Science Friday - American Chestnut, ‘Don’t Look Up’ Movie, Aurora Electrons. December 24, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

The Resurrection Of The American Chestnut At the turn of the 20th century, the American chestnut towered over other trees in forests along the eastern seaboard. These giants could grow up to 100 feet high and 13 feet wide. According to legend, a squirrel could scamper from New England to Georgia on the canopies of American chestnuts, never touching the ground. Then the trees began to disappear, succumbing to a mysterious fungus. The fungus first appeared in New York City in 1904—and it spread quickly. By the 1950s, the fungus had wiped out billions of trees, effectively driving the American chestnut into extinction. Now, some people are trying to resurrect the American chestnut—and soon. But not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. Reporter Shahla Farzan and “Science Diction” host and producer Johanna Mayer bring us the story of the death and life of the American chestnut. ’Don’t Look Up’ Asks If Satire Can Stir Us From Climate Apathy What if scientists warned of a certain upcoming doomsday and no one took them seriously? That’s the plot of director Adam McKay’s latest dark comedy, Don’t Look Up. Two astronomers discover a comet that’s heading towards the Earth. The catch: There’s only six months and 14 days to avert a total annihilation of humanity. The scientists, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, embark on a media campaign to convince the world and the president, played by Meryl Streep, to take the threat seriously. Joining Ira to talk about the parallels between this movie and real world crises like climate change and COVID-19 are Sonia Epstein, executive editor and associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and Samantha Montano, assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, based in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Montano is also the author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontline of the Climate Crisis. Surfing Particles Can Supercharge Northern Lights For thousands of years, humans have been observing and studying the Northern lights, aurora borealis, and their southern hemisphere counterpart, aurora australis. The simplest explanation for how these aurora form has been unchanged for decades: Charged particles, energized by the sun, bounce off the Earth’s protective magnetic field and create flashes of light in the process. But for a long time, scientists have known it was more complicated than that. What exactly gives those incoming particles the energy they need to create the patterns we see? And why are some aurora more dramatic and distinct, while others are subtle and hazier? Aurora researcher Jim Schroeder explains new work published in Nature Communications that suggests that in more vivid aurora, electrons may “surf” waves of energy from space into our atmosphere. The waves, called Alfvén waves, are a side effect of the solar wind warping the Earth’s magnetic field. Schroeder explains the weird physics of our aurora, and what we could learn about other objects in the universe as a result.    Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll talk about the surfing electrons that contribute to dramatic northern light displays. And a disaster scientist takes on the new movie, Don't Look Up. But first, if you've ever hiked around the forests of the eastern U.S., you might have noticed all the oaks and the pines and the maples. But there's a key player that's missing. The American Chestnut. The American Chestnut towered over these canopies, a little over the little over.

over a century ago. One of these trees could grow over 100 feet tall and 12 feet wide, and there were lots of them. So many, people like to say, a squirrel could go from New England to Georgia, leaping chestnut to chestnut, without ever touching the ground. But then an invasive fungus wiped them out. Billions of trees gone in the span of a single generation. Now decades later, people are trying to bring them back, using science to resurrect these old giants. But not everyone's happy about it. Here with the story, our reporter's Shayla Farsan and science diction, Johanna Mayer. Full disclosure, Johanna's partner's aunt, works for the American Chestnut Foundation. They come up later in this story. And with that, here is the tale of the

vanishing chestnut trees. Back when there were still American chestnuts, every year, the trees produced baskets of rich sweet nuts, each one encased in a spiny jacket. You could eat them right off the tree, or grind them up into flour, or even cook them into toasty little snacks. People just adore these trees. I've heard people talk about it being, you know, the people's tree, our tree. Susan Frankel is the author of American Chestnut, the life, death, and rebirth of a perfect tree. She says for a lot of people, especially in Appalachia, this tree held a trestress. measured place in their lives. It really was like a member of the family.

And when the trees started to disappear, you know, people wept over them. People had pictures in the family scrapbooks of the trees that they would visit each fall to harvest nuts from. And from an industry perspective, the American chestnut was a dream too. The lumber was light, made it a lot cheaper to ship. And it was rot resistant, thanks to the high tanning content. And by the late 1800s, Americans were making just about everything out of chestnut. Railroad ties, telegraph poles, church pews, pianos. It really furnished people's lives cradle to grave.

People made cradles out of it. They made coffins out of it. But one summer day, in 1904, a forester named Herman Merkel was strolling the grounds at the Bronx Zoo when he noticed something strange. The leaves on one of the chestnut trees were wilted. And when he looked closer, he saw the branches were covered in tiny orange specks. Merkel didn't know it at the time, but those little dots were from a fungus native to East Asia. No one knows exactly when or how the fungus got to the U.S. But general consensus is that it hitched a ride with a different chestnut species from Japan.

And once it landed, it spread. Fast. In 1908, just four years after Herman first noticed those wilted trees, the New York Times ran an article announcing, quote, chestnut trees are doomed. By 1912, all the chestnuts in New York City were dead. And over the next few years, the fungus spread to Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee. By the 1950s, the blight had effectively finished off all. the American chestnuts. The fungus spreads through tiny spores that enter the tree through a wound or a little crack in the bark. And then it basically strangles the tree, siphoning off water in nutrients until the tree is dead.

Well, mostly dead. Because this fungus doesn't attack the roots, so chestnuts can keep on sending up shoots, which get to a certain size, before eventually the fungus kills them again. And on and on. You can still find thousands and thousands of these small sprouts in the understory, most of them blighted. And again, you know, because they're these sprouts and they're not producing chess, most of them are not producing chestnuts anymore, we call them functionally extinct. Sarah Fitzsimmons is the director of restoration with the American Chestnut Foundation, a nonprofit that's been trying to bring this species back since the 1980s. But people have been trying to save the chestnut for much longer, really, since the blight first landed.

First, people tried walling off the fungus. New York and New Jersey's chestnuts were clearly goners. And in Pennsylvania, the whole eastern part of the state, east of the Susquehanna River, was the lost cause. But west of the river was looking pretty good. So they came up with a plan to cut down vast swaths of trees, create a kind of firebreak. by the time they finished game planning, the fungus had already jumped the river. Strike one. Another option, don't stop the fungus, fix the tree.

The American chestnut was basically helpless in the face of the blight, but the Chinese chestnut, it's resistant. So what if you combined the two? It's called bat crossing, creating a hybrid, then breeding that hybrid again and again with a target species. The idea is to make a tree that's just like an American chestnut, but still has some Chinese chestnut genes that make it resistant to the blight. The problem with that plan, chestnut trees take years to reach maturity. And plant breeding is really slow when you're working on that kind of timeline. It just wasn't sustainable. Strike two. Then there was the nuclear

option. There was irradiation experiments. That was one of my favorite. It started in the 50s. back when nuclear radiation was on everyone's mind. The idea was that if you irradiated enough chestnut seeds, you'll induce a bunch of mutations. Much like, you know, a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters, you know, maybe we'll get a mutation that causes resistant in American chestnuts. Alas, none of the monkeys hit the typewriters. Strike three.

Eventually, a team at the State University of New York landed on a new strategy. Genetic engineering. It gave them a lot more control than traditional plant breeding. Instead of slowly working toward a lucky genetic combination, they could choose specific genes from other species and put them directly into the chestnut genome, creating a transgenic species. And in time, the Sunni scientists found just the fungus-fighting gene they needed in wheat.

When they put that wheat gene in American chestnuts, the seedlings could ward off the fungus. as well as Chinese chestnuts. The team published that work almost a decade ago, back in 2013. But now, they're facing a new kind of hurdle. The previous ones were primarily scientific, and the current one is more political and social that we're now facing in getting these out into the forest. The first hurdle, bureaucracy. There are three different federal agencies involved in this process.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is involved in approving. genetically modified plants. The Environmental Protection Agency is studying the chestnut's possible environmental impact, and the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of reviewing the food safety of transgenic nuts. These agencies probably won't release their decisions before 2023 at the earliest. So, more than a century after that strange orange fungus was spotted in the Bronx, the American chestnut might be coming back, except some people are wondering, is this even a good idea? It's sort of like, what's the rush? Why the push? Let's make sure we're acting in the tree's best interest.

Neil Patterson Jr. works at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY and is a member of the Tuscarora Nation. The Tuscarora are part of a group of six nations known as the Haudenoshone Confederacy. Neil says the American Chestnut once played an important role in their lives. The Houdinashone peoples extracted oil from the nuts or ground them up to make flour. The leaves were used for medicinal purposes, and the wood became the backbone of their longhouses. One of the arguments for restoring the American chestnut has been this idea that indigenous peoples could reintegrate it into their traditions. But Neil says he's morally opposed to planting transgenic chestnuts in the wild. He's worried they could affect the forest ecosystem.

system in unexpected ways. And what then? One of the concerns that I'm slowly trying to understand is the potential to recall this technology at some point in the future. The people trying to restore the American chestnut say a lot of work is going into ensuring the trees are ready for release. There's the long governmental review process and a lot of research to back it up. Researchers have studied how the transgenic trees would affect bees, the soil, even tadpoles and water, and they haven't found any adverse effects. But Neil says even beyond the specific environmental concerns is a deeper question, whether we should try to restore the chestnut tree just because we can. In other words,

should we meddle with the earth? The people who want to preserve the chestnut argue we should. People created this problem. People should fix it. But these kinds of fundamental philosophical questions are the hardest to answer. In October, Neil Patterson and about a dozen other indigenous people went to pick chestnuts in a small town in upstate New York. The trees were planted about 20 years ago by volunteers from the American Chestnut Foundation. They're not hybrids, not transgenic trees. They're the original. And even though they're struggling with the blight, some trees were just big enough to actually produce nuts. For most of those on the outing that October day, it was their first time picking chestnuts, feeling the spiny burrs prick their fingers. And then it sort of hit me at some point to think about this as perhaps the last time Haudunushoni people will gather what,

We can say fairly certain our non-transgenic American chestnut. Neil says over the years, some of the history of this tree has been lost. The blight arrived at a time when indigenous children were being sent to boarding schools, told not to speak their native languages. He says some nations don't even have a word in their language for chestnut anymore. Others, like the Tuscarora, are rediscovering it. In my own language, chitgas. Jitges is how we say chestnut in Tuscarora.

So I've been making it a habit to, when I see a chestnut, call it its real name, the name that it was meant to hear, Jitkes. Now, he says, they're starting to think about what to call this new transgenic chestnut, trying to figure out where it fits in. That story was produced by Shayla Farsan and Johanna. mayor, along with Ella Fedder. We have to take a break, and when we come back, how do disaster movies help us make sense of the biggest threats to humanity? We'll be talking about the new movie Don't Look Up with disasterologists Samantha Montana. Hey, Ira here with an exciting message. Science

Friday currently has a dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect. This means that any donation made through December 31st will be doubled, including yours. Now, I don't have to tell you that the for Science Friday is stronger than ever. So please head over to ScienceFriday.com slash support to make a gift. We depend on the generosity of fans and listeners. Again, that's Science Friday.com slash support. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. What have scientists warned of a certain upcoming doomsday, and no one took them seriously? That's the plot of Director Adam McKay's latest dark comedy don't look up. Two astronomers discover a comet that's heading towards the

Earth, and there's only six months and 14 days to avert a total annihilation of humanity. The scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence embark on a media campaign to convince the world and the president played by Merrill Streep to take the threat seriously. How certain is this? There's 100% certainty of impact. Please, don't say 100%. Can we just call it a potentially significant event? But it isn't potentially going to happen. 99.78% to be exact.

Oh, great. Okay, so it's not 100%. I'm going to call it 70%. Let's just, let's move on. But it's not even close to 70%. Oh, by the way, this movie is billed as a comedy. Joining me now to talk about the parallels we can draw from this movie to real world crises like climate change and COVID

are Sonia Epstein, executive editor, an associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image, based in New York City, and Samantha Montano, assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, an author of Disasterology, Dispatches from the Frontline of the Climate Crisis. She's based in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Thank you for having us. I just want to warn our listeners a bit that the following conversation might contain, spoilers, which we might not be able to avoid. So be ready for them or watch the movie before we

begin our conversation. And let me begin, Sonia, with you talking about movie director Adam McKay, who has talked quite a bit about how the movie really is an allegory for climate change. It's interesting when watching it because, you know, perhaps for some of you and for me too, the first thing that comes to mind is not climate change per se, but maybe the current pandemic and the way that things have become so polarized. Adam McKay, you know, he started writing this film in 2019. He said he was inspired by a book that came out that same year called The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming by David Wallace Wells, which is, as the title indicates,

about the threat of global warming and climate change. And he really wanted to do something that was about that. And so climate change is something that happens. gradually over decades, over millennia, and not something that is as locatable, say, or evident as a comet, where you can just look up as the film says and sort of see what's coming at you. So far as I've heard Adam McKay say, you know, he chose this conceit of the comet to sort of make the problem imminent, tangible in a way that climate change really is not. and in so doing to show the sort of willful ignorance towards even a disaster as a parent, as a comet. Samantha, do you agree that this is a good analogy? You know, I really struggle with this.

I went into watching this movie, having listened to a lot of Adam McKay's interviews, and so I went into it as this is a climate movie. But as I was watching it almost immediately, I felt like I was watching the pandemic. And, you know, certainly there are similarities between the pandemic and climate change and the global nature of those two and, you know, the fact that they require a global solution and the politics and the economics of both of those situations. We run into this problem of trying to use a comet that has a specific date and time that it will cause destruction as a metaphor for climate because, of course, climate manifests as many little impacts over. a much, much longer period of time. I think there was an interesting metaphor and comparison in the film where it started out as trying to convince the world, these scientists, convincing the world that all humanity was

going to die. And then it quickly morphed into what we see today, basically, oh, this is a hoax. Wait a minute. Don't believe what your eyes see. And that's actually the title of the movie. the hoaxers were saying, don't look up. Don't look at the comment. It's not there. Yeah, you know, this is where I think maybe there was a bit of a clear parallel with climate change in that we are beginning to see the fingerprints of climate change in our day-to-day lives

as we're seeing more and more climate-related disasters occur across the U.S. around the world. And scientists are able to do attribution studies and make more clear those connections between specific disasters and the climate changing as a whole. Certainly there is, you know, in a sense, you can see the disaster a bit more. It's a bit more clear than it was, you know, going back a decade, two decades, three decades. But still, you have this issue of it being spread out over this really long period of time. Maybe one of the things that the film does parallel, and I am also curious for you as a science journalist is the sort of feeling of frustration or even disbelief that scientists or science journalists, people who are concerned about our world and the species

that are in it feel, you know, we've been telling people that climate change is real, that it's happening. And yet there is a real lack of action. And so that struck me as the main parallel between the events unfolding in the film and what's unfolding in real life. And yeah, I guess I'm curious for each of you if that it rang true in that way. One of the disappointing but actually real world issues was the total failure of the media to take this seriously. I mean, they go on a talk show, which is similar to the morning talk shows there. And as they are there to present the news about the destruction or the imminent destruction of the world, the hosts of the talk show just they laugh it off.

And even before they sit down, one of the producers says, keep it light. Keep it light as if this is something that, you know, just morning talk show fair. And that's really disturbing as a journalist to see the screenwriter saying, you know, this is the state of the media now and that's how we think it really would happen. Yeah, I will say that scene in particular definitely resonated with me as somebody who goes on various media, platforms to talk about disasters, to talk about climate change, to advocate for policy change, to prevent destruction in its various forms, seeing the comments about, oh, they need media training before they go on TV again, kind of how the journalists interacted with those scientists,

saying, like you said, keep things light. I've heard very similar things as I've given interviews in the past, even just making sure that we end interviews on like a light note, you know, getting asked questions like, well, what's your favorite disaster movie? Just to, you know, keep things light at the end of interviews. So that piece of it definitely resonated. And Jennifer Lawrence has a great line, something along the lines of, you know, it's the end of the world. Maybe it's not supposed to be light. Maybe it's, you know, supposed to make us stop and pay attention and feel bad. Sonia, you know, don't look up reminded me immediately of another terror comedy from another era. And I'm talking about the 1960s film, Dr. Strangelove, about the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War.

And it was, is really, you know, you look at this and you see that they're trying to make a comedy out of something that we were all very fearful of. Is that the role of film? I mean, is that the role of trying to make a comedy? can we reach more people with comedies than a straight documentary or a disaster? Yeah, I think those are all good points. I mean, you know, I think there's other films that have a more similar or comparable plot point like Armageddon, you know, to Don't Look Up. But Dr. Strangelove and Don't Look Up are similar because, A, they're both comedies, but also they're not action films. They're sort of inaction films and these sardonic critiques of our politics of these institutions.

that are kind of failing to act. And so I do think as comedies, there is a potential for films like don't look up to reach a broader audience and maybe become a sort of cultural touchstone that aids in difficult conversations, like about climate change, like about the pandemic. You know, so I do think comedy sort of has a potential

to hopefully bring people together. Samantha, the other big power player in the movie is the head of Bash, an amalgam of various tech CEOs. Some people have said that the lead character as a combination of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. And the point being is that it's all about the money. You can make money from a disaster.

What role do tech companies play in the real world in our understanding and action on COVID, for example, where drug companies are making huge profits? Naomi Klein coined the phrase disaster capitalism. So we see that various companies, companies make money when disasters happen or they, you know, make money in failing to prevent disasters from happening. And so certainly that is a huge issue when we look at why we are not taking more action to prevent disasters that are happening around the country. You know,

climate change is the obvious factor there in the connection with the oil and gas industry, of course, is quite clear. But also one of our, you know, the research shows us one of our major challenges across the country are development decisions that are being made. Those are decisions that are being made at the local level by developers that very often are paying off local politicians funding their campaigns. And we're seeing, you know, people building new buildings in areas that we know have a high risk of experiencing a disaster. And then it's up to the federal government to help come in, non-profits, individuals, to come in and pay for that requirement. on their own. So certainly the role of corporations and the role of capitalism are inextricably

tied in with how we approach risk and managing risk in this country. Samantha, as a disasterologist, is there a take-home message for you in this film? This movie did not necessarily have a happy ending, but I think the difference here is that we don't just have six months to save the world. climate change doesn't work quite that way, right? We need to act as quickly as possible, but it's not necessarily all or nothing as this film portrays. And so I think one thing that this film does really well is try to show the various moving parts of that need to kind of fall in line to have us be able to act. And, you know, look, this movie is not on its own going to solve climate change,

but I do hope that it signals a really important shift in Hollywood of making more climate change movies. There have been very few climate movies made in the past 20, 30 years. This one film is only going to do so much, right? We need a hundred other films about climate change to help people see what the problem is, to see solutions, to find characters that they identify with to help kind of create a vision for us moving forward and how we can address these, you know, deeply entrenched systematic problems that are creating the conditions that we are beginning to experience. We had that movie from years ago called The Day After Tomorrow.

Sure. Which was not very accurate scientifically. No. Yeah, no. Myself and my research partner, John Carr, we actually just published a study. where we watched 173 disaster movies from the past 20 years. And there were only a handful of movies that even mentioned climate change. And the ones that did did not portray climate change accurately.

But, you know, Hollywood has done several disaster movies in the past 20 years where they've kind of claimed it as a metaphor for climate change where they, you know, you have these very often asteroid-related movies. that are going to cause a global problem, require a global solution. So, you know, this movie does kind of fit into a more recent history of how climate and disaster movies in Hollywood have tried to tackle these issues. Obviously, the kind of ensemble cast that they have here will hopefully bring kind of more attention than some of those others have.

One thing that this film, and I'm also thinking of contagion from a few years back, which has become a touch point during the pandemic, what these films do potentially show is something about the scientific process and something about sort of the inherent uncertainty that's a part of the scientific process that I think we heard in the clip up top. Even where it's 100%, it's 99.97%.

And that means that scientists don't know 100%. And that's just kind of the truth of the scientific process. but I think that's also an issue with the media, right? Where, like, how do you embrace the fact that scientists can make mistakes and still have the public trust? This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Another interesting point that I found about the movie is that historically, we like to think that even though our country may be divided politically, but when a disaster happens, whether it's a war, or some other disaster, we all come together in a common cause and figure this out together. That does not seem to be the theme of this film.

That does not seem to be happening anymore in the greatly divided society we have. Yeah, so we actually have some insight here from disaster research on why that is. So usually when we think of disaster, we're thinking of these relatively short duration events. So you're thinking earthquake, tornado, hurricane, where the actual response to those events takes place over a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. Whereas, as we've seen with the pandemic, we have a response that has lasted at this point nearly two years. And there are really clear differences in how human behavior manifests, how our institutions respond to these really short-term acute disasters versus these much longer in-duration disasters. So this movie in particular

was really interesting because they had this six-month, which usually would fall more into this long-duration framework for thinking about disaster. And in terms of some of the human behavior that was depicted in the movie, it does kind of align much more with what we've seen during the pandemic. But this is one of the real challenges with climate change. Climate change. Climate change itself is not from an emergency management framework, a disaster. It is influencing other disasters that are occurring, which is one of the reasons it's really kind of hard to think about. And there's kind of multiple layers of issues going on that you have to unpack. Well, I hope everybody gets a chance to watch this, because we'll give you something to think about.

And I hope we did not give away any of the spoilers in our conversation. I want to thank both of you taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. Sonia Epstein, executive editor and associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image based in Queens, New York, and Samantha Montano, assistant professor of emergency management, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, also author of Disasterology, Dispatches from the Frontline of the Climate Crisis. She's based in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.

We have to take a break, and when we come back, there's more to the Northern Lights than meets the eye. We'll talk to a physicist who's been investigating one of the big mysteries of the Aurora Borealis. You're going to want to stay tuned for that. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. One of the best light displays of the winter season is the northern lights, the Aurora Borealis. Or if the Southern Hemisphere is your preference, try Aurora Australis. The long nights and clear, cloudless skies of winter make it easier to catch a glimpse of the fantastic greens, pinks, purples of the polar auroras. And if you're lucky enough to see the sky show this winter, you might notice that not every aurora is created equal. No, some may look blurry and diffuse,

while others shine in distinct, ever-moving bands of color. I have to say, I have never seen one, but I am always hopeful. Well, believe it or not, with all that we know about Earth science, the reason for this variable display has been a long-standing mystery in the astronomical community. And joining me now is someone whose research may have finally helped us know why the Aurora comes in such different flavors. Here with me is Dr. Jim Schrader, assistant professor of physics at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. A pleasure to be with you. So what is known about how the northern lights and their southern hemisphere cousins happen? Yeah, so it's known that auroras are produced when energetic particles from space, like

electrons come raining down into the atmosphere. And they'll strike atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere. And actually, these energetic particles will give their energy to the atoms and molecules of the atmosphere. And then eventually those atoms and molecules give up their energy in the form of a little flash of light. A photon is given off. And when a bunch of photons are given off over a region of the sky, that's what makes up an aurora. But as you said, there are some mysteries here because auroras have all sorts of different appearances, suggesting that What's actually pushing these electrons towards Earth varies. And there's different types of things that can push electrons towards Earth.

Such as, I know the sun is a major player here, right? That's right. So the sun is sending a constant stream of something called plasma. And so plasma is actually, it's the fourth state of matter. We often learn about solids, liquids, and gases, but we don't always learn about plasma on the same footing. Plasma is an ionized gas. So if you take a gas and heat it up, you get ions and electrons. and the sun is sending this stream of plasma called the solar wind that flows past the earth.

And some of those particles get funneled down towards the polar regions and cause auroras. And so what are the other things you mentioned? There may be different things, other things that are pushing the electrons. It turns out that the direct streaming of solar particles towards the earth is not sufficient to actually produce visible auroras. And so there has to be some extra energy boost given to these particles. particles before they crash into the atmosphere. And so there's various things that are believed to cause this energy boost that's needed

for particles streaming downward. And there are things like actually particles catching waves and riding waves and being accelerated on waves as they come down towards the earth. And then there's also currents that flow in the magnetic field around the earth and help to sustain the magnetic field around the earth. And those currents can carry particles down towards the earth as well. Waves? What kind of waves are you talking about? There's waves that exist in plasma that are not waves we experience in our everyday life, right?

When we think about waves in our everyday life, we think about light waves, we think about sound waves, we think about radio waves or x-rays. But actually in plasmas, there's a whole bunch of other types of waves. And one of them that's known to exist in the plasma around the earth is Elphane waves, named for a Swedish physicist, Hannes Elfane, who won the Nobel Prize. and this is a type of vibration in plasma. And so it's known that there are elphane waves around the earth. And actually, it's known that there are elphane waves above auroras, traveling down towards the earth in the regions above auroras. And so there's been a hypothesis for a long time

that these waves are a part of pushing electrons toward Earth and actually causing those electrons to have enough energy to produce visible auroras. Well, the geek in me wants to know them both, about these alphane waves. How do they start? Where do they end? Give me some more details on that, please. Yeah, so elphine waves are a disturbance of magnetized plasma. So I was talking about plasma being ions and electrons. And so to make it magnetized, there has to be a magnetic field running through it as well. And that's exactly what we have around the Earth. Earth has its magnetic field

that extends out into space. And so when the ions and electrons and magnetic field get together, there can be vibrations of that magnetic field. If you picture kind of waves on a string, if you take an instrument and you pluck the string, with a high-speed camera, you could see waves traveling along the string. And actually, it's the same, very similar mathematics behind elphane waves.

There's vibrations that carry along the magnetic field lines very analogously to how waves travel along strings. Wow. And so your research has been trying to connect these waves to the electrons that give us the most distinct, the dramatic aurora, That's right. We have all sorts of survey data and case studies from satellites and rockets that have shown us for decades that elphane waves are really common above auroras, and they're actually really common above what are called discrete auroras, these really bright bands of light across the sky, the sort of iconic auroras that you think of when you picture an aurora in your mind is a discrete aurora. And so we know that elphane waves are common above those auroras. And actually as the auroras get to be more active and there's more auroras in the sky, there's more elphane waves present during those times. And so there's this really

suggestive correlation. But we've never actually been able to say definitively if the elphane waves are a part of causing the auroras or if simply the elphane waves happen alongside them. And so our goal was to try to do a really detailed study, create elphane waves in a laboratory with conditions relevant to where auroras are produced and monitor those elphane waves to see if they can give their energy to electrons. As I was saying, electrons need a boost in energy. in order to actually produce auroras. And what did you find in your lab? Drum roll, please.

That's right. Drum roll please. We found elphine waves do transfer energy to electrons in conditions relevant to where auroras are produced. And so that means we have a definitive test showing that elphane waves can participate in the production of auroras. And actually the way that this process would unfold is pretty striking. If you picture surfing, I've actually never been surfing, but what I'm told.

So we're on the same page. Okay, perfect. What I'm told is that you have to paddle up to the right speed. And if you watch surfing videos, this is what you see. You don't see the surfers just sitting out there in the middle of the ocean. And so once you're at the right speed, then you can be picked up by an ocean wave. And what we found in the plasma in our laboratory experiments is something similar, that electrons have to be going at the right speed in order to be picked up by the elfin waves.

So they're surfing on elphane waves. So next time you see an aurora, you could think about electrons surfing on elphane waves out in space. Now that you know this, how does it go from the lab to space? That's right. Of course, we would love to do a demonstration, actually an in-situ measurement of this process, right? You notice I said, Elphane waves can cause auroras in conditions relevant to where auroras are formed. What we'd like to do next is actually go out into space and perform a measurement that would definitively show this happening out in situ. That's been a really tricky task, and that's actually initially why we,

turned to the laboratory. But our ability to take space-based measurements is always improving. That door is not closed. Okay. Well, we'll wait for that to happen. All these surfing electrons relate to the sharp, distinct auroras. Now, what about when auroras are very blurry looking? Do we have no surfing electrons there? That's right. So when auroras are more blurry looking, those are called diffuse auroras. And it's believed that the source of those electrons, what's actually pumping up the energy of those electrons is something different in that case. Earth has this band of energetic particles around it called the radiation belts. Actually, there's a couple belts around the earth, and some of them come and go. So there's some belts that are there,

and then they vanish. But it's believed that diffuse auroras are produced by particles leaking out of that energetic belt of particles around the earth. And so there'd be some trapped particles that make their way down to the poles from those radiation belts. And so that would not be electrons surfing on elphane waves. That would be some other scattering process. That's terrific. So that's it. You solved a 40-year mystery. That's right. Although I have to say there are a lot of open questions about auroras. There's auroras at Earth. There are auroras elsewhere. This isn't to be interpreted as meaning that we've solved everything there is to know about auroras, but we have answered a long-standing question. So if you're looking out at an aurora, I'm outside in the cold. I'm noticing

its color and its shape. What are all the things I can tell about it just from the naked eye? Yeah, that's a great question. So as you're looking at an aurora, the first thing you could do is look to see if it's a discrete aurora or a diffuse aurora, if it has well-defined bands of light, or if it's just kind of hazy. That would give you a hint about if the electrons were being pushed down towards Earth by elphane waves, by surfing, or if they were leaking out of the radiation belts instead. Another thing you might notice is actually the different colors of auroras. And so auroras are often green, but sometimes they're reddish and purplish. And that would indicate actually where the light is being given off at different altitudes. Is that right? It's like a rainbow there.

Yeah. So there's the atomic transitions that make up different colors require different amounts of time in order to occur. And so if an atom, getting ready to have an atomic transistors, and give off, let's say, purple light. If it bumps into something else in the meantime before that transition can occur, then the energy is stolen away and it won't actually produce its little flash of light. And so as you go up into the atmosphere, things are more spread out. The density goes down. And that allows more time for the transitions to happen and we can see different colors. Can the colors tell me anything about what elements, what molecules are being activated here? That's right. So oxygen is known for giving off it.

kind of yellow, green light, and also some red light, but the red light given off by oxygen is much, much higher in altitude because those transitions require a lot more time to occur. And then nitrogen molecules can give off kind of dark reddish light. We've been talking about the role of the sun in bringing us these aurora displays. Can understanding the sun better help us predict when we might see a lot of auroras or what the nature of them might be. Yeah. So the sun is, of course, the ultimate driver of all auroral activity. If we didn't have the sun sending out its solar plasma, the solar wind, then we wouldn't have auroras. Knowing something about the sun, especially the variations of that solar wind as it's coming out, helps us to predict when there might be

more or less auroras. And so the sun goes through an 11-year cycle where it's more or less active, and the solar wind is more or less variable as it's streaming outward. And that is a good indication on a sort of day-to-day basis when you're likely to see more auroras or less auroras. But there are a lot of mysteries that remain. Like, why does the sun have its 11-year cycle? And why do certain things that we can see on the sun actually correlate to the variability of the solar wind as it's streaming past the earth?

Really cool. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. in case you're just joining us. We're talking with Jim Schrader, assistant professor of physics at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Everything you've ever wanted to know about Aurora's. And Jim, what do you not know that you would like to know? I'm going to give you the blank check question,

which I give a lot of scientists. If you could build a device or study something more, and it would cover that cost, what would you like to know? How would you do that? I would love to have fleets of, satellites at every planet where we know auroras exist so that we can get really complete data about what's creating those auroras in different scenarios.

Like we see auroras at Jupiter that look much different from what we see here at Earth. And there's also evidence of ultraviolet auroras appearing at Mars. No kidding. And so I would love to know more about that. Ultraviolet auroras at Mars. So if they were ultraviolet and you were on Mars looking up, you might not see them because we can't see ultraviolet naturally. That's right.

You need an ultraviolet camera. And that's in fact how they have been seen with a UV camera on the Maven spacecraft. Do these electrons, as they're traveling up and down, do they create any sounds as they travel? So the electrons don't create sounds themselves, but they do have vibrations that map directly to the audible spectrum. So sounds that we can hear. So if you take the vibrations of electrons traveling around the earth and you just transform that into an audio file, you can hear it. And there are some great videos out there on YouTube of these types of noises, what are called electron whistler waves. And it's this really kind of eerie noise that, or it's a signal that is transformed into an eerie noise of kind of chirping, the frequency going up and the frequency coming down.

And it has to do with waves in plasma actually being separated by different frequencies. And I know there are a lot of ham radio enthusiasts that try to listen to these waves. That's right. So they're picking up those vibrations and then translating them into an audio signal using their receiver. Are there any other phenomena in the universe that this research into auroras might help us better understand stuff? Yeah. So I often get kind of the so what question. Why do we care about how electrons gain the energy that's needed to produce auroras? And so close to home, the reason why we care about something like this is because we're more dependent than we've, ever been on the space around Earth, what's called geospace. We have all sorts of assets and

satellites out there that help us to communicate and navigate and monitor the Earth. And so we care about the dynamics of what's happening around the Earth. But then in terms of just kind of pure science questions, what's left out there that we don't understand? There's all sorts of energetic particles out in the universe. So if you look even just a little bit further out from the auroras, there's the radiation belts and the energetic particles of the radiation belts. We don't really understand how those particles get to be so energetic. And we'd love to know that, again, because we depend on geospase. You know, I heard this year earlier in the year, as I say, I have never managed to see an aurora,

but I heard that the Aurora was moving up and down the hemisphere a little bit for certain reasons. Why is that? Why do we see that, hey, some people a little further south might be able to see the aurora at this time of the year. That's right. So when there are geomagnetic storms that are more severe, like there's a larger disturbance of Earth's magnetic field by the variable flow of the solar wind past the Earth, that tends to create auroras that are visible at lower latitudes.

So we don't often get to see them here in Illinois, but there's been a couple nights this year where we've been warned that it might be a good time to go outside and look. And so that has to do with actually the disturbances of the magnetic field, kind of penetrating deeper into Earth's magnetic field and being visible at lower latitudes. Well, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and hope we get to see one, or I get to see one, Jim.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Absolutely. My pleasure, Ira. Happy holidays. Jim Schrader, assistant professor of physics at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. But if you want to continue exploring auroras and this idea of electrons surfing on magnetic waves some more. We've got something special for you on our website. It's a fun activity you and any young person you know can try. Learn to think like an Aurora scientist, just like Jim here, to predict

the color and shape of Aurora in the sky. That's on ScienceFriday.com slash waves. ScienceFriady.com slash waves. Now here's Verlissa Mayers with some folks who make this show possible. Thanks, Ira. John Dankowski is our director of news and radio projects. Sochi Garcia is our K-12 educational program manager. Luke Groskin is our video producer. Charles Berkwist is our radio director. And I'm office manager, Felissa Mears. Thanks for listening.

Thank you, Valissa. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And on the SciFri Vox Pop app this week, have you been out birding this? winter. We'd like to know about it. Tell us what you've seen. We're talking birds on an upcoming

show, and we'd like to hear what you have to say. That's on the SciFri Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend and a safe holiday. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.