the first time was a small-ish mountain glacier. So it's about a kilometer and a half wide, like six kilometers long and about 200 meters

thick at its thickest. So yeah, if you like are standing in the middle of it and look down, you can imagine that there's like two football fields worth of ice just like straight down. Oh my God. Okay. So for scale, this glacier near Juno is bigger than Central Park. It's actually closer in size to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but there are probably fewer people smoking drugs and making out on it.

San Francisco, my birthplace, I love you. I love your vibe. But what is the vibe of working on a glacier? Can you walk me through a little bit of what your fieldwork is like? Like how long are you there and what time are you getting up? Is there coffee and how many things are you measuring? So I have been very lucky that my fieldwork has been in an area with a little bit of infrastructure. So the Juno Ice Field Research Program is an organization that's been monitoring glaciers

outside of Juno and running a field school for students interested in glaciology. They've been monitoring the area for about 70 years and they have some infrastructure there. So they have camps on the rock ridges between glaciers. So we get to stay there. So it's actually pretty plush living for a glacier. Among those, we will get up right and early and there is coffee, breakfast. They do a lot of the just add water pancakes, very good field food.

And yeah, then we go out and do whatever we are doing that day. We take our seismometers, which are basically very sensitive motion detectors. And yeah, so they can detect really, really tiny motions that a human could never feel on their own. We have to take those out from our camp and deploy them on the glacier in strategic spots. Usually burying seismometers is best because then that's very nice and quiet, not as much like wind and rain hitting them and they can just get all the vibrations that they need to get.

Then as the, as our experiment wraps up, then I have to go back out and pick up the seismometers again. So then instead of going out and, you know, dropping all these seismometers in particular spots that I'm on the Easter egg hunt to go pick them back up again, that part's a little bit less fun because that involves hauling some seismometers uphill, which is a little bit less fun. You got to do, you got to do. Sometimes we are also making some seismic waves.

So on my second round of field work, we did some active source seismic surveying, which is making your own seismic waves, which is as fun as it sounds. It is, there are two methods. The quieter method is hitting a steel plate with a hammer. Oh my God. And the louder method is essentially setting off a small controlled safe explosion. What? What kind of explosions?

So we have basically, they look like very, they look like large shotgun shells. So they're like a little bit bigger than a shotgun shell that you could like buy for a hunting rifle. Those shotgun shells are blanks. They just have gunpowder in them, no projectiles. And we put them in, it looks kind of like a sketchy gun, but we bury the end in the snow. Or if you're, you know, doing it in the desert or something, then you bury it in the ground.

And yeah, then you fire it and it makes a little noise because it's underground. And then that generates some seismic waves that will move through whatever you've put it into. So the ice for me or the rock, if you're out in the desert doing it, looking at looking for faults or something. And then it'll, those seismic waves will bounce off of say the base of the glacier or a, you know, fault in the ground or something that can bounce off and then be picked up by your seismometers.

So they're shooting things in the ground, they're creating explosions to see how the glacier will react and where fault lines might be. In some cases, Celeste and her colleagues are looking at data coming in day by day and seeing how much water is rushing through the glacier. And then with other seismometers, all the data is stored in a memory chip for later. So yeah, it depends on the kind of using, but some of them you can, you can live feed them back and some of them you just got to wait and be surprised. Oh, it's like opening up a time capsule.

Yeah. Yeah. And now, I don't know if you know this, but the Earth's temperature is getting a little bit warmer. And I'm, yeah, I don't know. Amazing. Yeah. It's been in the news a little bit, but what is going on with glaciers and with cryo seismology?

Are you able to track anything based on what's melting, what's moving, what's shaking? What's shaking? So, examining what's happening with glaciers under climate change is one of the big reasons I want to be doing cryo seismology is it's another tool that we have to check out what's happening inside of a glacier and what's happening inside of a glacier really matters for what the future of a glacier might be like. So all around worldwide, we are losing ice. There are some glaciers that are getting a little bit larger due to changes in weather

patterns in their area, but like net, we are losing ice and we're losing a lot of ice. And yeah, that means a lot of potential changes for the world and it'd be nice if we could help head off some of those changes with knowledge about what's going to happen. So things like as we're losing ice, how much ice are we going to lose? How much is sea level going to rise? And you can keep track of, you know, how much meltwater is moving through a glacier or how much it's cracking off the end and just breaking off into icebergs. You can track those things with seismology.

That's one tool you can use to check it out. Glaciers are also a really important water resource for a lot of people around the world. So a lot of people who live downhill of glaciated mountain ranges, like for example, the Himalayas, a lot of people are relying on the glaciers there to provide steady water resources for all of their water needs, for their agriculture, for their drinking water, for their water, for hygiene. Getting an idea of what those glaciers might be doing in the future is really important for making sure those people have those water resources.

So yeah, it's really important to be keeping an eye on glaciers and understanding exactly what's going on on the inside and out so that way we can get better ideas of what they might be doing in the future. So her work helps us gauge how much ice we may be losing and how much sea water we may be gaining and what a toast to your earth might mean for people who rely on glaciers for their water. And another reason to keep tabs on glacier quakes and ice hunks is because they can surprise you, which, spoiler, these surprises do not involve a glacier popping out from a couch

with your name on a cake. Some glaciers can have what's called glacial outburst floods, which are very scary, also pretty amazing. So you can get dams of ice, so like melt water will be entering an area, but then the ice is actually blocking it. And then when the ice breaks, all that water is free to go. And those can be really big floods that are super sudden. Since you can detect moving water with seismometers, this is potentially a way to check out how

can we get people downstream early warning before a flood comes through and washes away their home or something. And how big are ice quakes? Do they conform to the same Richter scale like a 7.0 ice quake, like a crazy huge shaker? How big do these things get? So ice quakes, you can measure them with similar tools like magnitude scales for earthquake, but they usually end up looking a little bit different. Really big ice quakes happen when icebergs cav off the front of a glacier.

And sometimes you can get series where it's just iceberg after iceberg is tumbling and rumbling off the end and they're all like going into the bay. So really big ones of those happen in places like Greenland. And a huge event like that, that can be as much energy put out as a magnitude five earthquake. But if you're standing right next to it, it doesn't feel like a magnitude five earthquake because it's happening over a longer period of time. So whereas, you know, an earthquake might be happening in a second or so, it's going to take several minutes for all of those icebergs to do all of their tumbling.

So you can measure them on the same magnitude scales, but it's not necessarily a helpful way for humans to imagine like how big they are. Yes, the seismology lab at Caltech is the actual birthplace of the Richter scale. And we'll definitely get into that when we do seismology. But in general, these ice quakes or cryo-sizems, which apparently they're known, are low-frequency shakers, big but mellow, kind of like the Bernese Mountain dogs of seismic events, but less hairy. Also, if you've ever, during a winter cold snap, heard loud booms and thought someone

was attacking you with like an old school pirate cannon, you may have heard a frost quake, which is when rain seeps into the ground and the temperatures drop and then the water in the earth expands and snaps. And you'll know if there has been a frost quake by simply turning on the television to see breathless coverage of news anchors assuring you that the explosions were not the apocalypse. I know. What about movies?

How do they get glaciers or glacier quakes right or wrong? Are there any, Erky or any that you're like, good job? Okay. So I was trying to think if there was any movies that have ice quakes at all. And the closest I could come up with was in the beginning of the day after tomorrow, when the ice shelf is like breaking off right under their station where they're drilling for ice cores. What's happening?

The whole damn shelf is breaking off. That's what's happening. And that was pretty wild and maybe if they would have had some seismometers, they could have had a little bit more warning that that was coming. But yeah, you really do get like huge crevasses in glaciers, especially on big ice shelves like in Antarctica. Yeah. I don't know.

There hasn't been too many ice quakes in movies. And I know that you have a history with Frozen. When you watched Frozen, did you love it because you're like, that's me. That's my jam. So Frozen came out before I was studying glaciers at all. So I just liked it because I love kids movies. But now I just saw the stage musical version of Frozen is in LA right now. And I saw it a couple weeks ago with my friend and it was super awesome as a glacier person.

And I saw Frozen too recently with another friend and also like actually went in a glacier and it was really cool. And oh my gosh, I was like, my little glacier heart was just pounding. It was great. It was great. It melted your ice heart. And now you took a cape with you. Yes.

It was a Halloween costume. Yes. And you bundled it up in a tiny, tiny little bundle, put it in your knapsack and the glacier cape photo felt around the world. What was your motivation for that? So it was actually a silly idea that I think it was my mom's idea originally. After my first round of fieldwork, she saw some of the photos I did and she was like, hey, you should take the cape we made for your Halloween costume a few years ago next

time we go to a glacier and then like take some photos because wouldn't that be fun? And I'm like, oh yeah, that would be fun. There's a lot of cool ways to, you know, appreciate ice in media and movies and fun stuff through things like Frozen. But there's also a way to scientifically appreciate them. And it's kind of cool that all those different, all those experiences in ice can go together in fun ways. There's also a cool way to think about like, who is a scientist?

A scientist for this is a person who's interested in ice and yeah, that's both me and Princess Elsa. It was a fun way to make a little statement about what a scientist might look like and also just a fun reason to wear a cape because, you know, I always need more reasons to wear a cape. You're wearing one right now. She was not wearing a cape, but I was wearing a sweatshirt I think I slept in just to be real with you.

But the point is, don't judge. And that was a really good statement too that to be a scientist, it doesn't mean that you have to issue certain aspects of femininity or gender. Now when it comes to your outreach, I know you do a lot of it. What is like the most infuriating flimflam that you would like to debunk? So I get a lot of flimflam from the seismology side of my work rather than the glacier side of my work. Really?

Because people have lots of myths about earthquakes and a lot of those myths aren't intentionally trying to be harmful. There are a lot of them are from our human brains trying to make patterns. So there are a lot of folks out there who think you can predict earthquakes and nobody can actually reliably predict earthquakes. And some people think there's things like earthquake weather that will tell you whether it's more likely to have an earthquake and those don't actually make much of a difference. So I usually have lots of myth busting to do.

Earthquake wise, the main one, the main one that I have to do with the glacier stuff is just like, yes, climate change is real. We are losing ice. We are losing a lot of ice. And we should do something about that. Can I ask you Patreon questions? Please do. Are you ready?

Yes. Oh boy. Okay. But before your questions, a few words from some sponsors who make it possible for us to donate to a charity of theologist choosing each week. And this week Celeste chose the International Association for Geoscience Diversity. And the IAGD is a nonprofit dedicated to creating access and inclusion for persons with disabilities in the geosciences.

They celebrate the diverse abilities of all geoscience students, faculty, and working professionals by fostering student engagement and geoscience career pathways. And they're doing awesome stuff. So thank you Celeste for choosing them. And thanks to some sponsors of the show who I may talk about right now. All right. On to your burning icequake questions. Carl Netser, more of a comment than a question.

Just says love her. I'm honored. So Carl. Thanks Carl. Duly noted. Will there still be quakes when the glaciers disappear? Are the glaciers ever going to fully disappear? So that's a big question.

And that's one reason why folks are interested in like, you know, why should we be investigating or glaciers right now is, yeah, what's going to happen to them in the future. So we are definitely losing ice. We are definitely losing a lot of ice. It will take a long time for especially our larger piles of ice like Greenland and Araraca. There is ice loss there, but it's going to take a while for those to be like, you know, gone, gone. So hopefully that's not a case that we are facing.

There are definitely there are glaciers with projected death dates already. Really? Yeah. There's project. If you go on Wikipedia articles for small glaciers that are well known, like for example in Glacier National Park, the Wikipedia articles will say, you know, this glacier is estimated to disappear by 2050 or something. So there's a lot of the glaciers do.

They have projected disappearance dates. Okay. Side note. I went to look up a graphic representation and found out that Glacier mass balance is the term for how much ice a glacier is putting on versus how much it's losing. Taking on a little snow, some is melting. Let's just say that the graphs for that show a definite global trend downward. But essentially I would say overall it's going to be following sort of the same kind of global

temperature curve, which is, yeah, really, really taking it up tick since that good old industrial revolution. Right. Yeah. So it'd be nice if that could, that could take a little downturn soon. That way we have a chance of preserving some of these glaciers. So we don't have to call Glacier National Park the park formerly known as Glacier. Oh gosh.

Okay. There are roughly 198,000 glaciers in the world. Remember larger than Adele's 25 acre country estate. And Iceland, by the by, is expected to lose all of theirs in the next 200 years. And last summer in a move that was starkly emotional, they were the first nation to hold a funeral for one of their deceased glaciers, which was once called Okiakul, I think. But since Yoko means glacier, they just changed the name to Oak. It hurts.

They put up a memorial on what's now a rocky mountainside with a plaque that read, this monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. They addressed future visitors. Hopefully that plaque will be buried in ice one day. But Kudos, Iceland, a glacier funeral, that's a power move. It's also goth as hell, if you ask me, a person who has held a funeral for a bug. Now speaking of the forces that shape us, topography, so like you can still look at

it. One thing or two about, you know, you can look for those U shaped valleys that glaciers leave behind. You can still say, ah, yes, glaciers were here in some of the glaciers there are going to be gone in the next couple of decades. Some of the larger ones might take a little longer, but yeah, we could see some of those glaciers go away and other other small mountain glaciers too are really at risk. Right.

God, I hope they don't have to rebrand. It's just, it's for many reasons. This next question was asked by first time question asker, Alexis Delgado, plus Annie Sophie Caron, Stephanie Berthes, Tara McNeigh, and May Merrill wants to know, how do wildlife react to glacier quakes? Oh, interesting. I haven't really thought too much about this. So there's actually not much wildlife on like the middle of a glacier because it's not,

it's not a place with very much food. So when I've done work on glaciers, like I was out in the middle of the genome ice field this last summer and yeah, we would very rarely see any animals, occasionally a bird would fly over. We would occasionally find dead birds on the glacier because they would get in and not be able to get out and get in or out of a glacier. They would like start flying onto the glacier and then run out of food out there and then end up dying out there.

It's kind of sad, but that's the circle of life. For those birds, no pancakes for them, but yeah, so yeah, there's, there's not a ton of wildlife on the glacier. There is, oh, one of the coolest things out there is there's a kind of algae that lives in snow, but it's commonly known as watermelon snow because it's bright pink. Really? Yeah. So if you like go out to glacier and there's like a patch that like looks kind of like a

murder scene, like there's like a reddish, like pinkish splotch. It probably wasn't a murder scene, it's probably just watermelon snow. So it's a kind of like little algae and then there's these little tiny worms, like smaller than a penny, like worms that feed on that algae. P.S. I looked this up and it's also called pink snow and blood snow. And yes, there are inch long black worms in it. You can eat it, but too much might cause gastrointestinal issues, just in case you need one more reason not to eat blood snow peppered with worms.

So there is stuff living in the snow. Those little worms are probably like concerned when the ice shakes a little bit. But for the most part, it wouldn't disturb too much wildlife. Maybe they would maybe a nearby, if it was, if it was a glacier on the edge of an ice field and had a larger ice quake, maybe a nearby deer or something would look up from its snack and wonder what was going on. But yeah, no, ice, ice quakes don't affect wildlife too terribly much. Okay.

That's good to know. Just keep thinking about these little disturbed worms and like a kind of munch of melon over here. Yeah. What's going on down there? Oh, Maria Hancox wants to know where'd she get that cape I want one. I just went to the craft store and bought some glitter tool fabric. It's like what a tutu is made out of, but you can just like buy a couple yards of it.

Yeah. My mom bought it for me. Thanks, mom. Okay. Megan McLean wants to know, have glacier quakes resulted in the discovery of anything significant in terms of new life forms or fossils? Anything ever pop out of a glacier? What was that doing there?

Well, I don't know if glacier quakes have helped, but you can get things can be preserved pretty well in ice. So occasionally there have been lost hikers on glaciers in the Alps from a hundred years previously have gotten buried in the ice and then appeared lower on the glacier from the motion of the glacier a hundred years after they disappeared. And yeah, so that's pretty wild. Yeah. That is super wild.

A little grim, but yeah. So glaciers can preserve things really well, but yeah, since there's not much life on a glacier other than adventurous humans, there's not much in the way of fossils or anything. Good to know. Patrons Pandore too, Shea, Sarah Amish, Cranolation and Rock also asked about things found in a glacier. And I just have to pipe in that I looked it up and there have been Mount Everest hikers mummified by the ice and then later revealed when it melted and fallen prehistoric warriors

from thousands of years ago and warplanes with entire crews, soldiers with unmailed love letters, sacrifice victims, lost lovers in the Alps and more just in case melting glaciers just weren't sad enough for you. DB Narvison wants to know where are the largest glaciers like by service area? Those would be Greenland and Antarctica. Yeah. Yeah. So Greenland and Antarctica are both ice sheets.

It's kind of like one big glacier as in it's just like one huge, huge pile of ice. But then there's glaciers coming off the side where the ice is oozing out from the edge of the ice sheet. I don't know about what the largest one of those officially is. I know the fastest glacier is called Yakupsov and Ispre. It's in Greenland and yeah, it's the fastest it's moving about 30 meters a day. Whereas like smaller glaciers like the ones that I work on are moving half a meter a day. That's still pretty fast.

Yeah. For something so big. Yeah. Yeah. By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me. Hey, Meryl Streep from Devil Wears Prada. You move something that weighs billions and billions of tons 60 to 150 feet a day and

tell me that's not impressive and terrifying and heart-wrenching. Is it weird emotionally to see ice kind of break off and splinter off from a huge glacier? On one hand, you've got some great data, but on another, that's more ice melting. So icebergs breaking off the end of a glacier is a natural thing. Even healthy glaciers are doing that. Okay. So it is something that you can happily enjoy and just enjoy it for the powerful sort of a gunshot kind of sound.

Is it still going? Yeah. One of it cracking off the ice. You can actually hear it. And then it'll tumble into the water if it's emptying into the ocean or something. So yeah, you can still enjoy that. But then yeah, it does remind you that, oh, this is happening a little bit more than it used to.

So yeah, it's a weird emotional thing to be up close with glaciers, knowing that they are going away. Have you seen anything like that? Have you ever seen a huge tumble off? Have you been present for that? No. I wish. Well, on vacation with my family before I knew I was going to be studying glaciers someday,

we got to see some icebergs tumble off the edge of a glacier in Alaska and like that was pretty cool, but it wasn't like one of the really huge ones. There are great videos online of like glacier calving events that are really spectacular. So that calving event you heard earlier was audio from the documentary Chasing Ice and Dang. If you like watching glaciers crumble like scones, very loud rumbling scones, this is the documentary for you future glaciologists. First Minnie Thompson says, I'm a glaciology student, so I have so many questions.

Oh, right. Fellow glaciologists, what is the deal with the meteorite impact craters recently found under the Greenland ice sheet through seismic studies? Oh, yeah, this is a really rad case. There's a spot in Greenland that I think somebody was originally just like, hey, the topography here looks a little bit funny. Let's check it out. And then they figured out that part of the, it's in like Northwestern Greenland that

there was actually a crater below there. And yeah, they figured it out. I don't know if they figured it out from seismic or from radar data. One of the other good ways to check out what's going on inside a glacier like structure-wise is to shoot radar beams in there and they'll bounce off the bottom and come back. So it's kind of the same concept as seismic wave moving. It's just that they're radio, it's, yeah, it's radar waves instead. So yeah, I don't know if that was discovered via seismic or radar, but yeah, it's pretty

rad. And they just saw the nice characteristic crater shape at the below the edge of the Greenland ice sheet. You can kind of, if you zoom into that area on Google Earth, you can kind of see a nice little like, it's like right on the edge of the ice sheet and the crater is all full of ice. So you can see kind of like a little rounded little, um, little bump on the edge where it's filling up the crater.

It is bananas. Side note that you can just use Google Earth to look at glaciers. I just had this surreal, like how does technology even exist moment doing that? Also some fun trivia. This Hyowatha impact crater and another subsequently found pretty close to it was discovered by some NASA scientists. They were doing a flyby and just testing their equipment on the way to the Arctic. Imagine making the discovery of a lifetime, seeing a 19 mile wide geological divot in

the earth when you just meant to be like, uh, just hang on, testing, oh, look at that, holy smokes. Rexanne Parker asks, what's the most valuable or useful piece of technology that you use to conduct your work? So a new piece of technology that, um, I just used on my last round of field work and other cryo seismologists are starting to check out too is called distributed acoustic sensing. Okay. Um, which acoustic sensing makes it sound like a microphone, um, but, uh, it's actually,

it's really cool. So it's essentially tricking a fiber optic cable into thinking it's a bunch of seismometers. What? Yeah. You shoot a laser pulse in and then little inhomogeneities in the cable will bounce that laser pulse back. And, uh, then if you stretch or smush any bit of the cable from, for example, a seismic wave passing by, then the return times of all of those little bounce backs will change

timing. Oh, my God. So a computer sends pulse after pulse after pulse and looks for changes in the reflection that comes back. So that's some wild new technology that, uh, yeah, instead of deploying a lot of seismometers, you can just roll out one cable. Yeah. So a lot of, a lot of seismologists in general are really interested in how do we use this

tech? Technology in urban areas is probably where that's going to be coolest because you can use fiber optic cables that are already installed for just like telecom purposes. You just plug your box in and then check it out. Oh, when it comes to seismometers, Michelle Lee asked about them, the thing that draws the wavy lines is called a seismograph and the paper with the wavy lines drawn on it is a seismogram, which means Instagram should really be called Instagram. None of this matters.

One thing that does matter. How big is a seismometer? But yeah, seismometers in the modern day can be really tiny. You can even, um, you can buy your own tiny seismometer with, it's powered by raspberry pie, the little microcomputers have seismometers called raspberry shakes. Get it? Oh my God. And so if anybody wants to, they can go buy a raspberry shake and you can plug it in,

you can feed it into, there's a network of raspberry shakes. They're great for like education, like teachers will get them for their classrooms and stuff. Oh my gosh. DIY seismometer. Yeah. It's amazing. It's super cool. I have no idea what this question means.

So I'm just going to ask it. And if you don't either, then we're going to skip it. No idea what this means. Robert Robin Helton wants to know, was the bloop a glacier quake? Please tell me it was because I'm terrified of the ocean as is. What is the bloop? I don't know what the bloop means. Okay.

Alison B, or rather Alison B's girlfriend, also asked this question and we had no idea, no idea what the bloop they were talking about. But Celeste emailed me right after the interview later that night with a link and apparently in 1997, oceanographers recorded the loudest noise ever heard under the sea. A bloop, a sound like a walrus gently farting in a bathtub, but so loud. Noah, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on their site, quote, was the bloop from secret underwater military exercises, ship engines, fishing boat winches, giant squids, whales, or some sea creature unknown to science for years and years until

2005. All these conspiracy theories about the bloop swirled around. No one knew what the bloop was. People were losing their minds. What is this bloop? Turns out it's the sound of an ice quake and a chunk calving off into the ocean. Bloop like an ice cube in your lemonade. And Noah also mentioned that we can expect more and more future bloops.

Oh, Hollis, great question. What causes glaciers to be so blue? Oh, this is a great question. And if you have not seen how blue a glacier is, you need to like Google image search like glacier ice, especially, oh, search for glacier ice caves because that gets you the blue really good. So glaciers are blue for the same reason that like the ocean is blue. What happened?

And it's not the same reason as the sky is blue. So the sky is blue because of really scattering of light. Large quantities of water and large quantities of ice are blue because water molecules, like a bond stretch in there can absorb light, but it gets absorbed on the red end of the spectrum as light is coming into there. The red just gets kind of absorbed out. So all you're left with is the blues. And they're very, very lovely.

My favorite color in the world is like looking down a glacier crevasse and just seeing it is so, so, so blue. It's the bluest blue. I got to ask someone at Pantone what chip color that is. Yeah. Like what number that is. Okay. So side note.

Of course, I looked up ice caves, which are surreal and gorgeous caverns of shimmering surfaces and these deep moody blue tones. And then I went to Pantone and I typed in glacier and they have a color called glacier, but it was like kind of minty green. They have a color called Arctic, but that was just kind of a straight vintage army color. They also had an iceberg green, but that was again like a powdery olive. And I'm looking at these swatches and the closest I could find to the color of ice caves was this sadly unnamed chip known only as 2985C and it kind of captured that cool aqua of

an ice crevasse. And then I was like, maybe they have a color called ice crevasse. They do not have a color called ice crevasse. And I realized that the 2020 Pantone color for the year is ready for this classic blue. Just straight up blue, which I will say if you compare it to those dim ice caves is pretty spot on. So that's magic. Jennifer Tran wants to know, are there ice canoes like an icy volcano?

Oh, so there are a lot of places where there are volcanoes with glaciers on them on earth and also potentially on other planets. There is what's called cryovulcanism. So places like icy moons of our outer planet, so places like Enceladus and Europa maybe have cryovulcanism, which is just like a volcano, but it's solid and liquid water instead of solid and liquid rock. No way. Yeah.

So when it spouts out of there, is that cold? Is it hot? Is it like a dome full of ice and then water is shooting out of the top? Yeah. It freezes pretty quickly because it's cold out there in the outer solar system. But yeah, it's just a volcano, but it's just, yes, ice and water and just lava shoots out of a volcano and then rapidly freezes into rock. So water would shoot out of a cryovulcano and then rapidly freeze back into ice.

Oh my God, what is life? Yeah, that is so bananas. Charlotte Hunter, first time question asker. All right. Says native traditions in Alaska and elsewhere possess rich mythologies regarding geological events. Do you know of any that focus on glacier quakes? I'm not exactly sure.

I do know that one interesting bit of indigenous knowledge and seismology is the fact that the Pacific Northwest can potentially have very large earthquakes that can cause tsunamis. When Western Earth started interacting with indigenous peoples in what is, yeah, the Pacific Northwest, they heard in those people's oral traditions about stories of the ground shaking and then a giant wave coming. And they thought, oh, look at their silly creation myths. But that was actually just real oral history of past earthquakes and tsunamis happening. So that's one thing that folks are trying to do in geoscience is making sure that we're

not doing our geoscientists from a colonialist perspective. So I don't know specifically. I do know that glacier myths feature in a lot of cultures native to areas like Southeast Alaska where I work. I read up on this a little and there is a First Nations idea of sentient forms of nature. And glaciers in some indigenous accounts are depicted as powerful but a little catty seeking some chilly revenge for human offenses. And there are adages of not frying anything with grease on a glacier because the noise

of like crackling bacon or simmering oil is thought to mimic or even mock a glacier quake possibly causing an outburst flood, which is pretty bitchy and very dangerous. So tread lightly if you do tread at all. Amber Lee Noel, first time question asked, why on earth are we still allowing people to commercially visit glaciers? Is it as bad for them as I think it is? And Amber Lee lives close to Jasper National Park and that has a beautiful ice field parkway and gets really sad when they notice how far it's receded in the last 10 years.

Should tourism on glaciers be allowed? How do you feel about it? Well, so it is really cool that people can go experience a glacier because as someone who has worked on a glacier like experiencing them physically being there is something that's so cool. But yeah, I understand the reservations about that since it is a little bit of a delicate landscape. But a lot of the like when glaciers recede, it's because of sort of larger scale climate

effects rather than individual actions like local to that area, generally. So maybe less tourism because that's less of a carbon footprint, but as far as like, you know, going to a national park and admiring the glaciers that they have there. That's pretty cool. And if you can do that in a low carbon way, then I highly encourage you to because there's a lot you can learn and it makes you it makes you value those environments more. So that way you are maybe a little bit more motivated to help create a world where our climate is a little bit safer in the future.

So just some people breathing on a glacier is not what is causing glacier recession. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The glacier is receding because of larger, larger scale changes that, you know, people at the National Park Visitor Center. So Amber Lee Noel, you can read a little easier on that. Okay.

That's really interesting. We're all concerned about glaciers. I get it. So there's a patron named Rod who simply commented F in the chat for all the melting or melting glaciers. Sad face. Christina Delaire asked, is there any way to reduce the pace at which glaciers are melting or are we screwed because we've passed some kind of tipping point?

I do know that there is some kind of wild geoengineering happening to try to preserve glaciers. So I think there's a spot in the Alps where a glacier has been melting and that melts out, for example, dirt and debris on the surface and that's darker color than the ice. So it sucks up more heat than it melts faster. So they are essentially part of the time covering it with like a white tarp, like a giant, like white blanket to help keep it cooler. Yeah. There is some radical geoengineering that people are trying to do to protect glaciers

that are currently being impacted by climate change. One example, side note is an ice stupa, which is this conical artificial mini-glacier formed by spouting water up in the air and having it freeze into like a big ice cream cone or stupa, which is a temple shape. And then as it melts in the spring, the water can be used by the communities. And this was invented by Indian engineer and genius, Sonam Wangchuk, who first implemented this in 2014. And just as an aside, he also suggests starting your day with a cold shower because it makes

everything else in your day seem comparatively easy. And it also saves a lot of energy. So someone else, please do this for a week and report back. Just the thought of this makes my butt wince. A few people asked about things that are hiding in the ice as they melt. Ruby Ostrich asked, how screwed are we by all of those bugs hiding in the ice as they melt? Like, are there bacteria that are going to pop out and be like, surprise? So you probably don't have a ton to worry about with like glacier ice, but permafrost,

stuff melting out of permafrost, which is frozen soil, just like when the near surface ground is totally frozen year round. Some funky, funky stuff can freeze into that, I know. And so I do think there's some concerns about, you know, what kind of bacteria or viruses might be in that. But yeah, so permafrost melting might might release some funky things, probably not from just like straight glacier ice. OK, Haley Vandewal has a really scientific question.

Wants to know what you do about dry skin and cold hands. Asking from Pennsylvania in February. So where I am from my field work in Southeast Alaska, it works to be pretty lucky because I'm there in the summers and so it's surprisingly pleasant out there. OK. Sometimes it's a little too pleasant and makes me a little bit concerned about climate change. So where I am, luckily, it's quite pleasant. But I know when people are going to even colder, colder places like Greenland and

Antarctica, they do take very seriously bundling up and yeah, making sure that everybody is staying safe and healthy in very cold conditions is serious business for folks working in any any outdoor environment. Yeah, what kind of moisturizer? What kind of hand cream do you take? I definitely bring Vaseline. OK, because I get super dry lips, but just regular old drugstore lotion. OK, gets me in the summers in Alaska, so I'm all good.

Several people asked if you have a favorite glacier. I think my favorite glacier is the first glacier that I did fieldwork on, which is Lemon Creek Glacier in Southeast Alaska. It's just outside of Juneau. But then I've also done work on Taku Glacier. So Taku Glacier has my heart as well. Taku Glacier, side note, is a 36 mile long boy in Alaska. What's the shittiest thing about being a cryo seismologist?

So I thought about this because I know you asked, like, what's the best and what's the best. And I kind of came up with, like, there's sort of like the same thing as both the best and the worst. OK, fieldwork is kind of the best and the worst because it's the best because it's like really just amazing to be out in such a cool environment. Like it's phenomenal, but also like it kind of sucks because it's a high pressure situation in some ways. You have to really make sure that you're getting everything done exactly right

because there's not really take backs in the field because it costs a lot to get you there and you were trying to do everything like, you know, you're doing it live. We'll do it live. And yeah, it's also remote. So if like, you know, if something breaks and you are you don't have the exact size of screwdriver to fix it, then you just got to figure it out. So it's really cool, but it's also like it's stressful in some ways. You really have to make sure you get it right.

So that's kind of the best and the worst. The best is just existing in those environments. And then the worst is the kind of pressure that goes with that. What do you love the most about seismology? Um, so the thing that I love most about seismology in general is that people are very interested in it. So when people find out I'm a seismologist, they want to tell me about an earthquake they felt and I love hearing those stories.

It's like really cool to hear the ways that different people have experienced earthquakes, you know, they told me about the one that they felt when they were a kid. They'll tell me about the one they felt, you know, a couple months ago or something. It's cool to hear people's stories. And it's also cool to like help bust some myths about seismology, remind people that no, nobody can be predicting earthquakes. No, there's no such thing as earthquake weather. No, we don't know when the next one will be and we're hiding it.

Like there's, there's, there's all kinds of, there's all kinds of myths to bust about seismology. So I really like just that it's a science that a lot of people are interested in just in general. Oh, and what is the best gear to have? Is it earmuffs, a ski mask, a cape? The important thing is the waterproof pants. I think really the essential field item without waterproof pants.

You are sunk. But yeah, a good jacket and the waterproof pants are, are, are the real game changer clutch. Yeah. Oh, this is amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

So ask smart people your stupidest questions. I swear I have done this thousands of times. No one has thrown a shoe at me yet. It's glorious. So to learn more about Celeste Labed's work, you can follow her on Twitter or Instagram at Celeste Labed's L-A-B-E-D-Z. And we are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. Please do befriend us.

I'm on both at Ali Ward with 1L. We have an oligies podcast Facebook group full of very cool human people sharing weird science stories. Thank you, Aaron Talbert for admitting that. And for hats and pins and totes and such, hit up oligiesmerch.com, which is admin by Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast, You Are That. And assistant editing was done by Jarrett Sleeper of the podcast, My Good Bad Brain.

And thank you to the rock that is Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts a dinosaur slash Laura Dern podcast, Sea Jurassic Right, and a kitty podcast, The Purrcast. Nick Thorburn of the Band Islands wrote and performed the theme song. And if you listen to the end, you know that I reward and burden you with a secret from my soul. And this week's secret is that I'm in Chicago. It's very cold and I'm here for Jarrett's grandfather's memorial service. And we were celebrating his life by gathering in his favorite local watering

hole. And I was offered a shot of Jepsen's Malort, which if you are from Chicago, you know, this is a local tonic that Chicagoans muster through with pride. And we had a shot of Malort in his honor. And it tasted kind of like herbs and vanilla going down. And then it had this aftertaste, like a bitter aftertaste. I was trying to figure out what it was like grapefruit or something. And then I realized what it reminded me of, and it was bile. Anyway, to Chicago, I also ate a hot dog.

And I'm so sorry, but I did put ketchup on it. I'm recording this under a desk in an Airbnb because I want to get it to you ASAP. OK, bye bye.