Science Friday - Australia Fires, Great Lakes Book Club. Jan 10, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

How Climate Change Is Fanning Australia’s Flames  All eyes have been on Australia in recent weeks as the country’s annual summer fire season has spun out of control with devastating damage to endangered wildlife, homes, farms, indigenous communities, and—as smoke drifts across unburned major metropolitan centers like Sidney and Canberra—air quality.  Vox reporter Umair Irfan and fire scientist Crystal Kolden explain why climate scientists are pointing the finger squarely at climate change for contributing to the fires’ unique size and intensity. Plus, Australian climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick explains why climate change has heightened the country’s naturally volatile weather patterns to make this the worst fire season in living memory. Science Friday Book Club’s Winter Read Plunges Into The Great Lakes Even on a clear day, you can’t see across Lake Michigan. The same is true of the other Great Lakes: Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. At average widths of 50 to 160 feet across, the five magnificent pools are too massive for human eyes to make out the opposite shore. These glacier-carved inland seas hold 20% of the fresh surface water on the planet, and are a source of food, water, and sheer natural wonder for millions of people in communities living on their sprawling shores. While the lakes have cleaned up immensely from a past of polluted rivers that caught on fire, it’s not all smooth sailing under the surface. From the tiny quagga and zebra mussels that now coat lake beds to the looming threat of voracious, fast-breeding carp species, the lakes are a far cry from the lush ecosystems they once were. This winter, the Science Friday Book Club will explore Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which details both the toll of two centuries of human interference—and how the lakes can still have a bright future. SciFri Book Club captain Christie Taylor is back to kick off our reading! She talks with ecologist Donna Kashian at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and Wisconsin author Peter Annin about the ravaged ecosystems and enduring value of these waterways.  Studying Drought, Under Glass Scientists are using the enclosed Biosphere 2 ecosystem to investigate how carbon moves in a rainforest under drought conditions. KNAU science reporter Melissa Sevigny tells us the State of Science. Solving The Mystery Of Ancient Egyptian Head Cones Ancient Egyptian artwork often depicts people wearing ceremonial head cones, but the role of these head dressings remained a mystery. Journalist and author Annalee Newitz talks about the first piece of physical evidence found of these head cones and what they may have been used for. Plus, other stories including a group of scientists who trained cuttlefish to wear 3D glasses to test their depth perception. 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 how climate changes fanning the flames of Australia's deadly bushfire season. But first, there has been an archaeological mystery. Ancient Egyptian art depicts all sorts of headwear, from crowns to masks. And physical evidence of these have been found, except for one piece, the head cone. It has never been seen until now. And only Newitz is here to fill us in on that story. And other short subjects in science.

She is a journalist and author based in San Francisco and joins us by Skype. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. What are these Egyptian head cones? Describe them for us, please. Well, in drawings that we've seen painted on walls and also carvings from ancient Egypt, they look a little bit like kids' birthday hats with a rounded top. So we're not talking about the sort of Saturday Night lifestyle cone heads.

These are smaller. And some of the pictures show them with zigzagged lines. coming out as if they have a scent to them. And so for a long time, archaeologists have wondered what the heck these were. They'd speculated that they had perfume in them. Maybe it was something people put on their heads during ceremonies because a lot of the pictures show people kind of partying when they're wearing them, either going to a special dinner or engaging in a religious activity. but we'd never found an example of it anywhere in graves or remains of Egyptian cities. And so people had actually started to think that maybe they didn't exist.

Maybe they were kind of like speech bubbles in a comic book. You know, people don't actually wear speech bubbles over their heads, but they draw people with speech bubbles all the time. But now a report came out last month that, in fact, two graves have been found where people were buried with these head cones. And in those two graves, at least, they were made of wax, and they were wrapped around some kind of textile. And so now we know that at least a few people were actually wearing head cones. But no clue from there about what they were used for or whether they were party hats or anything like that. Yeah, probably not party hats as we know them.

What's really interesting about this discovery is that it hints at the fact that people might have been using them in a lot of different ways. So these were part of a funeral right. The people who died were buried with them. And that was possibly just a small group of people who were doing that. One of the things we forget when we study ancient Egypt is that the Egyptian empire was very diverse. There were people from all different areas, speaking different languages with different cultures. So some of them may have used these cones in funeral rituals. Other people might have used them for other things. And so what we might have discovered is a little bit of Egyptian multiculturalism on top of the exciting discovery of the cone. The cones. Let's move out to something a little more

serious, and that is a CDC study saying that young women may be undergoing unnecessary pelvic exams. That's right. So this was a study that the CDC did with the University of San Francisco here where I'm based. And what they found was in looking at women between the ages of of 15 and 20, about 1.4 million of them had undergone pelvic exams that they didn't need. And that includes what's called a PAP exam, which is used to screen for cervical cancer. And so what this study really kind of wants people to understand is that currently the American Cancer Society and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists do not recommend that women have pelvic exams really until they're 20 or 21, unless they're pregnant or there's

some kind of STI involved. And so the main thing is if your doctor is telling you or your daughter that they need to have an exam like this, you really need to communicate more and find out why. Because these exams are expensive. They're really uncomfortable. People shouldn't have to go through them unless it's medically necessary. Because there's a certain amount of risk in having this, right? That's right, yeah, because especially for the PAP exam, which looks for cervical cancer, you can get a lot of false positives the younger you are. So that's, again, why the American Cancer Society says really don't get that exam until you're 21, because it may lead to more and more unnecessary tests.

The next story looks at the domestication of the tomato. Exactly. So we all know that the tomato is the most delicious fruit, and it evolved in the Americas and didn't actually come to Europe to get into tasty dishes like spaghetti until about 500 years ago during what's called the Colombian Exchange when Europeans started taking stuff from the Americas and bringing it back home. And what now we know from sequencing the genome of the standard big beefsteak tomato that you

get in the grocery store is that tomatoes had a really interesting early life. They evolved from very tiny tomatoes that are about the size of a blueberry. They're still around. They're called current tomatoes. And these evolved in South America. And when humans arrived, they immediately started domesticating a version of this current tomato that had already grown to be the size of a cherry tomato. And these were utterly delicious. And people domesticated them throughout South America, brought them all the way up to Mexico.

And then they underwent a change where these tomatoes stopped being domesticated. They were rewilded, essentially. And people stopped really farming them. and then jump ahead a few thousand years, and then people did start farming them again, and that's where we get our big giant tomatoes of today. Those domesticated, then rewilded, then redomesticated cherry tomatoes are what result

in our big giant beefsteak tomatoes of today. There was a time they were considered to be dangerous because they were in the nightshade family, right? Europeans were afraid to eat them. Yep, and then they tasted them. They didn't die, and they were just like, Let's put them in all food forever. But yeah, they have a great long history from South America.

Well, finally, scientists have trained Cuddlefish to wear 3D glasses. I know this is true because I spread that photo on my Twitter feed also. Is that the cutest little picture, but there's some science behind it? That's right. So Cuddlefish, which, if you don't know, are related to their cephalopods. They have 10 arms and they're very cute. And they have two eyes that operate independently of each other. that means that they can move their eyes all around on stocks and when I can look behind and when I can look ahead.

But they also are excellent at doing something that we think of as a human thing where our eyes basically track exactly the same. They always are looking in the same direction. And we have, as a result, stereoscopic vision, which gives us a 3D view of the world because of how our eyes work. So scientists wondered, well, cauddlefish are so good at depth perception. We know that they can catch shrimp like in the middle of the water just by zapping out their tentacle. So how are they doing it? Did they have some kind of stereoscopic vision? And so this is the moment that I really wish I'd been in the room for this conversation

among scientists because they were thinking to themselves, how can we figure out that Cuddlefish have stereoscopic vision? Let's give them stereoscopic glasses. Right. Let's give them 3D glasses and make them watch 3D movies and they gave them to them and they discovered that actually works, huh? They actually can see 3D. works. They have stereoscopic vision, and now there are videos on the internet of cuttlefish wearing red and blue glasses.

It's delightful. Thank you, Annalie. Great story. Annale Newitt, Science Journalist and author at San Francisco, California. Have a great weekend. Yeah, you too. We're going to time now to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. With climate change shifting weather patterns around the world and fires continuing to rage in Australia and the Amazon, the question of how carbon gets stored, used, and released in the environment is getting more attention. Researchers from over 80 institutions are collaborating on a project to track how the carbon flows in a rainforest under drought condition and as it recovers. But it's not happening down in the Amazon.

It's happening in Arizona. You know, the enclosed dome with a biosphere two habitat? They're letting researchers use things like carbon-13 labeled CO2 to follow the flow of carbon through the air, the plants, and the soil. Joining me now to talk about the project is Melissa Savani, science reporter at KNAU in Flagstaff. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. So tell us about this project. What is going on there in Biosphere 2?

Right. So one of the cool things about an enclosed ecosystem like the Biosphere 2 is that you can control the weather. So scientists decided why not turn off the rain for two months and force this rainforest to go through a drought? And one of the big questions they have is what the plants are going to do with their carbon when they're stressed out. So we know that forests soak up a huge amount of carbon, but we don't know exactly where that carbon goes. And that's because in the real world, you just can't track carbon cycles that closely. But the great thing about the biosphere too is that it's a sealed ecosystem. So one of the experiments the scientists did is they closed all of the doors and they shut themselves inside for four hours.

And I got to be in there with them. It was a great deal of fun. And they released canisters of carbon 13 into the air. So that's heavy carbon. And it's something that can track with scientific instruments. And then they had these instruments hooked up to every part of the rainforest to see exactly where those carbon molecules ended up. And so they could follow the carbon cycle, as we call it. Right, exactly.

And so it's a pretty cool setup. Inside the rainforest is this fake hollow mountain. And inside that mountain is a room that was filled with very precise scientific instruments. And there was this spider web of plastic tubing that connected those instruments to every part of the rainforest. It was something like two miles of tubes. And they were constantly collecting gas samples from different parts of the rainforest and figuring out where the carbon was going. So just as one example, it was pretty neat. They wanted to look at individual leaves.

So they wrapped up leaves in these Teflon bags and hooked them up to the instruments so they could see, you know, maybe the leaves are getting stressed out and they're releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. And they could look at that very closely. So how long will this experiment run and will they keep tweaking up the CO2 levels to sort of mimic what's going on in the atmosphere? Right. So the experiment, the drought itself was two months, and they ended that drought in December. and it's pretty important to track the recovery of the plants after the drought end.

So they're going to keep collecting data for the next month or two and watch how the plants recover. It's interesting because, you know, people were wondering what's the best use for Biosphere 2 and now it looks like we have found something really useful for it. Right, yeah, I don't think anyone could have predicted that. It certainly 30 years ago wasn't built specifically for this type of research. But it turns out to be a really useful place because, you know, if you're studying climate change and you're looking at ecosystems in the real world, they're very

complicated and it's super hard to control all of the variables. But if you're just looking at like a potic plant or a greenhouse, well, that's pretty small and you're not really getting the complete picture. So this rainforest is the size of a gymnasium. It's been living and thriving for 30 years. It's the perfect place to do this kind of research. And you got a chance to go in there, Melissa, thank you very much for telling us what it's like. Thanks so much. Melissa Svini is a science reporter at KNAU in Flagstaff. We're going to take a break and when we come back. We're going to check in on the fire disaster down under Australia's wildfires and how they fit in the picture of climate change. If you want to talk about that, our number 844-724-8255, tweet us at Cy Fry. We'll be right

back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Australia is burning. What is being described as a megafire, the joining of two large wildfires to create one super blaze. is now engulfing an area three times larger than any California fire. You've likely seen the photos, right? These scorched koalas, they're smoke-hased beaches, refugees and boats being rescued from burning coastal towns. And maybe you've heard some of the statistics, more than two dozen people,

more than a billion animals dead, millions of acres burned. Bush fires are a common occurrence in the Australian summer as drought and lightning intersect to burn the landscape. But this year, is, as many Australians will tell you, an unprecedented year, and the worst disaster in living memory in terms of how big the fires have been, how much damage they've caused. Earlier this year, this week, we spoke to a climate scientist in Australia, Dr. Sarah Perkins-Pactrick, University of New South Wales and Sydney, who said that this year's fire season was no surprise

whatsoever to climate scientists who have been predicting an intensification of fires under models of climate change. There's lots of reports and research saying that a longer fire season with more intense fires was going to happen under climate change, particularly in South East Australia, and that's exactly what we've seen.

So, you know, there's part of me's like, well, you know, guys, kind of told you about this. We warned you as much as we possibly could. But at the same time, it's absolutely shocking. Like, so many people have lost their homes, we've had a lot of deaths, half a billion animals have been killed.

It's horrible. No one wanted this to happen. We knew it was going to happen, but by no means do we actually want it to happen. Dr. Perkins-Captric also noted that the record temperature for Western Sydney was just toppled an entire degree Celsius. That's two degrees Fahrenheit. Fewer than five years after the last record was established. I studied that a colleague of mine led, you know, it was saying that in a few decades in Western Sydney, we will see temperatures of 50-ish degrees Celsius. and we were so close to that thus the other day. So, you know, what we thought might happen in decades might actually happen within the next 10 years. And that, you know, that's quite scary that, yeah, these climate projections are getting better. The models are getting more accurate and precise.

But even then things are happening at times faster than we can predict. Dr. Perkins-Cyr-Pactric told us that while this year was an unprecedented season for fire, it's just a matter of time now before Australia has another one. just as bad. What was once unheard of could happen again in just 10 or 20 years, and she's hoping that Australians will be ready next time. But how do we draw the line between climate change and this year's disaster? Are future wildfires preventable in a warming world? And will Australia's politicians see this as a reason to work harder on carbon emissions? In Melbourne, 10,000 people took to the streets, as others did across the country, voicing their anger at Prime Minister

Scott Morrison's inaction to combat climate change. We'll only see more of this. Joining me to talk about all of this is Umerer Fon, a staff writer for Vox based in Washington, D.C. Welcome, Omer. Hey, Ira, thanks for having me. Also, Dr. Crystal Coden, an associate professor of fire science at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me. Omer, what are people telling you about what it's a professor? like to be in Australia right now? I spoke to a researcher who was in Canberra, and he was just saying that the main impact that they're having is the smoke, and it's been really devastating that this choking air quality has caused a meaningful reduction in quality of life. People are talking about getting headaches just by walking outside. There was a report of a woman who just got off of an airplane fell ill and then was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. So it's a non-trivial

amount of problems, even for people that are far away from the firefront. And that's coming on top of a year of record drought and record heat and all the other health problems that stem from those as well. This is something that very few Australians can get away from, and that's kind of what's made it such an urgent issue. And the fires are not under control and no guess about when they might burn out or come under control. That's right. And forecast show that there's still going to be more high winds picking up this weekend. And with those high winds, of course, that means that the flame front can continue to spread. And so even the progress that they're making in terms of maintaining blazes could easily be undermined and overcome.

Dr. Colden, as someone who researchers fire, what data are you looking for when big events like this happen? What can you learn about how fires behave? So we look at a lot of different things. The key thing that folks like myself are looking at right now is the timing and the intensity of these fires in order to understand how these are different from fires we've seen in the past. and how that difference is related to climate change. So a key thing here is that we're not even in the peak of summer and the peak of fire season for Australia.

Usually fire season peaks in late January, early February, for southeastern Australia, and we're still weeks away from that. So there's a lot of hot weather yet to come. And, you know, we look at the intensity of these fires and look at what they're actually burning, because fires don't necessarily burn completely across the land, They sort of burn in patchy areas, and a lot of times there are unburned trees, even in the middle of burned areas.

And so one of the things that we look at is, oh, these fires are actually really burning completely. They're not leaving a lot of live vegetation behind, and that's unusual. That's much more complete than we've seen in past fires. Is there any doubt that these fires are connected to climate change? For climate scientists, no. There is no doubt. And the key is that there's a lot of discussion and misinformation being spread about, about arson, about land management. But the key here is that these fires are burning under conditions that are unprecedented.

You just talked about the records that have fallen this year and are likely to continue falling. And those conditions, extremely hot, extremely dry, they're in a long-term drought. those conditions allow fires to burn more intensely and allow new ignitions to start and grow more quickly than cooler and wetter conditions. So climate change is really amplifying the effect of ignitions. Australia always has a lot of ignitions. There are parts of the U.S. that are very similar. But these are conditions that are associated with climate change and are amplifying. the types of intensities and speed with which these fires are moving.

Well, mayors, scientists have said that Australia is uniquely vulnerable to climate change because it's maybe, why is that? Is it a small landmass and a big ocean? What makes them vulnerable? Well, Australia is sort of in the middle of three big ocean circulation patterns. It's between the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Antarctic Ocean. And so there's a lot of natural volatility there, and there aren't a lot of natural barriers against that volatility. So they are at the mercy of the weather. And, you know, in 2019,

in addition to the long-term changes in climate, there were also circulation patterns that aligned in a very unusual way to drive even more moisture away from the continent and allow more heat to accumulate. But another big factor is, of course, that Australia's landmass is about the size of, you know, the United States and their population is less than that of Texas. And so it's very sparsely populated and it's difficult to, you know, manage the land and take, you know, the precautions that they may necessarily need to prevent or, you know, cutting firebreaks. And, for example, in areas that could be more vulnerable. So there's a resource management problem there as well.

So on top of the natural climactic and weather variability that they deal with. And you know what? I was shocked. I imagine a lot of other people was shocked to hear the extent of death animals, the billion animals, have died of there. Wow. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

And ecologists, I mean, that estimate, that's an estimate right now. but they're deeply concerned because, you know, Australia has a lot of unique wildlife. It's, you know, an isolated area that's evolved in, without human influence for millions of years. And then once humans got there, you know, they've been very vulnerable to things like invasive species and other kinds of human effects. And so there were a lot of unique animals and organisms that were already under threat who have very small, you know, natural habitats and biomes that they live in. And now those have been, as Dr. Coleman noted, like, destroyed in a wholesale way. The fire is burning. Even the animals that are used to fire are seeing an unusual level of fire that they can't necessarily or easily recover from.

And Dr. Coulin, let's talk about the damage to the people. You know, we see on the newsreels, we get the people are stranded in beach towns waiting for boats to pick them up. But the real damage may be more inland. Yeah. And, you know, Umar just noted that this is an area that happened without a lot of human intervention for thousands of years. But it's important to point out that the European influence is really what has changed Australia because Aborigines, the indigenous people of Australia, they've been there for tens of thousands of years and they've been managing land. And their communities are rural, a lot of the

rural ranchers that make their home in the bush and are cattle ranchers or sheep ranchers, which is a key economy in Australia. Those are the people that often are overlooked because you know, people surviving on a beach and being carried off by boat is definitely a newsreel highlights. A lot of those folks don't actually live in Malacuda. They are holidaying there, and of course this is very traumatic for them, but they will get to go home to Sydney or Melbourne or places where they're from. But the people that live in the rural areas, the indigenous individuals, the rural ranchers, those are the folks that are actually going to have some of the long-lasting effects

from these fires in terms of trying to recover from their losses. Many of them are underinsured or they're just sort of forgotten by a lot of these fundraising types of events. And those are the folks that are the most vulnerable to begin with and are going to have the biggest struggle recovering. And what would a recovery, if so many acres have been burned, what does a recovery, Dr. Colton, look like? Well, the vegetation itself is fire adapted.

So it is going to probably recover along a normal timeline. There may be a little bit more mortality in the forest than we may have seen in the past because it's been so dry and so hot. But these are fire-adapted forests. And so the recovery is really in the wildlife populations and the human populations. And the wildlife populations are already fragmented by habitat loss. and a lot of the changing climate issues that we've already noted. So those wildlife populations are going to be very vulnerable to disease, to further reductions from additional events.

You know, the human populations are also going to be really vulnerable in the post-fire period. Recovery for them is trying to rebuild their homes, trying to rebuild their operations, their ranching operations, and that is a real struggle. And we've seen that everywhere where there have been these large fires that oftentimes these people end up being climate refugees. Is Australia the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world? It is. Australia is very much showing us what will happen elsewhere.

And this is something that for those of us in the U.S., we feel like the last few years we've seen some pretty big fires in California that have been really destructive. but when we look at Australia now, for those of us in fire science, a lot of us see this is the future for the U.S. as well. And not just in California, but in a lot of other parts in the U.S. too, even places that have not necessarily seen a lot of fire, because as it gets hotter and drier and we have these types of really unique events, really hot, dry conditions or even droughts, it will facilitate fire in places that we necessarily haven't seen a lot in the past. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Dr. Crystal Colden from University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, and Umerer Fahn from Vox in Washington. Omer, I was noticing today on the news reports there were 10,000 protesters in Melbourne today,

and there were thousands all across Australia who are asking for the removal of Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister. Do they feel he, you know, he has been a climate denier, right? and did they feel he's just not sympathetic to what's going on? Right. This has quickly become a political crisis in Australia, particularly for Scott Morris and the prime minister. And yeah, as you noted they had protests in Melbourne and Sydney and Canberra at the capital as well. The issue is that a lot of people have said that he's been kind of hands off with respect to the fires and the preparation. There was a group of about 20 former fire chiefs who asked for a meeting with the prime minister before the fires took off in August, asking to, you know, just brief him on the

immense risk that they are worried about, that the risk they may face, and that meeting never took place. And as Morrison has toured some of the disaster areas, he's gotten a pretty frosty reception. A lot of locals are upset that they didn't have the resources in advance to deal with the fires. And some of the firefighters were saying that, you know, his political rhetoric about, you know, climate change and also the environment in general has been not suited to the task at hand. Now, I don't think it's fair to say that he's a denier. I mean, he's never said that climate change isn't happening or that greenhouse gases aren't related, but he's been very reluctant to sort of connect the dots

between Australia's role in climate change and the ongoing fires. He frequently brings up that Australia is only accountable for like 1.2% of global emissions. But Australia is one of the world's largest coal exporters. The huge chunk of their economy depends on mining. And his party, the center-right liberal party, and also the center-left labor opposition party, have been very pro-mining, very pro-coal. And even the opposition wants to increase coal,

sports. And so it's a big tent pole of their economy. And it's really kind of hard to square with the other kinds of economic destruction and disasters that they have to deal with now. So this is not going to change any of those political minds or has or have some of them changed? I mean, I think the fact that you're seeing people protesting so rapidly and so fervently about this, it could potentially change it. Yeah, he is getting, like I said, a very chilly reception and voters could potentially turn against this if this, you know, lackadaisical response continues. But that remains to. be seen. I mean, coal has been a very powerful force in Australian politics. I mean, Australia

was one of the only countries in the world that implemented a wholesale economy-wide carbon tax and then repealed it. So there is momentum. There is like a drive for action on climate change, and there's also, you know, a very strong counter force as well. Crystal, what do you think about this? The politics of this? The politics are fascinating. And I spent three months in Tasmania last year during a very active fire season there. And Tasmania is one of the few states where the Greens party is actually relatively active and has a fair amount of power. And there's a lot of discussion about what the, you know, how the politics need to change and what people can do differently in terms of

trying to change policies to support not just climate action, but also a lot of changes in land management and practices there to try and address future fire risk. Do you think that people talk a lot and don't really act enough on this kind of issue? Well, that is what has been said about after the 2009 Black Saturday fires. So 2009 was a year that there were major fires in Victoria, outside of Melbourne, and over 170 people were killed in those fires. And this exact same type of discussion happened with regards to needing to make major policies. changes, conditions that people had never seen before. And in the 10 years since that event, there hasn't actually been a lot of implementation of

some of the recommendations that were made after that. That was a smaller event in some ways. Yes, the loss of life was huge, but in terms of the area impacted, it was much smaller. And because we're seeing more frequently some of these types of events, and this particular year, we're seeing a much larger area and much larger proportion of the population impacted. The hope, I think, is that this will have a more lasting impact, and that some of those policies will begin to see the light of day. Dr. Crystal Cullden, Associate Professor of Fire Science University of Idaho and Moscow,

Omerifon, writer for Vox based in Washington. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If cabin fever is getting you down, if winter has you cooped up. If you're itching to take your mind elsewhere, you are in luck. Our biennial Science Friday Book Club is back for the dark, dreary winter reading season, and this summer, remember, we sent you out birding.

Now it's time to take you on a new adventure. How about the shores of the largest freshwater resource on the surface of the planet? The great lakes. The great lakes hold more than one fifth of all the surface freshwater on Earth, enough water to submerge the entire lower 48 under nine and a half feet. Wow, have I wetted your appetite? Our book is Dan Egan's 2016 book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, producer Christy Taylor. A proud Great Lakes Wisconsinite is our guide.

Take it away. Christy, tell us about this book. Hey, Ara. So the first thing I actually have to do is tell you about the lakes themselves. Like you said, I grew up in Wisconsin, and I spent every single summer on the shores of Lake Michigan for a lot of my childhood. I'll never forget standing on the beach and trying to see the other side,

even though that, spoiler alert, is actually impossible in most parts of the lakes. Or also watching ships that seemed as big as ocean liners drifting by on the horizon. The Great Lakes are so big, Ira, that they influence weather systems. They generate heavy snowfall in some parts of the country, including Buffalo, where I think you've been.

And under stormy skies, they have sunk literally thousands of ships, including the Edmund Fitzgerald. in 1975. Famous fun. Yeah, there's a song about it. And if you drive around their circumference, it'll take you days,

and you'll pass through dozens and dozens of different kinds of landscape in the process. They are big. They are very big. And if you live anywhere near the Great Lakes, you also know that you basically got an ocean in your backyard.

It's an ocean that supplies drinking water, however, for 40 million people, plus the usual boating, fishing, swimming, and most of the time, stunning natural splendor. But if you read Dan Egan's book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, you start to understand that these lakes, big as they are and beautiful as they are, they're not healthy at all.

They're full of invasive species that are sucking the nutrients right out of the water, and agricultural runoff is spurring noxious algae blooms that can poison water supplies. Take the city of Toledo in 2014 when half a million people couldn't drink their tap water, even if they boiled it. And then there's the always looming threat of invasive carp. So we have two guests here to help unpack what's troubling the lakes these days, what's hopeful and hopefully help people get excited to start reading Dan Egan's book with our book club. We have Peter Annen, director of the Mary Griggs-Birk Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior.

Welcome back, Peter. Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you. And Dr. Donna Cashin, professor of biological sciences at Wayne State University in Detroit. That's at the conjunction between Lakes Huron and Erie. Welcome back, Donna. Thank you.

It's great to be here. Thank you both for coming back. So first of all, Peter, take us to the scene. Why are the Great Lakes such an important natural resource? How do you explain them to people who don't live anywhere near them? Yeah, as Iris said, and his intro, you know, 20%, 1 5th of all the fresh surface water on the planet. Just an enormous, not just national but continental and globally significant resource. Again, as you said, nearly 10 feet, that's enough water to cover the lower 48 states, nearly 10 feet.

Superior alone holds 10% of all the fresh surface. surface water on the planet. The lakes have 35,000 gorgeous islands. Georgian Bay and Northern Lake Huron has 30,000 alone. You know, it's really, the Lake Erie is one of the largest freshwater fisheries in the world. So it's really a gorgeous, thriving, superlative place in much of the Great Lakes Basin. But as you mentioned, there are places where the Great Lakes are hurting and they need our help. And Donna Cashin, tell us more about that hurt. what's been not so great for the Great Lakes in recent years?

Well, the Great Lakes have been suffering from a lot of impacts, multiple ones at every angle. Invasive species have been one of the largest impacts that have changed the structure of the species that live within the lake. Then we are seeing massive harmful algal blooms and affecting drinking water. We're seeing contaminants in the fish, so some fish are no longer really you want to eat them because of it

while some other fish are still lower in contaminants. Changes along the shorelines, losses of wetlands, climate change, fluctuating water levels that are beyond the normal fluctuating fluctuations in water levels with climate change. So a lot of things have changed, but they still move forward. Looking at invasive species specifically,

the death and life of the Great Lakes unpackes a lot of how they got here. They arrive from the ocean. After all the shipping channels were created 100 years ago, Others are arriving in ballast water from cargo ships, blood-sucking sea lampreys, tiny alewives. Either of you have a favorite, I guess, bad guy for what maybe has caused the most damage in these lakes. Yeah, I mean, I think the two. Go ahead. Donna first.

All right, sorry. In my opinion, the number one, to me, is the invasive muscles, the zebra and quagum muscles, the dry scyth. followed really closely by the lamprey as the biggest impacts, where those two species take this impact, where the lamprey affect the higher trophic levels, taking a top-down approach to the impacts, while the dry scintids or the zebra muscles and quagga muscles affect the bottom of the food chain like nutrients.

So in the process, the two groups are squeezing out the middle of the food chain and creating dramatic impacts on the lake. Peter, did you have another nomination for that? No, actually, I was going to agree. You know, there have been 100 plus more than 180 non-native species introduced to the lakes, but the two big ones, the two big game changers, system-wide game changers have been the lamprey and the zebra muscle. And the big concern is that we may have another big game changer knocking on the door with Asian carp.

And Dan writes about that in the book as well. And we'll talk about carp for sure. These lampreys, does anyone want it? I mean, they're so gross in some ways. and they did so much damage to the lake trout stock. But who were the fish that we're trying to save at this point? What is the native fishery? What are those fish that we're trying to help recover?

Donna. So the first, a lot of the lake trout have, the native species of the larger predatory fish, have been really reduced. And so we've taken steps to, as those populations have dropped, to introduce new species like the salmon species and the lakes, to recover the fisheries that have been lost due to the lamprey. So the trout, a lot of the bigger fish, the top predators again,

are the ones that have been most affected. But with the top predators affected, it moves down the food chain again and affecting all the species of fish. I really love the story of the salmon fishery in the Great Lakes. These are Pacific salmon. I should clarify, like Coho and Chinook salmon. And one guy basically got to decide

that instead of restoring lake trout, we were going to put salmon in the lakes. Peter, how did that happen? Yeah, well, you know, when the lamprey came in and knocked out the top predators, Donna said the lake trout, that threw the lake's ecosystem and food web completely out of balance. So then we had another non-native species, preyfish, the alewife, that exploded. And the populations were dying off and washing up on beaches in the Great Lakes, and they were bulldozing these stinky piles off of the beaches in the night.

1960s, and they really turned to people away from the lake. So there was somewhat of a food web emergency, and so you had people in Michigan pumping these Pacific salmon, which are eating machines, especially the Chinook or the Kings, as they're known in Alaska, into the lakes to beat back this alewife population. And so now we have sort of the native species, predator prey relationship in the fishery competing with the non-native species, predator prey relationship in the lakes. And yet people in the Great Lakes region who've grown up catching these specific salmon who think they are actually a native species in the Great Lakes, and obviously they're not.

Donna, you mentioned the zebra and quagga muscles, and they play a role in the algae blooms that we were seeing in Lake Erie. Isn't that correct? Yeah, they have a lot of impacts on the lakes, and one of them that has been linked is through the increase in harmful algal blooms. And there's a lot of different mechanistic. is going on. One thing that happens in the type of algae, we have the muscles come in and they filter the water, making it more clear. So we have some of the algae that grows on the bottom or the benthic algae flourishing, because the light is hitting the bottom now. But then we also have the cyanobacteria, or what used to be called the blue greens or the harmful toxin-producing

algies that muscles can actually reject. So they will take in the healthy, the green algae that it doesn't produce toxins and eat those but spit back the cyno bacteria that produce the toxins. So it's creating this dynamic where it's facilitating these blooms even further by multiple mechanisms. And Peter, you're the author of a book called The Great Lakes Water Wars, which is about the worries about the water supply in the lakes. Is this just about chemicals? Is this just about pollution and invasive species? Or is there something else in this story?

Yeah, it's really the idea that, you know, with 20% of all the fresh surface water, as we continue to enter a period of a global water crisis and some parts of the continent are also entering a period of severe water stress, that there might be a run on Great Lakes water in a way that could harm the ecosystem of the Great Lakes rather significantly. There's been a lot of paranoia about that in the Great Lakes region for decades and decades. And so, from 2008, at Great Lakes, Great Lakes Compact was adopted by Congress and signed by the president, creating a legal water fence around the edge of the Great Lakes watershed, preventing long-range, large-scale diversions out of the Great Lakes basin and keeping that water inside the watershed for the people and the ecosystem and the economy that's here. That was a pretty bipartisan act, wasn't it? It was an extraordinary bipartisan act, yeah. And what you see in the Great Lakes region, it's one of the large.

last bastions of bipartisanship in the country when it comes to the environment, environmental policy. And it's remarkable to go to the hill and see on Great Lakes days, which is in early March every year, this line of members of Congress who come and testify on behalf of the Great Lakes to the advocates who are there. And it's incredibly bipartisan and really quite a remarkable thing. Looking at the water supply, I mean, one question I have, though, is haven't water levels been extremely high on the lakes the last couple of years? Is there really a worry about the supply? Yeah, well, so first of all, with the compact now in place, there is much less worry about a supply.

And that's right. Water levels vary naturally in the Great Lakes basin to a degree that drives humans crazy, but it's actually very good. The ecosystem here has thrived and evolved based on. It's significant. The difference between, say, the all-time high water level and the all-time low water level on Lakes, Michigan, and Huron is more than six vertical feet. So if you live on a cliff, that's six vertical feet. But if you're on a gradually sloping shoreline, it can be a hundred yards difference between where the water was, quote-unquote, when I was today.

And today we are definitely dealing with them working on the shoreline dealing with this really record-breaking or near-record-record-high-water period. We were in a record low water period in 2013, and that's part of living with the Great Lakes, but we're seeing as more volatility in water level changes more recently, and that's really a cause of concern. Thank you. Just interrupting to remind everyone, I'm Christy Taylor. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about the Great Lakes and the ecological changes of the last decades. Donna, before we go, the lakes have changed so profoundly in essential. of human interference, but you're saying that there's still a lot of positive things happening,

there are things to look forward to. Why aren't the Great Lakes a doomsday story yet? Well, I think they're in some ways getting close to doomsday in some ways, but there are other aspects that we've seen really improving. The problems of the 70s, Cuyahoga River catching on fire multiple times, contaminants. So PCBs have gone down. We've seen improvements in PCBs. levels in the eggs of hearing gulls, DDE, which is a breakdown product of DDT, which is used for a lot of pesticides and mosquitoes historically. We've seen those levels go down. Mercury is going down in the water. We've seen bald eagles, peregon falcons, ospreys, having higher fledgling years. We've seen beaver coming back to the Detroit River. So we're seeing a lot of positives

on the Great Lakes, but we still have these negatives we worry about, like increases of climate change impacts, continue changes with invasive species, vector-borne diseases like West Nile encephalitis associated with water, and botulism in the Great Lakes. So we still have a lot of things to be concerned about. And we'll talk about all of that in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I have to let you go for now. Thank you so much. Peter Annen, director of the Mary Griggs-Bergs-Berk Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, and Donna Cashin, Professor of Biological Sciences at Wayne State University in Detroit. Thank you so much for coming in today.

Great talk. So let's talk about the book club. How can people get involved in the book club? Sure. So first of all, it's time to start reading. Go to our website at science friday.com slash book club. For all the information you need for starters, you can even bookmark that page. And then we are giving away 20 free copies of the book, thanks to our friends at Powell's books. Enter your name before Monday, and you could win one free. And if that's not in the cards for you, Powell's is also discounting those books through the end of the book club. And there's a, there's an late event in February, late February, that features author Dan Egan himself. Right. Our New York listeners can come in person and attend that event, and there is apparently going to be a robot fish. We will learn. Right, we'll learn more about that.

And we'll also be talking about the book and all sorts of related Great Lake stories all month, including ecology, climate change, how natural resources impact their quality life. Do you have a favorite great lake? I mean, I would have to say it's Lake Superior. They are all great, but Lake Superior, it's the biggest, it's the deepest. It has the wildest coastline, and you've got ice caves. It's glorious. It's like a force of nature. Whoa.

It's great. And I'm looking forward to that book club. Thank you very much, Christy. Thank you, Ira. Christy Taylor, captain of our Good Ship Book Club. So go to our website and get a drawing for a free copy. It's Science Friday.com slash book club. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, gets started telling us your memories of how the Great Lakes have changed.

Or just your favorite memory of the lakes. That's the Science Friday Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. One note before we go. listener as Science Friday is hosting the Great Curiosity Fair next Thursday, January 16th at WBURC City Space. Come meet book artists, immersive art makers,

research scientists, science, you're not going to forget this one. Anyone under 12, it can come for free. So go to ScienceFriety.com slash Boston for tickets at science friday.com slash Boston. That's the Science Friday, Curious, creating the Create Curiosity Fair

next Thursday, January 16th. Thank you.