Short Wave - Meet Two MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Scientists

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

We meet two scientists working on opposite sides of the world, both thinking creatively about rising sea levels and our changing oceans. Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stacy Jupiter, a marine biologist and Melanesia Director with the Wildlife Conservation Society, were awarded MacArthur Fellowships this fall.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safaya here with Shortwave's reporter Emily Kwong. What do you got for us today, Kwong? I have a story about one of the most exciting phone calls you can receive as a scientist, the MacArthur Fellowship. Ooh, the Genius Grants. Yes. At least that's the unofficial name. So every year, the MacArthur Foundation, quick disclosure, one of NPR's funders.

Thanks, y'all. chooses people on the cutting edge of different disciplines and gives them each eight. $625,000 gift that they can spend however they want. When Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, got the call last month, she nearly ignored it. She thought it was a robocall. And instead it was like a half a million dollars. Exactly. That is not how they go for me generally.

Maybe one day you'll get a call like this. But for Andrea... They'd asked me if I'd ever heard of the award. I said, oh, yes. And that was why I'm speechless. Andrea studies something really interesting. She wants to know how sea levels rose and ice sheets melted in the ancient past, and she painstakingly collects fossil corals for clues.

Yeah, she's like a CSI investigator, but for the ocean. In fact, we use a lot of the same tools. We're looking at isotopic evidence and chemical fingerprints, if you will. We're just looking in the rock record rather than on a crime scene. and so we're using those tools to reconstruct what happened in the past. Pretty cool, right? Yeah. Well, get this.

She knows another of the Fellowship winners who also works in ocean science. And like waves washing upon a shore, their work overlaps. Ugh, that joke. Which is why we're talking about them both today. Today in the show, we talk about two MacArthur fellows, Andrea Dutton and Stacey Jupiter, who are thinking creatively about our oceans. And living out the idea that meaningful science can't be done alone. All right, Kwong, scientists show and tell.

Tell me about our geologist Andrea Dutton. Well, we described Andrea as like a CSI investigator of sea level rise, but I would also consider her a time traveler too. She looks specifically for fossil corals from this period called the last interglacial, 125,000 years ago. Oh, so BP. What? before the podcast.

Oh, gosh. Go on. That's a terrible joke. Anyway, last interglacial. Earth was a little warmer than it is now, and her work suggests that oceans were 20 to 30 feet higher than they are today. Whoa. Yeah.

And by gathering data from the last time Earth got this warm, the last interglacial when ice sheets melted and sea levels rose, Andrea can offer insights into how it could all go down in our present day. Okay. That is very cool and seems relevant. Is there anything interesting that she's learned so far? Okay, well, Andrea told me about this one trip to the Seychelles, this island nation in the Indian Ocean, where her team found fossil corals at a really high elevation. Really high.

And that freaked her out. Why is that? Well, that's because Andrea knew in that moment that in order for the corals to have been that high, for the ocean to have risen to that point to put them there, the Antarctic ice sheet must have. been melting at that time. That's the single biggest mass of ice on Earth. So when we got this result in the Seychelles, I did walk away from the outcrop and I sat down in the beach and I thought to myself, you know what? People are not going to like this because I knew right away it meant that Antarctica must have contributed a lot of ice that melted. And that was not good news for our future because it means that we may be headed in the same direction.

Meaning the Antarctic ice sheet may melt and contribute to sea level rise in the same way in our time. So we have some clarity on what the future could look like because Andrea is traveling back in time to gather this information from oceans in the ancient past. I'm into it. I'm nervous about it, but I'm into it. Okay, so tell me about the other MacArthur winner. Tell me about Stacey. Stacey Jupiter. I'm 43 years old and I'm the Melanesia Director with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Melanesia is a region in the Pacific Ocean, home to all these island nations. Fiji, where she's located, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, just to name a few.

The water is just beyond her doorstep. I try to get out as much as I can and take my three-year-old son out as well. We love to go for a paddle and I just show him the crabs on the seawall and we go look for sea snakes or rays that might scoot off as we go over them. So it's a nice place just to look out and be inspired by the marine environment. Fiji is spread across 300 islands. Stacey lives in the capital, Suva, where she thinks a lot about how to work with locals around conservation. Okay, how does she do that?

Well, she not only looks at the hard science of what's happening to, say, the fish or the coral reefs, but the environmental factors, human activity too. For her, conservation means not only protecting the land, but the people who live on it, valuing their need for sustainable jobs, access to natural resources. their physical health, their mental health. Sometimes this looks like formal programs. Other times, it looks like this. Oh, okay. This is my favorite type of science communication. What you're watching is a YouTube clip of 125 people disco dancing in the streets of Suva.

Yeah, I am. Stacey helped organize this flash mob with the motto, more eggs, more fish. Uh-huh. Like all flash mobs. They're calling on the government to pretexts. protect areas where fish come together to reproduce. They're kind of like discos. Okay. This frenzy of fish movement as they release their eggs.

And that's why it was a disco-inspired flash mob. This is some solid science outreach right here. It is so fun. That's not all Stacy has done. She's commissioned a comic book. Why is she having so much fun during science? I did not have this much fun. Well, it's because you didn't help commission a comic book about a cute little fish called

Joji G. Copey. Gobeys are these, they're fish that are born in rivers, they migrate to the ocean and spawn back in the river. So they have this epic journey that come across all these obstacles on the way. And to explain this whole process to kids, she created a comic book called The Adventures of Joji Gobie. He's a little bit precocious. He gets lost from the rest of his school. And he ends up having to go back upstream with this kind of crazy inventor scientist crab and his sidekick's snail. And through this story of them trying to get upstream to find his home,

they encounter all of the different hazards of human impact all along the way. Like fishing and dams and river sediment. And then the Wildlife Conservation Society's Fiji program, which Stacey used to run, turned the comic book into a puppet show. Oh, no. Brought it to schools and kids loved it. I was on board until puppets got involved. You would love this, Maddie.

So this is the moment right after the Joji Gobi puppet encounters a barracuda. Are you sure it's just not them screaming because there's a puppet? Who knows? The mysteries of children. All the kids were given river monitoring kits afterwards with the idea of encouraging their stewardship of the land one day as adults. Indigenous people have tenure over about 87 to 98% of all of the land in Melanesia. And so it really is those kids when they grow up, they're the ones who will be looking at. after the place because they own the land and they have the rights to say whether or not they're going to lease their land for logging or mining activities or whether they'll keep it protected

for themselves in their next generation. You know, okay, so as a science communication nerd, seriously, this is pretty amazing. Like, the level of creativity here and engagement and fun, I am all for this. Sand's puppets. Yeah. Over the phone before our interview, Stacey said to me, look, I'm trained in science, but what moves people is stories. And creativity is a big part of how she approaches her work. Throughout my career, I always felt like as I was going through school, there was always pressure to try to narrow the scope of specialization in your field and try to stay within one field and say,

you are the expert on this one particular topic. But for myself, I always, I rebelled against that. I really wanted to, you know, be more of a generalist and be able to look across disciplines, across different habitats. And I think that taking this approach that's kind of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, it inspires creativity because you're getting this diversity of perspectives and viewpoints. And that's what's needed, Stacey said, to tackle these seemingly intractable global problems. Stacey and Andrea, they work on opposite sides of the world, but they know each other.

And Andrea actually works with another MacArthur fellow in this cohort, Jerry Metrovica at Harvard. He interprets her data about corals so that it can be baked into global climate models and projections for what will happen with ice sheets. And you know what this made me realize. What does it make you realize, Kwong? That it's a small world after all in the sciences. No, it actually made me realize that you need a lot of disciplines, right? Putting their heads together to answer the big questions, especially. especially when it comes to climate science.

At least that's how Andrea, our geologist in Wisconsin, sees it. We can't do this job alone. Science is a team sport, and we need to have all these different disciplines and perspectives to get to the answers that we are seeking. Both Stacey and Andrea said they're thinking about using a part of their MacArthur money to create a scholarship fund of some kind for the next generation of scientists. That is very beautiful, Kwon.

Thank you. We're not doing goodbye. No, but you could say, this NPR shortwave. We'll see you tomorrow. This is NPR Shortwave. We'll see you tomorrow. Nailed it.