Science Friday - Geoengineering Climate Change, Tasmanian Tiger, New Water Plan. Jan 3, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

In the context of climate change, geoengineering refers to deliberate, large-scale manipulations of the planet to slow the effects of human-induced global warming—whether by removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it safely, or altering the atmosphere to reflect the amount of incoming sunlight that is absorbed as heat.  But neither strategy is uncomplicated to deploy. Carbon capture is expensive and is often used to enhance fossil fuel extraction, not to actually reduce emissions. Meanwhile, altering our atmosphere would require maintenance indefinitely until we actually reduce emissions—that, or risk a whiplash of warming that plants could not adapt to.  UCLA researcher Holly Buck is the author of a new book that examines these complexities. She explains to Ira why geoengineering could still be a valid strategy for buying time while we reduce emissions, and why any serious deployment of geoengineering technology would require a re-imagining of society as well. Welcome to the Charismatic Creature Corner! Last month, we introduced this new monthly segment about creatures (broadly defined) that we deem charismatic (even more broadly defined).  In the first creature spotlight, we marveled at slime molds, which look and feel like snot but can solve mazes. This time, a far more conventionally charismatic creature was nominated—but one mired in tragedy and mystery.  Meet the Tasmanian tiger, believed to have gone extinct decades ago, but spotted all over Australia to this day. Tasmanian tigers, also known as “thylacines,” look like dogs, have stripes like tigers, but aren’t closely related to either because they’re actually marsupials. They have pouches like kangaroos and koalas, and are even believed to have hopped on two feet at times!   The last known Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo in 1936 and they were declared extinct in the 1980s, but people claim to have never stopped seeing them. There have been thousands of sightings of Tasmanian tigers, crossing roads and disappearing into the bush, lurking around campsites, even following people on their way home. But solid proof eludes us. So if they’re truly still around, they’re particularly sneaky at hiding from modern surveillance.  Science Friday’s Elah Feder returns to convince Ira that Tasmanian tigers—dead or alive—are indeed worthy of our coveted Charismatic Creature title, with the help of Gregory Berns, a psychology professor at Emory University. We also hear from Neil Waters, president of the Thylacine Awareness Group of Australia, who’s dedicating the next two years of his life to finding proof the tigers are still out there. Nara Bopp was working at a thrift store in Moab, Utah the morning of March 4 when her desk started moving. “I immediately assumed that it was a garbage truck,” Bopp said. She looked out the window. No garbage truck. No construction nearby either. So she did the same thing she does every time something weird happens in Moab: She logged onto the town’s unofficial Facebook page to see what was up. “Pretty much everyone was saying: ‘Did you just feel that earthquake?’ or, ‘Did you just feel something shaking? Was that an earthquake? Does Moab even get earthquakes? This is crazy,’” Bopp said. Moab doesn’t normally have earthquakes people can feel. This one—at a magnitude 4.5—didn’t cause any damage. But it was enough to get people’s attention in communities all along the Utah-Colorado border. Many took to social media to post about the uncharacteristic shaking. Earthquakes can feel like a freak of nature, something that strikes at random. But not this one. There’s no question where it came from and that human activity caused it. Since the turn of the 20th century, the Colorado River and its tributaries have been dammed and diverted to sustain the growth of massive cities and large-scale farming in the American Southwest. Attempts to bend the river system to humanity’s will have also led to all kinds of unintended consequences. In Colorado’s Paradox Valley, those unintended consequences take the form of earthquakes. Read more at sciencefriday.com. 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, as large portions of Australia burn, what are we prepared to do to slow climate change? Geoengineering sounds dramatic, but my guest researcher says it could help buy time. All that later, but first, the federal government spends billions of dollars of your money every year funding scientific research. And yet in many cases, when the results of that research are published, it can take a full year before the public can read those results for free. The Trump administration wants to change that and make all taxpayer-funded research available immediately, but publishing companies aren't happy about it. Joining me now with more of that is Ryan Mandelbaum, science reporter at Gizmodo here in New York. Welcome back. Always good to be here,

Ira. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year. Oh, let's talk about this. President Obama began to open up access to taxpayer-funded research by making it free after a year behind a paywall, right? But President Trump wants to go even further with this. So, yeah, it's a rumor right now. They won't comment on this pending decision, but it's a rumor that the White House might actually make all federally funded research, open access, immediately afterwards. That's exciting to me, somebody who needs to read a lot of this research. And it's exciting, I'm sure, to those who have to spend a lot of money on papers, thousands

of dollars for some journal subscriptions. And obviously, as soon as this rumor came about, the publishing companies said, oh, no, we can't. This is our business model. There's no way we could change things now. So it's, let's see what happens when they actually come out with the decision. So the decision has not come out yet. Right.

Just a rumor. But it does remain to be seen whether, I mean, one of the people who I read about commenting on this said it's weird that the Trump administration would want to do something like this. And, you know, the problem is that it is going to, scientists will have to eventually pay to put their research in open access journals. So it's unclear what the motives are here. But I personally would love to see more research open access. So I guess it could be a step in the right direction.

All right. Let's go to your next story, which is out in space with one of my favorite stars, Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice, beetle juice, beetle juice. You can say it either way, right? Beetlejuice, beetle juice, whatever. So it's the top left star of Orion, and it's been growing fainter. It went from being in the top 10 brightest stars in the sky. And it's now in the past couple months it's gone out of the top 10 stars in the sky and

brightest. and people are now wondering, is this star going to go supernova? And it's definitely got people excited because if a star that close, about 650 light years away, when supernova, it would be very bright. We would see it brighter than the moon here. Wow. So what is the hint that it would go supernova? What is the progression that happened?

Right. So, I mean, what happens with these very big massive stars is the fusion starts to run out and they slowly begin to burn their heavier and heavier elements until they collapse either into a neutron star or a black hole. Right now with Beetlejuice The problem here is that it is a variable star already So it's unclear whether this dimming is just sort of What it does or if it's actually going to go supernova

And it is expected maybe in a hundred thousand years So I wouldn't really bet on it just yet So you don't think either of us are going to see that in our lifetime No no but there's another star You know Ada Karenet is one that people have said It's a star in the southern hemisphere people can see it We can't supposedly might be going supernova soon, so we'll see.

And there have been, there's records of seeing a supernova back in history, right? That's right. I know that Chinese astronomers and astronomers going back to, you know, 1,000 AD. There was another supernova back in, you know, the 1980s, but we'll see. I mean, the next supernova is probably going to be a star you never heard of. Your next one is a real head scratcher where physicists are actually learning how they might want to build quantum computers by supercooling Legos.

So just, you know, a quantum computer is the next sort of future of computing technology. It will hopefully do some things that regular computers can't do. And today's quantum computers require cooling to near absolute zero. So Legos apparently have these great thermal properties where they don't conduct heat very well. And so if you put them in a quantum computer as maybe a structural component, like a scaffold, they might, you know, they might not destroy the quantum computer's quantumness. So they're not going to put Legos in the quantum computer. What they're going to maybe do is use this research to maybe try and find a 3D printed alternative based on the same materials, Legos, and the same sort of interlocking architecture.

Interesting. Next up, you have a story about a monument in Scotland that may have been built to attract lightning bolts. I saw this story, and it was really cool. Yeah. Tell us about it. Sure. Sure. So there is already a monument in Scotland called the Calanais Standing Stones.

It's kind of like Stonehenge looking. But nearby, archaeologists uncovered another circle of rocks that seems to have a magnetic anomaly right in the middle that they think has come from like striking lightning bolts a bunch of times in the center of this rock circle. And of course, the striking would magnetize. Right. The rock. Yeah. So it's not a magnetic rock that's attracting the lightning. It's just the lightning.

It's because the rock is magnetized. They say lightning must have struck it. Right. I don't think that they knew they were, I don't think they were building like a lightning rod. I think what they thought that either was happening is lightning was striking this location a lot. So they built a monument around it. Wow. That is cool.

Now, I know that lastly, that you are an avid birder. I sure am. And this holiday season, you've been all over the annual Christmas bird count all over. Tell us where you've been what you've seen. Yeah. So I actually did four Christmas bird counts in four days. I mainly was in the northern Minnesota, eastern North Dakota area. In Grand Forks, North Dakota, my team actually, we got some birds that nobody else did.

We saw American tree sparrow, which it's a little too cold for them there, so we got very lucky with that one. Pileated woodpecker, which common in a lot of the rest of the country, we were the only group who saw one. And then I think that the best animal I saw during my Christmas bird counts is I saw almost nothing in Itasca, which is the Mississippi headwater, but I saw a wolf, like a gray wolf walking on the frozen ice. Wow. Yeah, so that was not a bird, but it was pretty awesome to be able to take part and help out in all these counts where a lot of people don't really, it's too cold. It's very cold. It's always awesome to have you, Ryan. Great to be around. Thanks, Ira.

Ryan, Amanda Baum, science reporter for Gizmoto here in New York. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. The federal government is seeking public comments on four possible. plans for treating the water of the oversaulty Dolores River in western Colorado. Why do you need a new plan? Well, the old treatment facility was reportedly causing earthquakes. Joining me now is Luke

Runyon, Water Reporter at KUNC Radio in Greeley, Colorado. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. How can a water wastewater plant cause earthquakes? Well, it's where they're sending the water that's causing the earthquakes. So this is an area in western Colorado called the Paradox Valley and the Dolores River cuts perpendicular across the Paradox Valley and picks up all kinds of salty groundwater that's naturally occurring. And back in the 90s, the federal government built this facility in the Paradox Valley that was meant to intercept this salty groundwater and then pump it deep underground to get rid of it. And once you start pumping, lots of water deep underground, depending on what's going on under there, you might end up causing earthquakes. And that's what's been happening for the last 25 years or so.

So it's kind of like fracking, but not fracking? It's not fracking. It's getting rid of this salty groundwater that's actually about eight times as salty as ocean water. And the reason why they built this facility in the first place is because the Dolores River is a major. tributary to the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water and irrigation water for about 40 million people in the southwest. And if the water is salty, it makes it a lot harder to use for agriculture and it possibly increased costs for municipalities to treat the water. And so they built this facility to try to decrease the amount of salt that was ending up in

the Colorado River. So if it's more or less a natural condition to have the water just like that, Why do we need to do anything about it? When I was in the Paradox Valley reporting this story, I talked with the guy who runs this particular facility. And he called it a natural pollution. And that was a new concept for me. I've never heard someone describe it. It's like an axi moron, right? Yeah, kind of.

But he basically said, we've pinpointed these areas in the Colorado River Basin where salt enters the river in high amounts. In the Paradox Valley, the Dolores River picks up about 10% of all the salt that ends up in the Colorado River. And so if, you know, you can build a facility to intercept that and get rid of it, then it makes it a lot easier for downstream users in California and Arizona, Nevada, to use water from the Colorado River because it's not so salty. It didn't end up there in the first place. So what are the options the government is considering about treating the water? So one of the options is just to do nothing. Basically let the project end and cap the old well where they were disposing of this wastewater and just stop worrying about how salty the Dolores River is.

Another option is to drill a new well and hopefully end up in a different geologic formation where you wouldn't be causing earthquakes. That would be the plan. Another option is to build a set of evaporation ponds where you could dispose of this brine and let it evaporate and then sell the salt. But that has a downside of potentially injuring migratory birds that would land on these ponds. There's also an option to build what they're calling

a zero liquid discharge technology facility, which would treat the brine using these thermal crystallizers, and it would clean up the water, and it would maybe be a little expensive to do it in the process. So those are the four options. A little expensive. Z-L-D-F. I'm trying to get an acronym for that thing.

So what is the timeline on this project and solving it? So the federal government is collecting comments until February 4th, and they're hoping to make a decision by this summer. And each of these options, I mean, if they're going to do nothing, the timeline is, well, we're just going to do nothing. But some of these other, like building evaporation ponds, building this new treatment facility, those would take a bit longer and would potentially take up the rest of 2020 trying to build those out if that's the option that gets chosen.

And who were they asking, is it all the public, all our listeners, are just people in your neighborhood? I think you have a few stakeholders. You have local residents who are obviously going to be impacted by whatever decision is chosen here. But the Colorado River watershed, because it supplies so many different water users, throughout the Southwest with water. You have a lot of people interested in Arizona, California,

even in the country of Mexico, which receives water from the Colorado River. All of those users downstream don't want this salt ending up in the Colorado River because it makes their jobs harder, so they're going to be interested, too. Luke Runyon Water Reporter at KUNC Radio in Greeley. Thank you for being with us. Thanks so much, Ira. Happy New Year.

We're going to take a break, and then we come back from engineering one water facility, to geoengineering the planet. How do we fight climate change by making it cooler? Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you've been following the news, you've undoubtedly heard that Australia is on fire. Record climate crisis heat has led to millions of acres burning, tens of thousands of people evacuating,

while a region twice the size of New Hampshire has already been scorched, and no sign of the fires stopping soon. Which brings us to climate change and lots of talk about lowering emissions of carbon dioxide by adopting clean energy, fossil-free vehicles, lower meat consumption, and more. But those efforts to lower CO2 levels are not working well. CO2 levels hit a record high last year.

My next guest wants us to look more closely at another proposition, geoengineering, intervening in the Earth's natural climate system and inserting our own projects to lower the global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, locking it up in the ground, or perhaps put particles in the air that would reflect sunlight and lower the greenhouse effect.

But there are only a few dozen carbon capture facilities in operation and atmospheric geoengineering needs much, much, much more research. And as my guest points out, embarking on large-scale geoengineering is more than an equation of should we. It's also a question of what does the world look like after we commit to it. Here to unpack that is Dr. Holly Book,

postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and author of the new book After Geoengineering. Welcome back to Science Friday, Holly. Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here. You're welcome. We haven't even decided, right, that geoengineering is a valid strategy for climate change. So why right about after when we're, We still don't have it before.

Right. Great question. I mean, we haven't even got the information that would allow us to decide. So the after of after geoengineering is I wanted to shine a light on the commitment of this because it's not just turning on a device flipping a switch. It's a real commitment. It's a centuries-long project. And so deciding to start it is a bit like deciding to get married, but the hard work is really

choosing your spouse. forever. It's this relationship that needs to be maintained. And so we need to do the research, thinking about the duration of that intervention. And then I just described a couple of tactics for climate geoengineering. At their simplest, it's removing carbon and blocking the sun. How advanced in the research phase are we into in these methods? So with solar geoengineering, we've had about a decade of modeling studies that's inadequate for answering the questions that we want to know. A lot of scientists think it would take two to three decades of dedicated, funded research to begin to answer some of the key questions about what the risks would be, what the impacts would be.

With carbon removal, there's been a lot more progress, and it's actually looking pretty encouraging. Tell us how that works. Walk us through how carbon removal or sequestration, as they all it would work. Right. There's a lot of terminology for this. You might have heard of carbon removal, draw down, negative emissions technologies. These are umbrella terms

that are talking about removing carbon from the atmosphere. And basically, it can be stored biologically in ecosystems such as forest, soils, or geologically deep underground. And so you would just suck, basically,

you have a giant pipe that sucks the CO2 out of the air, and then locks it up? So there's two kind of big technologies for the geologic disposal side. One is something called direct air capture, which is building machines that do that. I mean, they have contact with the air. Then the carbon dioxide needs to be transported somewhere, and it needs to be injected deep underground. So it's really a whole system of carbon capture, transport, and storage.

The other big scale technology is biohomable. energy with carbon capture and storage, or growing biomass, combusting in a power plant, separating out the CO2 and putting that underground. And both of those rely on carbon capture and storage technologies. Because I've also heard about methods that we could use the soil itself to lock up CO2 if we just improve the soil. We can. And that has a lot of enthusiasm right now and a lot of potential. And part of the context for why people are so excited about that is that the world's soils have, they hold more than double the carbon that's in the atmosphere. And they've also lost a lot of carbon. One third of the world's top soil is degraded.

North American farmland in particular has lost about half of its natural endowment of soil carbon. So people look at that and they think, well, what if we just put the carbon back into the soil and hold it there? And this is a great strategy, especially in terms of thinking of things like climate change adaptation. So having soils with better water retention, more nutrients, soil health is really important. However, it's not a silver bullet solution for climate change. Let's see if you can get a phone call or two in here. 844-7-24-8255 is our number. 844-Sai Talk.

You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. So you said before that the carbon capture is a lot further along in development than the aerosol, the reflection of sunlight. Tell us why that is and what the idea behind the sunlight is. So the sunlight reflection methods, the basic concept is to block a fraction of incoming sunlight, a percentage or two, which would cool the planet, either by putting aerosols tiny particles into the upper atmosphere, probably usually, specially designed high-altitude aircraft. And scientists have talked a lot about using sulfur because when volcanoes erupt, the surfle dioxide is released in their plumes. So there's kind of an analog for it. And you have to imagine a small air fleet dedicated to this project. This particle precursors have to be continually flown up there year after year. And then the other idea, which has received

even less research, is something called marine cloud brightening. So trying to make clouds brighter and more reflective. And we're really, that would really be an experiment, right? Anything to do with geoengineering about the sun? We have no experience doing any of that, do we? No, we have basically observations from volcanoes. But there's a lot of possible negative impacts there. And that is one of the questions you have to deal with, not just the research,

but the political implications, the social implications that we have really know we're right on the edge of that. Yeah, I think the governance challenges are in many ways more difficult than the technical ones. Because I remember years ago going down to Florida to watch experiments in cloud seeding to make it rain from the clouds in Florida. They had a lot of clouds. That was a good place to test it out. And the scientist I talked to said, well, they've stopped the program now. And I said, why? He said, because the politicians are not sure where it's going to rain if we make it rain.

And then they're worried about it. Sort of the same thing here. And, yeah, there's also been legal cases about making it rain in one place and stakeholders bringing lawsuits in another place. So a lot to untangle. But I think we need to start thinking about international scale governance for these techniques. Yeah, because you get to a point where we have reached the tipping point where we have to do something, right? We're not 50 years ago where we can just think about it anymore. Yeah, and there's a growing awareness of this, particularly in the way.

of the last IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. They point out that all scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 Celsius or 2.7 Fahrenheit project the use of carbon removal,

many of them at a fairly large scale. So in a sense we're already relying on these technologies that don't yet exist. There are critics of the carbon removal and carbon capture who say, you know who's behind this? It's the fossil fuel companies because they don't want to stop burning fossil fuel so they'll just try to promote a way of

sucking it out of the atmosphere. How do you answer that? I think that's probably true. They're the ones that are best positioned to do so because they have 40 years of expertise in injecting CO2 underground. They have the technology for doing that. So there's this huge question of what should the role of the fossil fuel companies be? Could they be transitioned to carbon storage or carbon removal companies instead. Let's go to the phones, 844-724-8255 to Oakland with Michael. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Directair capture seems like the most attractive way to do this possible.

And I've been pleased to see just in the last couple of years, it seems like there's been a lot of startups with significant capital that have gotten into this game. they're all doing it on tiny, tiny scales and with a ton of money behind them, though. Are we really getting close to a point where this could be remotely economically feasible? It seems like even with a significant price on carbon, it would be really difficult to get people just sucking CO2 directly out of the air, which would be the cleanest possible way to go about this thing. Good question, Holly. Yeah, it's important for people to understand that right now, the big market in CO2 is enhanced oil recovery or injecting CO2 underground to get more oil out, which is not an optimal use case if the goal is solving climate change.

But so we've seen the announcement of the first large-scale direct air capture facility planned for the Permian Basin in Texas with carbon engineering is the company. company and sponsored in partnership with Occidental Petroleum, low-carbon ventures, kind of a venture capital arm of this fossil fuel company. And that would be the use case is enhanced oil recovery. So that's the initial market. And so the question like Michael pointed out is, what's the other sources of funding for this? It's really hard to see it at a large scale without large-scale public funding, which is why that people need to know about carbon removal in order to think about should we be demanding these technologies, should we be spending significant public resources on them? Well, people need to feel that it's a real

threat, right? That this is not something you balance a balance sheet on. What is what is the alternative to living on the planet? How much is it worth to spend to try to keep the planet a lot? Yeah, I mean, in Australia, like you pointed out, 15 million acres burned. That's the size of West Virginia this year. And that's at one degree of warming. So it's not looking great. No, it's summertime in Australia. But then again, it'll be summertime in out west in America.

And we'll have the Western states burning too. So, you know, it's not isolated to just Australia. Yeah, there's no real optimal solution anymore. We're kind of in an era of hard choices. 8447-24-8255. Let's go to take a couple more questions if we can. Marty in Ellensburg, Virginia. Hi, Marty. Hi, it's Ellensburg, Washington. I'm sorry. My glasses are dirty. So I'm just wondering if we're trying to collect solar to keep it from heating everything up, what about using just a bunch of solar panels everywhere?

doesn't that limit how much of the sun is reflected back? Interesting. She's thinking, thinking about it. Well, yeah, I haven't heard that angle before. There's one term for solar radiation management, which is albedo modification, and there would be significant modification of the albedo. But generally, to reflect the sunlight vacuum, you want a white albedo. One thing about solar panels is we do need to scale them up. immensely because if we wanted to do large-scale direct air capture, it would need to be powered

by renewable energy. And in particular, solar energy, possibly nuclear energy, look like the best candidates for that and at a very large scale. Hi, I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking about carbon capture and solar with Holly Buck, author of After Geoengineering. Let me see if I can get another call in before we We have to go, Bob and Lawrence, Kansas. Hi, Bob. Hi, happy New Year. I'm coming from the wheat state, I've read quite a bit about the potential impact of geoengineering, changing the albedo of the atmosphere on crop yields. Can you comment a little bit about that, what you've come across? And also, they have geoengineering that they can implement in oceans with sequestration. carbon in the oceans. Yeah, I've heard about the oceans ascending it way down below and it turns into a solid and stays there for a long time. What about the crops, Holly? Yeah, there's been some initial studies on crop yields far from what's conclusive, I think. Part of the reason why it's

tricky is because you're thinking about it in reference to these other climate change scenarios. So if you're growing crops in a geoengineered world, without removing carbon, you have this carbon fertilization effect. So more growth from the increased carbon in the atmosphere. And how does that balance? There's a lot of changes about the hydrological cycle that are also not too well understood yet. But in terms of ocean geoengineering, that's been something that's been of persistent interest to a small few. one of the ideas there is ocean iron fertilization. So would it be possible to put nutrients into the ocean like iron that would grow a plankton bloom

and have that plankton sink down to the bottom of the ocean? This is another kind of risky fringe idea. Scientists aren't really researching it too much right now. But you know, we are at the point. It sounds like we are willing to look at any option because the crisis is getting so bad. Wouldn't you agree? I think we should be willing to look at things, but I think we need a structured, systematic federal research program so that we are looking not just for the things that work, but all

the ways things might not work to and identifying particular show stoppers. And we don't have that. Do we have any proposals for that? Does anybody speaking out about that, beside you? Well, yeah, the National Academy has actually has been doing a study for a couple of of years on developing a research agenda for solar geoengineering that should be out in the summer of 2020. And it'll make recommendations about what a federal research program would look like. They've already completed a report on carbon removal. And so people have thought about the questions that need

to be answered. We just need to fund that research and do it. And we need more. You've written books in fiction. It sounds like you're saying we need more, you know, imaginative thinking. We really do because when you see these lines on a graph with these levels of degrees and emissions, it's really hard to picture what it feels like to be a person living in those futures. And the main thing here is the choices aren't just about which technology or how many degrees, but about the social organization of these technologies who participates in shaping them, who profits. Whether these technologies even work as an intended is dependent upon these social choices, and we need imagination to think through all of that.

Because after all, we are a capitalist society, and any decision we make will be about the money. Right now. Yeah. I want to thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Holly Buck is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, author of a book, a great read after geoengineering. Have a happy new year to you, Holly. Thanks so much. Happy New Year. They last known Tasmanian Tiger died in his zoo in 1936.

but people keep seeing them. After the break, what happened to the Tasmanian tiger? Maybe it has made a reappearance. We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. And now it's time for our charismatic creature corner.

Joining us again in our charismatic creature corner is our correspondent, Science Friday's own Ella Fedder. Hi, Ella. Hi, Ira. Yes, I am back once again to plead the case that one very special creature is worthy of the coveted charismatic creature title. And by creature, again, I mean almost anything. We count tapeworms. We count bacteria.

And by charismatic, I mean a creature that is as worthy of our curiosity and enchantment as a baby panda. Well, that's a pretty high bar, you've said there. If you like baby pandas, which, of course, we do. So last month, I made the case that slime olds are charismatic. because I wanted a bit of a challenge. I might have been in over my head. I did get some people on board. Some people were on the slime train,

and they left some very nice messages on our vox pop app. But we also got this. This is Kate from Modesto, California. I'm pretty sure slime molds will never be charismatic, in my opinion. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm.

Do you have something now better then for Kate? Well, funny you should ask, Kate had something better for Kate. Kate left us another message with this suggestion. I've always been really interested in Tasmanian tigers. Many people say that they're extinct, but some people report sightings. Do you have any information on them? Okay. So since Kate is my toughest critic, I decided to give this a shot.

First of all, these are not Tasmanian devils, which is what I thought Kate was referring to it first. Tasmanian devils are endangered carnivores that live on the island of Tasmania. we're talking about Tasmanian tigers. Have you heard of these before? Who hasn't? Well, you're very learned. I had never heard of these before, but now I'm in deep. Okay, so like Kate said, they're considered officially to be extinct.

But people have been reporting sightings, like hundreds of sightings, not just in the island of Tasmania, but in mainland Australia too. Okay, for those of us who have confused Tasmanian devils with Tasmanian tigers, Fill us in in what a Tasmanian tiger is. Okay, so the Tasmanian tiger, also known as a thylacine, it actually looks a lot like a dog, but with, like tiger stripes kind of on its back, except that it's not a dog, it's not a tiger. It's actually a marsupial, like koalas and kangaroos.

It actually has a pouch and everything. I notice we have a photo up on our website at sciencefriety.com slash cute. Yeah, not to bias you or anything. So here's the deal. The last known Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo in 1936, actually as a result of human neglect, it sounds like. 50 years later, the species was declared extinct, but people keep claiming to see them. And earlier this week, I caught up with one of those people, Neil Waters. He told me about a time 10 years ago when he was walking in Tasmania just before dark.

And I'm walking up this road, this dirt road through the bush, and I can hear this crunching of brats. matches under feet somewhere in the bush alongside me. I can't see it because the bush is so thick, but I can hear it. Every time I stop, it stops. So something's following me. Creepy, right? Oh, yeah. So eventually the creature runs off, but before it does, Neil does catch a glimpse.

And apparently it looks kind of like a dog, but not a dog. It's dark, so he is as important. He does not see the telltale tiger stripes. And he's not 100%. He's not totally sure what he's seen. But then he starts talking to people and he learns about all of these other sightings. And then he himself sees one again in 2014. So he's a geek like me.

And you see something, you want to go out and prove that they're really there. Exactly. So Neil is dedicating, he's actually dedicating the next two years of his life to living in the bush and finding definitive proof that these animals are still out there. He walks around with night vision goggles. He goes looking for their scat. He's even set up a bunch of motion sensitive cameras, and a lot of other people are going to help him sift through those photos, like a big citizen science project. Eventually, someone will probably get the irrefutable proof.

And when that happens, we want, you know, scientists to get on board as much as possible. And so that's why I keep annoying them and saying, hey, look, someone's sort again. Are they annoyed? Oh, look, I've annoyed quite a few academics over the years, but I've got the respect of a few, too. So that's okay. It's 50-50 at the moment. So today we've actually brought on another academic to annoy, or to tell us more about the Tasmanian Tigers and how you do research on an animal that is nowhere to be found. His name is Gregory Burns.

It's a professor of psychology at Emory University. Welcome to the show. Yeah, welcome, Greg. Hi, Ira. Hi, hi Ella. Hey. So Greg, first, Tasmanian tigers, they look like dogs but are not dogs. What is up with that?

Yeah. So these creatures are fascinating. And as you said, the tigers are actually marsupials. And the only reason that we call them tigers is because they have stripes on their back. And when the original settlers of Tasmania saw them, and those would be the British colonialists, they saw them. And they saw the stripes. They said, oh, these must be some kind of tiger. And that's how they got their name.

but they are not at all related to dogs. And I got interested in it because of my interest in dogs and how dog brains works. And I was interested to find out, well, what can we figure out about these animals? They look like dogs or coyotes, but they're not. And so we started studying and looking for their brains. So this is a case of convergent evolution, right? How do you get two animals that are not remotely related looking so much alike? Yeah, and to really appreciate this, you know, what this animal is or was, you have to go way back in history.

We're talking 200 million years at least. And to kind of give you an idea, this is the age of the dinosaurs, you know, mammals didn't even exist back then. And actually the first mammals actually laid eggs. And the marsupials later descended from these creatures. And to give you an idea of how long ago this was, this is. when all the continents were jammed together. There's just one big land mass, gondwana, pangia. And as mammals evolved, during this period of time,

the continents started to separate. And what ended up happening was that these marsupials, these descendants from the very first mammals who actually laid eggs, they started to give birth live. Not, I mean, but just barely, right? The marsupials give birth live, but they're tiny, tiny little creatures and they crawl into the pouch. And so these animals started evolving. And as the continents split up, the marsupials were kind of

left to their own in what became Australia. And they had no competition from other animals, which were called the placental mammals. That's us. That's us. And that's pretty much all the mammals in the rest of the world. And so you had this kind of line of mammals evolving pretty much on their own in Australia. And you mentioned convergent evolution. And so the Tasmanian tiger or the thylacine actually ended up being what we call the apex predator in Australia. And so what did they pray on? Well, they preyed on the other animals, which would include things like kangaroos and wallabies and other little animals. And so we think what happened was that they evolved to kind of look like an animal that preys on other small animals. And so we know those types of

animals as things like coyotes and wolves and dogs. But in Australia, they were Tasmanian tigers, except they were marsupials. Right. Wait, if you say they're marsupials, did they have a pouch like a kangaroo did? They did. They had a rear-facing pouch. So not the pouch that everyone knows kangaroos have. They had a rear-facing one, meaning the, you know, the young kind of looked out backwards. So zooming forward to the present, you know, they used to be apex predators, but by all Well, not by all accounts, by many accounts, they are now gone. What happened to these animals? Yeah, so what happened, I mean, we don't know exactly, but we can kind of piece together this

story. It's kind of like a crime scene, so we're trying to do this forensically. So we know that thylacines existed on the mainland of Australia at least until probably about four or five thousand years ago, because there have been remains found that have been carbon dated to about four thousand years ago. And what's interesting is that period of time, there were also people in Australia by then, the aboriginals. So humans started occupying Australia probably 20, 30,000 years ago. And we know that the aboriginals were aware of the thylacines because you can find cave art showing them. And so there was this very deep relationship to them.

That's interesting. Wow, keep going. Yeah. And so the other thing that was going on in this period of time, is this was also the period of the last ice age, which means that the oceans were lower. And so Australia, the mainland, was actually connected to Tasmania. Now, Tasmania is an island, and it's south of Australia, kind of between Australia and Antarctica. So it's really far south.

But they were actually connected by a land bridge. So the thylacines, as well as the people, were able to move freely. And then as the ice age ended, the glaciers melted, the seas rose, and Tasmania was cut off from the mainland. So you had this population of thylacines on the mainland, and then you had a population that was cut off in Tasmania. Now, for reasons, we're not totally sure. The mainland thylacines seemed to have disappeared. We don't know if it's because of conflict with the humans. Maybe they were hunted.

Maybe their dogs competed with them. or maybe it was just simply climate change because before that mainland Australia was much wetter and more temperate than it is now. So you ended up with just a small population of these creatures on the island of Tasmania. And then the British colonialists arrived. And that was the end of the story. Wait, what happened with the colonial? I mean, just to spell it out.

What did the colonialists do? Well, the colonelists wanted to turn Tasmania pretty much into farming land. And so they brought their sheep with them. And mysteriously, their sheep started disappearing and they were killed. And they all thought that this thylacine was the one doing it. And so there was a bounty put out on the thylacines along actually with wild dogs, too. And so everyone just started killing off the thylacines because they were predating on the sheep. Although it actually remains debatable how much the thylacines were responsible for that.

Really, so they might have been falsely implicated? I believe so. Wow. You know, last time we talked, Greg, I know you're a neuroscientist, and last time we talked, you told me you've been studying dogs a lot, and you actually trained a dog to sit still inside an MRI machine so that you could study its brain. How do you go about finding and studying a dead Tasmanian tiger's brain? They're as rare as hands' teeth. So there's kind of a, I don't want to say a secret order of the thylacine, but there is a very active international community of people interested in all things, thylacine. And so one person, a guy named Steven Sleitholm, has compiled a database of all the known thylacine specimens in the world.

And so I wrote to him and I asked him, I said, do you know, are there any brains left anywhere? Now, as you said, I'm interested in brains. And so what I wanted to know is, you know, even though a thylacine kind of looks like a dog, I wondered what their brains look like. And it turns out that there are four known brains left intact in the world. And as luck would have it, the Smithsonian has one of them. So I borrowed it. That's cool.

I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking with Ella Fetter about the Tasmanian Tiger. And Professor Gregory Burns. Yeah. So what did you figure out when you took a look at these brains or this brain? Well, we actually know everything about this brain in the sense that we know the animal that it came from. It was completely documented. It came from a tiger that was captured in a town called Lonston in Tasmania in 1902.

They brought this tiger over across the Pacific Ocean. and then by rail all the way to the National Zoo in Washington. And then when they got this tiger there, they realized they didn't have just one tiger. They actually had four because there were three in her pouch. She was a mother. And unfortunately, she died and two of the pups survived. And they lived at the National Zoo until they died.

And so we know everything about them. And when I got this brain, it was actually quite shrunken, kind of the size of a walnut. And we knew from the records that it did. didn't start out that way, it had actually shrunk to a third of the original size. But we were somehow able to coax enough signal out of it when we put it in the MRI that we could reconstruct many of the pathways that exist in the thylacine's brain. And so I actually were almost out of time, so I should ask the question that everyone

has been wondering about, what do you think, are they still around? As much as anyone, I would love for them to be around. And, you know, I went to Tasmania, you know, to look for them myself. And obviously, I didn't find any. Personally, I don't think they're there. I would like to keep hope for them. But actually, you know, I've thought about this a lot. And I think kind of keeping the hope alive actually does a disservice to the other animals that are disappearing as we speak.

There you go. Okay. Wait, before we go, Ira. So I need your verdict on a scale of one to ten. 10 baby pandas, how charismatic are the Tasmania? And please, before you answer, bear in mind all that they've been through. Okay. You know, how can you not feel that an animal created by committee, it has a pouch like a kangaroo,

looks like a dog and has stripes of a tiger, how could that not be cute? So it's really, I think it's really cute, good animal. It wins. I need a rating. I'll give it an eight and a half. Eight and a half, Greg. Eleven. This is off the charts.

This is like, it blows away the baby panes. This is polar bear territory. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Greg, and maybe Ira. And thank you also to Neil Waters, who spoke with me earlier this week. And that's about all the time we've got our guest. Gregory Burns is a professor of psychology at Emory University. If you want to learn more about Tasmanian Tigers and what Greg and Neil have been doing,

go to science friday.com slash cute. Science Friday.com slash cute. And, of course, on Science Friday Voxpop app, we want you to nominate the next charismatic creature. We feature slime molds, and now we have Tasmanian tigers. What's next? Please go nominate the next charismatic creature on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. And we're saying goodbye this week to our digital intern, Andrea Corona.

We're going to miss her insight comments at our story meetings and our commitment to making sure coverage reaches more and more years. Good luck to you, Andrea. Wherever you go, I'm sure they will be better people for it. If you missed any part of our program, I'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcast or your smart speaker, ask it to play Science Friday. You can also email us, SciFri at ScienceFriaday.com. Also, as I say, we are looking for your comments on a Science Friday Voxpop app. Please go to the app and answer the all kinds of questions there.

But what we want you to know, we want you to answer, is what next? Nominate the next charismatic creature on the Science Friday Voxpop app and tell us. And, you know, since you're going to be leaving your voice there, your voice might show up on the show on Science Friday. So leave us a comment. I'm Ira Flato in New York.