Science Friday - Hawai’i Wildfires, Blue-Fin Tuna Science, Maine’s New Lithium Deposit. August 11, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.   Devastating Fires Might Become More Common In Hawaii As of Friday morning, at least 55 were dead and thousands were seeking shelter on Maui, after wildfires tore across the Hawaiian island. Officials there say that the fires, once rare, have caused billions of dollars in damage, and the Biden administration has made federal disaster relief available. The fires were driven by strong, dry winds from nearby Hurricane Dora, and were made worse by ongoing drought conditions. The region has grown hotter and drier, and highly flammable invasive grasses have been crowding out native vegetation. Bethany Brookshire, freelance science journalist and author of the book Pests: How Humans Created Animal Villains, joins Ira Flatow to talk about this story and others from this week in science news, including an investigation into unknown genes in our genome, a 390 million year-old moss that might not survive climate change, and a fish that plays hide and seek to get to its prey.    A Tuna’s Reel Life Adventures Bluefin tuna is typically sliced into small pieces, its ruby red flesh rolled into sushi. But don’t let those tiny sashimi slices fool you. Bluefin tuna are colossal creatures—on average, they’re about 500 pounds. The biggest one ever caught was a whopping 1,500 pounds. They can travel thousands of miles at breakneck speeds, and their skin changes color! The fish, once in danger of extinction, have now rebounded due to a combination of scientific advances and possibly as a result of climate change. Ira talks with Karen Pinchin, science journalist and author of the new book, Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and The Future of Our Seas about a tuna nicknamed Amelia who traveled across the world, the fisherman who tagged her, and what their stories can help us better understand about the mighty fish. Read an excerpt of the book here.   Preserving Acadia National Park’s Vanishing Birdsong Acadia National Park in Maine is home to more than 300 bird species. Climate change is affecting the range of many of these birds, to the extent that some may not be found in the area in the future. A team of volunteers has made it their mission to record as many bird sounds as possible—while they still can. Laura Sebastianelli is the founder and lead researcher of the Schoodic Notes Bird Sounds of Acadia project. She’s helped collect more than 1,200 bird sounds on tape, with the hopes of aiding future researchers. Sebastianelli joins Ira to talk about the project.    World’s Richest Lithium Deposit Faces Opposition To Mining Five years ago, professional gem hunters Mary and Gary Freeman stumbled upon the richest known lithium deposit in the world in the woods of western Maine. Lithium is a silvery metal many consider to be key to the transition to a clean energy future, thanks to its role in technology like lithium-ion batteries. The Maine deposit could be a way for the United States to be independent in their lithium sourcing. But there’s stiff opposition to digging up the mineral within Maine. Kate Cough, reporter and enterprise editor for The Maine Monitor, reported this story in collaboration with Time Magazine. Cough is a Report For America corps member. She joins Ira to discuss the debate.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Listener supported WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Later this hour, Ira Fleda will be here, and he'll be talking tuna. Bluefin tuna, to be exact, to find out how this globe-trotting fish became a sought-after delicacy. And we're taking a trip to Maine to learn about a newly discovered lithium deposit and how scientists are chronicling the state's diverse bird species. But first, wildfires have killed dozens of people.

people on the Hawaiian island of Maui this week. The fast-moving fires were driven by strong, dry winds and made worse by ongoing drought conditions there. Recovery could take years, and officials say billions of dollars after countless homes, businesses, and entire communities burned to the ground. So what do we know about the science behind these wildfires? Here with this story and other science news of the week is Bethany Brookshire, freelance science writer and the author of the book, Pests, How Humans Created Animal Villains. Bethany, welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me.

So what do we know about what caused these fires in Maui? Yeah, no one really knows the exact cause. What we do know is that they've been severely exacerbated by winds from Hurricane Dora. Hurricane Dora is about several hundred miles away, but it's sent winds of more than 60 miles an hour, which has really driven the burn and the spread into towns and other communities. Now, Hawaii, like a lot of other places, does. have wildfires, but not large fires like this. It's a pretty humid place. Why is this changing now, Bethany? Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people think, oh, California is the only place with something like a fire season.

Everywhere has seasons where fires are more likely than others, but there are some ecosystems that are kind of adapted to burning and benefit from kind of frequent low-level flames. Hawaii is not one of those. People in Hawaii are not used to dealing with fires like this. But now, Hawaii has pretty much a year-round fire season. And part of that is because of climate change, right? Climate change has made the islands much drier than before. And that has drastically increased both the number of wildfires and their potential danger. And there are invasive bushes, but most particularly there's this tall grass called guinea grass, which grows really, really fast and really, really tall. And that just provides a crazy amount of Tinder for these wildfires. It's such a terrible story. And our thoughts are with those in Maui and with all of our colleagues at Hawaii Public Radio who are covering this tragedy this week. Let's turn to some other news. The FDA has approved the first pill that treats postpartum depression. Now, before we get into how this pill works, Bethany, can you give us a background on postpartum depression and why it's different from other types of depression? Yeah. So we know about one in seven

people who give birth will suffer from postpartum depression in the weeks and months after giving birth. And postpartum depression is, you know, excessive sadness, excessive an hedonia, which is like an inability to take pleasure in normal activities. And in some people, it can be kind of mild. In others, it can be severely debilitating. It can endanger the life of the parent as well as the life of the baby. And postpartum depression is interesting because we're still not entirely sure what causes it. Many people theorize that there's large amounts of hormones going on in the postpartum body. They have been, you know, used to large amounts of estrogen and progesterone. And those hormone levels just really take a dive after birth. And there are thoughts that that might be

one of the causes behind postpartum depression. And that is why this pill is really interesting. So how exactly does it differ from antidepressants that are on the market and also prior treatments for postpartum depression? Yeah, so this pill is unlike any other antidepressant. Most basic antidepressants target specific chemical messengers in the brain like serotonin or dopamine. This drug, which is unfortunately called Xeranelone and will be marketed as Xerzeve because people love to make me pronounce things. is actually a completely different mechanism. It is a derivative of progesterone. And so Zerzeve is a very different mechanism of action. It's attacking that method that we think might be causing postpartum depression,

those low levels of progesterone, by kind of mimicking some of the breakdown products of progesterone. And it's different from previous drugs, in that the previous drug that was approved for this has to be administered over 60, hours in a hospital setting. Not great. No, that's right. It's not great and not something that a lot of people are going to be able to actually use. Yeah. And so the new one is a pill and it's just once a day for 14 days. And they're very optimistic because it appears to have very fast acting effects,

much faster than other antidepressants. We're going to go on a journey now into the unknown genes of the human genome. Tell us about this. I thought we knew everything about the human genome at this point, Bethany. Oh, that's so cute. No, we do not. Interestingly, so scientists estimate that the human genome has about 20,000 genes, give or take, that encode proteins. But in many of those cases, we have no idea what those proteins do. And so scientists have developed a database of these proteins that they have called the unknown, which is a combination of unknown plus genome.

and this is a massive database of protein coding genes with the requirement that at least one gene in the family is in the human genome. And it assigns a score to the different genes depending on how much we know about them. So a very well-studied gene will have scores above 100, but more than 800 of the known human protein coding genes have a score of zero, meaning we know nothing about them.

So the group ended up looking at 260 of these low-scoring genes that are shared between humans, and fruit flies, and they knocked them down in fruit flies. So they kind of knocked them out, made them not exist. And in 60 of those genes, the result was lethal, meaning that they are definitely necessary for life. We don't know what they do, but we know they are important. But we need them. Yeah. So we know that this database is going to give scientists new avenues to kind of figure out which genes should be studied and potentially how. Interesting. I want to turn to another story that you actually covered this week for science news. It's some new news.

on a very old moss. What can you tell us about this moss? Well, it's really cute. I highly recommend you look at pictures of this very cute moss. The moss genus is Takakia, and it's extremely old. It is estimated to be 390 million years old.

Wow. Which means this moss saw dinosaurs die to an asteroid and gave a little mossy shrug. Wow. So this moss is not only old, it's very rare. There are two species in the genus,

and they only occur together on the Tibetan plateau above 4,000 meters of elevation. And scientists carried out a 10-year study of these mosses. In the process, three people ended up medevac for altitude sickness, so it's a really tough area up there to find out how these mosses evolved to live in such harsh conditions. And they found that they're tough little guys, and they have the highest number of fast evolving genes of any moss. So they're speed evolving. And over the 10 years of the study, they analyzed the ecosystem around these mosses.

And they found that the temperature was rising on average about 0.43 degrees Celsius per year. And the moss, its range was contracting by 1.6% per year, which means that in another 100 years, a nearly 400 million-year-old moss might be extinct. It's just not evolving fast enough. Oh, what a story. It's really interesting, and you should go look at pictures of this cute moss. Finally, scientists have found evidence of a version of, I guess it's hide-and-seek that's happening in the ocean. Tell us about this.

Yes. So the fish we're talking about is the trumpet fish. So the trumpet fish lives on coral reefs in the Caribbean. And they're these long, slender predators, about 20 inches long. And they generally eat things like shrimp and damsel fish. And if they were to approach those shrimp and damselfish looking like themselves, the damsel fish would come up and check them out and be like absolutely not, right? They know danger when they see it.

So the trumpet fish swims up hiding behind a parrot fish, which is a big friendly boy, right? Yeah. And we knew there were anecdotal reports of this behavior. To test it, scientists created 3D models of fish and reeled them out over the reef to see how the damselfish would respond. And they showed that the damsel fish would flee from a trumpet fish model by itself. They would not react to a parrot fish model by itself.

And if a trumpet fish hid behind a parrot fish, the damsel fish were slightly less wary, maybe just less wary enough to end up as dinner. That is so interesting, those sneaky, sneaky trumpet fish. That is all the time we have. I want to thank Bethany Brookshire, freelance science writer and author of the book, Pests, How Humans Created Animal,

villains. Thanks so much for bringing us these stories, Bethany. Thank you. If that trumpet fish story isn't enough to make you realize how interesting fish behavior can be. Up next, we're going to introduce you to Amelia the bluefin tuna, a fish who, like her namesake, traveled across the oceans. Ira is back right after the short break. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This next story is about the world's most popular fish. Here's a little hint. Sorry, Charlie. Only the best tuna get to be Starkist. Insist on Starkist.

Tell them Charlie sent you. That's the famous Charlie the tuna commercial from back in the day when Americans were getting their feet wet over tuna-fitch sandwiches, tuna noodle casseroles, all things made from canned albacore tuna. Fast forward to the more chic way to eat tuna, sliced into tiny pieces, rolled into sushi with the pricier and meaty red-raw bluefin tuna. But don't let those tiny sashimi slices fool you. Do you know how big a tuna is? Bluefin tuna are colossal. On average, they're about 500 pounds, and the biggest one ever caught was a whopping 1,500 pounds. My next guest has me hooked on learning more about the surprising science of tuna and the history of how they became the world's most popular fish. Karen Pinchin, science journalist and author of the new book, Kings of their own ocean,

tuna, obsession, and the future of our seas. She's based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me on, Ira. Nice to have you on. Okay, let's start with some basics. Describe from you what a bluefin tuna looks like. So imagine the biggest mackerel you can conceive of. Yeah. Like a tiny little mackerel, but the size of a grand piano. You know, that's kind of what what we're talking here. It's a fish that evolved between 65 and 55 million years ago in the late Paleocene. It's the most remarkable color. Photographs do not do this fish justice. It's almost like a rainbow in all the colors as it kind of, they shift on its body. And it has these extremely sharp-looking fins. Its tail almost looked like it can be a weapon. It kind of

these really sharp points. It's a remarkable creature. And it can live up to how long? So like a lot of things about the ocean, it's hard to get kind of exact numbers here. But generally between 18 and 30 years is our understanding, which is magnitudes more than any other tuna species. Yeah. And you say that it can change its skin color. It reminds me of an octopus. Yeah, it's a phenomenon called flashing. And it most often occurs when a fish is fighting or stressed or while it's dying. And its skin can go from black to white to silver to mauve to teal. It's really, really spontaneous and only very lucky fishermen get to see it. It's quite remarkable. Wow. That is remarkable. Now, tell me how a blue fin,

is different from an albacore or a yellow fin tuna? Yeah, so the primary difference is how it evolved to swim in the open ocean. So they're technically part of the same family. That family is Scombarday. But very early on, back when the continents were still connected and you had the Tethys Sea, it was a precursor to the Mediterranean, that was where the bluefin tuna evolved. And then as the continent separated and the bluefin had to go farther afield into the Atlantic Ocean to find food, it developed this incredible system called a Riti Mirabili system. It's like a heat pump in its body, essentially, and it allows it to be warm-bodied.

So it takes all the heat that a lot of other fish would lose through their gills and actually recycles that heat. back into its muscles, its brain, its eyes, allowing it to really make these remarkable speeds. An example of that is in 1962, one fish that was tagged by a scientist near the Bahamas migrated 10,000 kilometers in 50 days and was caught off the coast of Norway. So that's like five consecutive marathons a day for more than a month. Wow, that is amazing. And tuna have a sort of third eye, right? Yes, this is my, one of my favorite tuna facts, is that it has a little translucent window called a pineal window on the top of its head.

And that's connected to an organ in its brain, like a piece of cartilage that essentially senses light. And so it does these incredible super deep dives called spike dives very often when it's breeding and spawning. And that little window allows it to sense light and day and depth. That is cool. So, okay, how did you get hooked on tuna? What drew you into researching and writing a book about this fish? I mean, I've loved tuna for my whole life, eating it, that is, but you're researching it. What drew you in?

Yeah, so I'm part of a generation that has been taught our whole lives, you know, save the bluefin. That has been the mantra, right? Is it by eating this fish, you're somehow morally complicit in its, you know, oncoming extinction. But I grew up far inland in Ontario, in Canada, and I would fish lake fish, you know, a floppy bass, a trout, but didn't really know a lot about saltwater fishing. This was kind of a new world for me. But I had been writing about restaurants and culinary culture and science for quite a long time when I got a phone call from a scientist named Molly Luckovich when I was doing grad school in New York.

And she said, you will not believe the story of this fish. And the fish came to be called Amelia for Amelia Earhart. a woman who I said, you know, crossed the Atlantic Ocean on currents of a different kind. And it was tagged first by a man named Al Anderson, a charter captain in Rhode Island. Three years later, she tagged the same fish, which just that in and of itself is extremely unlikely, you know, tagging a fish this size again. And then the tuna wore a pop-up satellite tag. she tracked it as it moved up the eastern seaboard. And then it disappeared until 2018 when it, this one fish crossed the Atlantic Ocean,

spawned, left the Mediterranean and was caught in a Portuguese set net and was killed and shipped to the world's second largest fish market in Madrid. And so the ability to track that fish over that period of time, the fact that that transatlantic migration is something that science hasn't incorporated into models for decades and decades. You know, this was a remarkable fish. And it had been tagged by some remarkable humans. And so that was the story.

And the more I got into it, the more I realized that there were all these themes of history and culture and science and crime that were encapsulated in these, you know, arguably simple seeming stories. I want to know more about Amelia's journey because from reading your book, I understand it was vital to really upsetting our ideas about tuna's migratory patterns, things that we didn't know before. Yeah. And that's one of the most outrageous things about fisheries science, is that so much of what we take for granted now about how fish move, how we manage the stocks, right? Even just the word stock, it implies like a certain degree of commercial value. But a lot of the science is so young compared to other fields. And so this one fish, it broke a line.

And this line was drawn in 1981 at ICAT, which is the international body that manages tuna. And it was a move championed by the United States whose delegation said, listen, if the Europeans won't reduce the number of tuna they're catching, we're going to draw a line down the middle of the ocean. All the fish on the western side, those are ours, all the fish on the eastern side, those are yours. They set quotas for the Canadian government, the U.S. government, and the Japanese fleet that had been historically catching tuna in, you know,

quote unquote, our waters. And that was it. that was how the fish was managed, you know, as two stocks that spawned in two different places, one in the Gulf of Mexico and the other in the Mediterranean, and that any fish that kind of went back and forth, they were considered anomalous. And over decades of dedicated tagging and, you know, tracking these fish from the air and watching catch landings and analyzing the odilis, the tiny little earbones, scientists are starting to understand that. maybe this framework that set all these quotas and determined international management,

you know, maybe they're just not useful anymore. Right, right. They're not accurate. In the book, you chart the story of Al Anderson, a fisherman based in Narragansett, Rhode Island. His business model was taking out people on his boat where he tagged bluefin tuna and then putting the tuna back in the ocean. I mean, what can his story help us understand better about the bluefin tuna? I think first off is the power of the individual action in the face of something that seems incomprehensible, right?

You know, tagging one fish and what? Putting it back into the ocean, this huge, huge body of water, you know, what are the chances it'll come back? And he was doing this by himself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one man on a boat. Sometimes he had a first mate. He collaborated with a Woods Hole scientist named Frank Mather the third who pioneered giant Lufin tagging in the U.S.

He loved the respectability, I think, that the tagging gave him. He loved the data that he would get back out of it. And, you know, when I get into his personal story, he had a very hard childhood in teen years and parental situation, and he used the tuna as a way to kind of, and striped bass, which he tagged as well. Over his lifetime, he tagged more than 60,000 fish. And about 5,000 of those were juvenile bluefin tuna. And I think ultimately, it's this idea that, you know, do you have to be a perfect person in order to do interesting or good or useful science, even if it's citizen science? And I think that's kind of the thing that helped me develop a real, real affection for Al,

who passed away before I even had the chance to discover his story. Walk me through a bit about bluefin tuna history and popularity, because I remember there was a time where the tuna were being overfished, I think it was in the 1990s, right? How did their numbers eventually rebound? This is such an interesting story where in some cases the scientists, you know, they loathed some of the environmentalists. You know, these people were really, really battling it out. But there were a lot of factors. One of the factors was that we needed better data. You know, we needed systems that said, you know, where are these fish?

How many of them are we catching? Part of it was that we did have to bring in a moratorium in the United States. in Canada. You know, Al said this in his books that he wrote, you know, a lot of U.S. fishermen don't understand that we are fishing under a scientific quota that all the bluefin tuna that were caught basically throughout the 90s and the odds. A lot of those fish were, you know, technically for science. But when a fish, a single fish is being sold for $50,000, $50,000, then, you know, the market has this kind of real power. So, One of the issues is also that there was a large criminal market, you know, when something has that kind of value, when you have that kind of demand, there's a real scramble.

And then the last thing is that the quotas that were being set internationally, the body that I mentioned ICAT, it was rife with political influence. The science was just, you know, the scientists would say, you know, maybe this year we should catch only 10,000 metric tons. and all the delegates from all these tuna fishing nations would say, well, like, thanks for the advice, but we're going to set the quab at 30,000 metric tons. That's a lot of tons. That's a lot of tuna. If you're just joining us,

we're talking with Karen Pynchon, author of a new book, King of Their Own Ocean, Tuna Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. As you're describing this, you know, I'm thinking to myself, and I'm sure my listeners are too, and I think about it every time I open a can of tuna fish, is there a way to ethically eat tuna? There is. And that has been a very modern emergence that has come from this better science and from this better management.

And I had sushi last week. I had bluefin tuna at my local sushi restaurant. And because it's locally caught on either rod and reel, that's where you have one fishing rod, one fish, or by harpoon. that's one harpoon, one fish. And it's one of the tightest managed most productive fisheries on the planet right now. I talked to scientists who've spent the past 30 years trying to save the bluefin, and they said it's now not a fish I worry about.

Carl Safina a couple years ago went out with a friend on his boat off Montauk and caught a bluefin tuna, and they kept it. You know, who he was the environmentalist who essentially led the charge against, you know, a global trade in bluefin tuna in the 90s. And now it's healthy enough that that even people who would have condemned it years ago are now saying that, you know, now we have other things to worry about. Like, you know, forge fish, herring in the North Atlantic. There, you know, hopefully this can, this is a hopeful story, right? that can be used as a template as a framework for in the face of a really dire situation, how individual action can actually make a difference.

Yeah. You know, it almost sounds like we're in the middle of climate change and global warming that it may be helping the tuna out some way. Yeah, that's a very strange silver lining in this whole story, is that bluefin tuna need waters of 22 degrees Celsius or warmer to breed. And it means that all these places where, it would otherwise reproduce, Gulf of Mexico, Mediterranean, those are warm places. And it can range so widely in the ocean that a lot of scientists say, you know, in some cases, populations may be

recovering because of climate change, because it can benefit from the warming waters. But that is in the short and medium term. The real danger is that we're just playing God with all these unintended consequences. So I would say that it will benefit with a grain of salt. Karen, a fascinating book. Thank you for writing it and thank you for being a guest. Thanks so much, Ira. Karen Pinchin, science journalist, author of the new book, Kings of Their Own Ocean, Tuna Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas. Karen is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And if you want to learn more about tuna and read an excerpt of the book, it's on our website, Science Friday.com slash tuna. We have to take a quick break and when we come back,

we'll head to Maine to talk about the world's richest lithium mine and the drama surrounding efforts to mine it. And this is a supply chain issue. U.S. currently has no lithium processing facilities. We only have one operational lithium mine in Nevada, which means we're really heavily dependent on other countries, primarily China, to mine and process the lithium that goes into our devices and our batteries. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday I'm Ira Flato, and now it's time 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. Five years ago, gem hunters found the richest known lithium deposit in the world, and they found it deep in the woods of Western Maine. Yes, lithium is a silvery metal that is a key element in lithium ion batteries, and the world is searching all over for it. Even so, there is stiff opposition to digging up this deposit. Joining me to explain is Kate Koff, reporter and enterprise editor at the Maine Monitor based in Bart Harbor, Maine. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me. Now, this is not the world's largest deposit, but it's the richest deposit. What does that mean? That's correct. So there is a pretty big difference. And we should probably start by explaining what lithium is, just briefly, for those who don't know. I'm sure you've heard about it at this point, but lithium is a metal, of course. It's the lightest element, which means that it can't be broken down any further into constituent parts. It's actually so light that it floats in water, and it's never found by itself in nature. So when we say that there's a very rich lithium deposit, it doesn't mean that someone has found like a big cache of pure lithium metal underground. It means that they've found rocks that have lithium in them, which is bonded to something else, in this case, the lithium is bonded to oxygen, and it's known as lithium oxide.

The deposit is thought to be the world's richest because the samples that have been analyzed so far have shown an average lithium oxide content of 4.68% by weight, which I know doesn't sound like very much, but the second richest hard rock lithium deposit in Manitoba, Canada, has a lithium oxide content of 2.76% by weight. So that's quite. a bit less. This find is also really unique for the size of the crystals that contain the lithium. So some of these crystals are 36 feet long, whereas typically crystals like this are really small, like the size of a thumbnail. So like we said, this isn't actually the largest deposit. Scientists think that it contains about 11 million tons of ore, which is way less than the 77 million tons in the world's largest. just hard rock lithium mine in Australia. But of course, this is all just speculation. We won't know

how big it is until somebody digs it out of the ground if they ever do. You've spoken to Mary and Gary Freeman, who found the deposit five years ago. What is their attitude towards what to do with all this lithium? I was actually able to visit the site with Mary and Gary Freeman this June, which was really fascinating. The Freemans are part of a really passionate group of just gem hunters in Maine. Those are people, you know, who like to look for semi-precious stones recreationally. We have quite a few of them in Western Maine. The Freemans have been buying land and digging for stones like tourmaline and quartz in Western Maine for decades now. A lot of their finds have actually wound up on display at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel,

and they are very keen about geology. They were actually looking for a rare type of blue termalium when they found this lithium deposit. And they really want the lithium to be extracted. So there's a lot of money to be made, possibly close to a billion and a half dollars, depending on the market price. So that's definitely an incentive. But they're also pretty pragmatic and clear-eyed about the mineral resources that go into basically everything in our lives. And they believe that they can get the lithium out of the ground in an environmentally responsible way that won't pollute the land and water around it. Just as a point of reference, is the deposit on the Freeman's property? It is. They have been buying land in this area specifically for gem hunting. They love to look for termaline. They have

been buying land in this area for decades now. And this particular pit sits in roughly the middle of about 7,000 acres that they own in Western Maine. So there's really, there's quite a bit of land around them, they own the land and they own the mineral rights underneath it as well. And this, of course, is an attempt to get away from the overseas, relying on the overseas supplies of lithium, right? That's exactly right. So as your listeners have probably heard, there's lithium in car batteries, there's lithium in all kinds of things. We use it in mood stabilizing drugs to help treat depression. We use it for scientific glassware to lower the melting temperature and computer screens. So we need a lot of it. And this is a supply chain issue.

So the U.S. currently has no lithium processing facilities. We only have one operational lithium mine in Nevada, which means we're really heavily dependent on other countries, primarily China, to mine and process the lithium that goes into our devices and our batteries. And that's becoming more of a more of a problem. You know, we all remember the supply chain issues that came up during COVID, like it was really hard to buy a new car because companies couldn't get semiconductor chips. Lithium is in so many things. It would be hugely disruptive if we suddenly didn't have access to a source of it or facilities to process it. So the federal government is trying to fix this.

The Biden administration recently launched an initiative to secure a Made in America supply chain for critical minerals, which includes billions of dollars in funding for companies trying to mine and process critical minerals in the U.S. As an example, last October, the Department of Energy used the bipartisan infrastructure law to give a $141 million grant to Piedmont Lithium, which is building a lithium processing plant in Tennessee. That's really interesting. And the Freemans say they have found a way of environmentally safe, taking it out of the ground, but there is still a lot of opposition all over the state, correct? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, you know, people are rightfully wary of mining operations. The mines that were developed in the past hundred years in the United States and elsewhere have a really poor track record. We probably all seen the photos of that really awful rust-colored water that's been

contaminated by mine waste and, you know, nobody wants that anywhere and nobody wants that in Maine. We have a couple of examples of old mines in Maine. One of, you know, one of them is an old pit mine that was a few hours east of the Freemans in Brooksville that was dug in a tidal estuary it's now a superfund site there are heavy metals in the soil there and it's cost tens of millions of dollars and taxpayer money to clean up so people are rightfully very wary of this and people are also very aware because Maine relies heavily on outdoor tourism and this area of the state has a lot of hiking has a lot of beautiful lakes and ponds that people depend on for recreation and for drinking water. Poland Springs actually draws water from aquifers not too far from

this proposed mine. So, you know, I think people are just very afraid of what the, you know, the potential impacts are. I'm just thinking about lithium getting into the Poland Springs drinking water and people drinking. And I'm laughing about it, but it's a serious concern I have is what happens to all the lithium dust that they mine up, right? It gets up in the air, people inhale it, do they? I mean, as you say, there are psychiatric disorders like bipolar and depression that you use lithium for. Yeah, well, we actually have, you know, lithium in our body. So it's around us and, you know, it is okay at low concentrations, from what I understand. And I, this lithium deposit, so these rocks that are there right now

are actually exposed to the air and to the water. So one of the primary concerns, when you're mining is that if you expose rocks that have this compound called iron sulfides in them, that's where you get that like rust-colored orange water that's, you know, so detrimental to aquatic life and fish and the environment around it. These rocks don't have iron sulfides in them. In fact, some of them are actually sitting out there, you know, in the open. I saw them myself. It was actually raining the day that I went and I saw these rocks out there. They were being rained on. they were being exposed to the air and water, and they, you know, hadn't dissolved away. Some of them have been sitting out there for hundreds, thousands of years and haven't dissolved away.

There was actually a brook nearby. It was, you know, the water was sparkling clean. So geologists that I have spoken to, and I've talked to a lot of them over the last couple of years, are, you know, pretty unanimous in the opinion that this would be safer than certain other kinds of mining because of the geological characteristics of the rocks around it. Yeah, but the butt. But the butt. There's always a butt. And that butt I would ask you is this is obviously going to have to play itself out in the courts, right?

The opposition to the mining. We're looking, it must be years down the road here. Yeah, well, I'm not sure. So Maine has very strict metallic mining laws. We don't have any operations. metal mines in the state of Maine at the moment. But lawmakers have been really carefully considering what to do about this particular deposit because, you know, we do need lithium for all kinds of things. And it's important to note that the lithium in this deposit is so pure that it's likely

it would be used for things like scientific glassware rather than for batteries, although it could be used for batteries. Really? Yeah. It's really high quality. So you don't need, as I understand it, you don't need as high-quality lithium to make batteries as you do to make other types of things. So this, I mean, the Freemans have no control over the end product, but it would likely be used for something like glassware or something that requires like really pure lithium. But so lawmakers have been looking for a way to, you know, allow them to get this out of the ground safely. So there was a law that was passed in July. It was signed by the governor and it will start the process of amending the metallic mining law in Maine that and eventually,

possibly allow the Freemans to get this deposit out of the ground. But that rulemaking process is going to take a long time. It's a public process. There will be lots of time for public comment and studies. And then once that process is finished, you know, it could be a year, it could be two years, it could be more than that. Once that process is finished, then the Freeman's. can apply for permits and they would have to do all kinds of studies before, you know,

they're allowed to dig this up. So, yeah, it's likely it will be at least several years at the earliest before they could start mining. Yeah, well, this is quite interesting. We will come back to you and follow the story, okay? Okay, that sounds great. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Kate Koff, reporter and enterprise editor at the Maine Monitor based in Bahaba, Maine. I'm I Refleto, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. To end the hour, how about a hike in Acadia National Park in Maine, home to more than 300 bird species, birds like the blue-headed Vario and the Winter Wren?

But climate change is affecting the park's bird populations, so a team of volunteers has made it their mission to record as many bird sounds as possible, while the climate change. they still can. Laura Sebastianelli is the founder and lead volunteer for the Scudic Notes Bird Sounds of Acadia Project that's based at the Skudic Institute in Winter Harbor, Maine. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks very much. Okay, so why is it so important to capture these bird sounds now? Because with the current trajectory, some of these birds won't be here. In fact, a couple of them are already missing from the park. Is that right? Where do they go? Well, that's an interesting. question because often we say the birds are extirpated and we kind of imagine in our heads that

they have just flown off to perhaps a more northern location. But often it means death to many birds who are going into a new territory where other birds are already established. So we say that they're extirpated and we just hope for the best. And how many sounds have you collected so far of all those birds? Well, we have about 1,200 recordings, many duplicates, meaning of the same species, because birds make a lot of different sounds. So we continue to record, for instance, a white-throated sparrow, because there's a lot of different sounds that birds make, and some of that is a variation among the individuals

and others are just sounds that may not be heard very often. And what's your goal? How many sounds do you think? How many different birds do you think you can actually collect? Well, I would like to hope that eventually we can at least get all of the land birds. It will be a lot more difficult to get ducks and, you know, shorebirds and waterfowl. But among the land birds, I would hope we could get all of them. And what will these sounds be used?

for, can we get a recording of that? Well, they'll be used for a lot of things. They'll be used by researchers who are a studying song to kind of learn the who, what, why, where and of the birds and, you know, what they're communicating. It can also be just for pleasure. They can be used for, you know, like you said, I'd really love to hear a winter rent and you can go to the McCauley Library and type in winter wren and there are recordings. from all over, not just Acadia National Park, but there are recordings of winter wrens there. They can be used for educational programs or outreach projects.

So there are a lot of different uses for the recordings, but I would say first and foremost, it's a record of the natural history of the species, of that particular individual and of the species. And you think that it will be preserved for forever? Well, as far as forever looks, the Macaulay Library is pretty much up there. So it has the largest collection of bird sounds in the world. So if ever you were going to try and preserve audio recordings, the Macaulay Library is an excellent choice. And what's your hope for the legacy of the project?

Well, you know, the legacy has already been accomplished, which is the recordings themselves. So we purposely set up the project so that it would not be a project about charismatic personalities, if you will. People come and go. We pass away. And if we then have these recordings in drawers and closets and wherever, you know, we tuck them away, then they really don't have a legacy. So it's set up right from the beginning to put them in a place where everyone can access them, which is at the Moncali Library, which is Cornell's Lab of Ornithology. Well, we wish you good luck and hopefully we'll be keeping in touch with you. Very good. We look forward to keeping in touch with you. Thank you. Laura Sebastianelli is the founder and lead volunteer for the Skudic Notes, Bird Sounds of Acadia project,

based at the Scudic Institute in Winter Harbor, May. One last thing before we go. Last week, during our segment about artificial sweeteners, we neglected to identify one of our guests, Dr. Margie McCullough, of the American Cancer Society, with her proper title. A fact several of you pointed out to us, and we deeply regret the error, Dr. McCullough, and extend our thanks to those of you who brought it to our attention.

Thank you. We had helped this hour from many folks, including office manager, Valissa Mayors, director of audience, Ariel Zich, and executive director, Danielle Johnson. BJ Liderman composed our theme music, and of course, if you'd like to hear the program again, you can subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.