The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Neil Shubin: Science, Exploration, Patience, and Survival at the Ends of the Earth

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

One of the best parts of hosting the Origins podcast is talking with remarkable scientists whose ideas have changed the way we understand ourselves and our world. My recent conversation with Neil Shubin was particularly enjoyable, not only because Neil is a friend whose insights I admire, but because our dialogue ranged across some of the most fascinating questions at the intersection of evolution, exploration, and human curiosity.Neil became widely known for discovering Tiktaalik, the fossil fish whose fins contain bones remarkably similar to the limbs of land animals, including us. He is currently the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago and the bestselling author of Your Inner Fish and, most recently, The Ends of the Earth. But beyond his credentials, Neil embodies the careful, patient, and humble approach to discovery that value in science.Our discussion began with the unexpected paths scientists take, including Neil's own formative experiences. He described how museum visits and planetarium shows ignited his childhood fascination, and we talked about how a single course on vertebrate evolution at Harvard redirected his career from veterinary medicine to fossil hunting. Neil recounted, and we discussed at length, the meticulous thought and considerable risk that led him and his colleague, Ted Daeschler, to choose the Canadian Arctic for their famous expedition. It took six summers of tough fieldwork before their gamble yielded Tiktaalik, transforming our understanding of how life transitioned from water to land.But our conversation wasn't just about past discoveries. Neil and I explored broader themes about the nature of science itself: how hypotheses are formed, the patience and courage it takes to test bold ideas, and the critical importance of embracing failure. We agreed that stepping outside one's comfort zone is almost always necessary to achieve scientific breakthroughs, and Neil shared how his own career exemplifies precisely that.This kind of deeper dialogue, going beyond the headlines to explore the very human stories behind scientific discoveries, is one of the reasons I started the Origins podcast. I hope you find this conversation with Neil Shubin as enjoyable and thought-provoking as I did.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I had a distinct pleasure and privilege to talk to an old friend and colleague, a distinguished scientist, a biologist, paleontologist, Neil Schubin, from the University of Chicago, who has written a new book called The Ends of the Earth, Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future. Neil attained fame as a scientist for discovering a fossil, which he called Tiktos, which I think is an Inuit word, but it describes basically the first evidence of a fish with legs,

a fish that the first transitional fossil as fish began to evolve into animals that could live on land, the important missing link in the history of evolution of life on Earth. And that got him famous a scientist. His book at the time, Your Inner Fish, which later got turned into a TV series, also was a best-selling book at the time. And this new book is equally interesting in so many ways. It describes the challenge of doing science in a polar region where he spent a lot of his time since as a graduate student. I'm a little familiar with that, having spent time in Antarctica and also in Greenland.

And I know the amazing science has been done there. And it has an impact not just on our understanding of our own human evolution, but the evolution of the earth itself, going back and understanding our climate back a million years, understanding how quickly the climate can change, how ice itself can move so much faster than you can imagine. And also not just the Earth, but the cosmos, because in Antarctic at least, you can look for meteorites. And meteorites that not just tell us about the beginning of the solar system,

but meteorites from Mars, which may one day reveal more information about life on Mars. The science is fascinating, but what's also particularly fascinating is this personal discussion of the challenge of doing science in such a dangerous environment. Now, the Origins podcast is, of course, is in many ways about origins, and this is not just about the origins of the earth, but in the book itself describes his own scientific origins

from the first time going out into harsh climates as an intern, as an undergraduate and then a graduate student when he hadn't even gone camping outside the house before to leading expeditions to places where the science is hard enough to do, even in a nice environment. But these are environments that can kill you if you're not careful. It's a fascinating discussion. I really enjoyed it.

He's an eloquent speaker, and the material is very interesting. And you can watch it on our Critical Mass Substack site. Add free if you subscribe to that site. And subscriptions to that site, the funds from that will go to support the Origins Project Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that produces this podcast. or you can watch it on our YouTube channel and hopefully you'll subscribe to that or you can listen to it

or watch it at any podcast listening site and no matter how you watch it or listen to it, I think you'll be as fascinated as I was by this remarkable discussion of doing science literally at the ends of the earth. So with no further ado, here's Neil Schubin. Well, Neil Schubin, I'm so happy to have a chance to talk to you again. It's been quite a while.

Thank you so much for coming on the program. It's been, I've really enjoyed every time we've interacted before, and I know I'm going to enjoy this one. So thanks. Thanks for having me on, looking forward to it. Yeah, I mean, essentially the reason we're on now is your new book, Ends of the Earth, journeys to the polar regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future. And it's a great read, which I enjoyed going through,

and we'll go through it in great detail. Some really interesting combination of personal stories and history, about polar regions and their importance. But this is an origins podcast. And what I like to do is sort of begin by trying to find out how people got to where they, the starting point of our discussion. And, and I like to learn more people. I've known you for a while, but this is a good chance for me to learn more about you as

well and your backstory. Of course, you're, you're famous for, is it tick-dolic? Tick-Dalik. You nailed it. You're very good. First try. Thank you.

I met a lot of Inuit friends. But anyway, you know, for discovering, and we'll get there to the fish on legs. And that's a precursor in some sense to some of the things that are discussed to the book. But I want to go further back. You grew up near Philadelphia. I assume an affluent suburb outside Philadelphia or? Yeah, I grew up outside Philly in a classic sort of upper middle class suburb. You know, I'm the last person you'd think would be a fossil hunter in the polar regions because, you know, my family used to think that, you know, camping was staying in a Marriott, rather than a higher-in-hot.

Mine too, exactly. You know, and I only know, I've been looking up trying to find biographies here. And I can only, and now begin sort of with your university with Columbia and then Harvard. but I want to go back further. So I don't know your background, your parents' background. Were they professionals? Were they academics? Were they, you know, what were they?

What did they do? My dad was a mystery writer. He wrote thrillers and mysteries of a noir genre back in the 50s and 60s and freelances his whole life. So I grew up in a writing family and my dad was freelancing and he had all the ups and downs of a writer. And I would be his first editor. really. Even as a kid, like a 13, 14 year old, he would give me his manuscripts for

various thrillers and mysteries he wrote, a very noir style, very staccato, you know, classic, kind of Raymond Chandler-esque kind of thing. And I learned two lessons for that. I learned the power of the written word, number one, number two, I learned it's never really good to criticize a writer in their first draft. So I'll be like, oh, dad, this is, this is perfect what you just wrote. It's absolutely perfect. But you can make it perfecter if you do explain and say, you know, So I learned how to talk to a writer. But actually, I got a lot of, I mean, a lot of my passion for the written word came from my interactions with my father and working, seeing him as a writer and so forth.

What about your mom? Yeah. What would your mom? Sorry, sorry to interrupt your mom? Yeah, my mom was, ran a day camp for a while than a nursing home. She sort of was more of the management side of things. And yeah, and so she just juggled a business with being running the hall, honestly. And then dealing with a writer as a husband, which can be challenging.

Yeah, which is always a challenge. Yeah. Yeah. Did they, had they gone to college, both of them? Or were they college educated or no? No. My mom, yes. My mom, no, she did not go to college.

My father was the first and only person in his family to go to college. So it was a big deal. Did he study more science? Say one? Yeah, he studied journalism. And so he studied journalism. And so his whole thing was to follow the Philadelphia police. around when they did their midnight raids.

And then he would get like official detectives kind of stories out of it and then fodders. He had notes downstairs of all these different police cases that were later fodder in some way for his creative process and crafting his novels, you know. And yeah, but he was not science literate. In fact, he was pretty sciencephobic. My mom was the same. And they were fairly religious. Conservative Judaism was raised that way.

way. You know, so I was not raised in a, you know, science, in a background where you think the offspring would become a scientist, Thomas. Well, you know, it's not that unusual. I, you know, I've talked about it's too much in the program. Neither of my parents went to finitia high school. So, and they, but they did. But I'm wondering if there was a conservative Jewish household, what I was, well, there's two questions I had about you. One, I've learned about now why you might have started writing, because it clearly, that's of interest. But the, the other questions, why? science. And in my cases, because my mother wanted me to be a doctor, but I don't, you know,

coming from that kind of background, but it wasn't, what got you into science? And also, not just writing, but reading. You know, were there a lot of books around the house for you other than mystery stories or not? Oh, it were tons. Yeah, tons. I mean, I think, honestly, my, my favorite things to read were mysteries, honestly. And I'm literature. I went through a huge Sherlock Holmes face, you know. And that, honestly, when I look back on it was really sort of, it just, you know, you read about Conan Doyle later after Conan. Yeah. He was very mystical. But with Holmes, Holmes was, you know, very rational, extraordinarily rational, figuring out the past by finding the clues and being having that insightful way of seeing, just, you know, detecting the important clues from the, the unimportant ones. And I just love those moments and those stories. And sometimes I reread them again because they bring back that youthful curiosity and excitement from reading them the first. time, you know. They're kind of my comfort groups sometimes. Yeah. I love going back to them. Yeah. In fact, I just listened to them all. My friend Stephen Fry narrated them all. And I listened to 62 hours of Sherlock Holmes. If you have them in a long car trip, I highly recommend listening to Stephen's

rendition. But it's, but you know, it's interesting that you say that it, you know, I agree with you. Holmes was sort of a, the ultimate rational sort of in the most part, scientific type. And science is kind of a detective story, and sort of looking for clues and trying to piece together what happened. And was it through mystery stories or was it through a good teacher? What got you in the direction of science ultimately then? Museums and planetarium. Planetarium. I used to forward to the days we'd go to the local Natural History Museum in Philadelphia or the local planetarium. And I just, you know, those environments really evoked a sense of wonder that hasn't much diminished, honestly, you know, and during my life. And, you know, seeing the dioramas of the animals from around the world, the fossils and the dinosaurs, the planetarium displays.

I just remember falling in love with natural history with astronomy. In fact, astronomy was my first love. And it largely through the encounters at the planetarium and then readings that I would do afterwards. just to be so excited seeing this and seeing the all on wonder. And remember, I was growing up at a time when humans were walking on the moon. This is, I was seven to 12 years old when the Apollo mission was going to the moon. So science was a very forward-looking enterprise. It was tied to national identity.

It was bold. It was risk-taking. You know, this is the era of the great national geographic documentaries, you know, the fanfare for the common men. You know, and you'd see Jane Goodall with the chimps and Carl Sagan with coffee. cosmos. You know, I just was caught up in this tidal wave of science as, um, as an enterprise that's forward looking, optimistic, inspiring, full of wonder. Honestly, I mean, I'm still getting, you know, kind of choked up when I talk about it because, and I kind of touch that place to myself when I'm writing about it. It's, um, yeah, yeah, I was growing up in a special time. I mean, as someone

has written, I've often find it, it's, it's, it's nice. to write because it rekindles that one's own, you know, inner enthusiasm often when you write about it. It's really, oh, indeed, absolutely. I mean, those are the moments, you know, those are the moments, you know, you have a lot of moments when you're right. Some of them aren't so great. But some of them, the really great ones are where you're touching a place in you that just opens up, you know, a world of your own personal history, but also the way you see the world now and tying you to your past an important way, you know. Now, okay, so you had said something that, that, that, prompted me. I was going to always wonder why people don't do physics.

But you're, you're, you're, um, so your interest, initial issues with astronomy, what, what moved you? I assume I don't, I was your undergraduate degree in biology or was it, was it, um, oh, was biology in anthropology? I did a double major with a minor in geology. I actually did not do astronomy in, um, in college. I took astronomy in college. I took actually to, yeah, I took a couple courses in astronomy in college, along with physics and all that and math because you have to do that stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But really what happened was I entered.

So astronomy was a real love. But then I really loved animals. And I wanted to be a vet because that's what I knew. Studying animals, maybe a zoo vet or something, you know, treating the lions and the tigers and the bears or stuff. And so I went to college with sort of a. a natural history astronomy mindset. And I went to college in New York City,

and I took a course in my freshman year on human evolution. It was taught by a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. And it was once a week, kind of a three hour once a week deep dive. And he would bring fossils from the collection or casts from the collection to the class. And I just remember it just captured my imagination that people could travel the world, world using sort of empirical conceptual tools of geology and other things and find object, physical objects, which can change the way we think about our past. And I remember thinking that. And then he offered me an opportunity to volunteer at the AM&H in the American Museum and Natural History

in New York. And I met the graduate students who were kind of, they were going to China and Chile and Western United States. And they were coming back with all these. adventures and ideas and, again, important, physical objects, which were telling us about mammal evolution or amphibian evolution and so forth. And I got swept up in that. Yeah. And so that's kind of part of my trajectory right now. And then, yeah, then I got invited on a field expedition in my third year in college. And I went on this expedition to Eastern Wyoming in search of early mammals, Cretaceous Memos. And I was so bad at it that the curator, professor at the end of it, you know, took me aside, said,

Neil, I just got some advice for you. I know you wanted to do paleontology. Remember, there's two kinds of paleontologists there. There are those who work in the field and there are those who work on the collections. You're the latter. I'm like, okay, great. Because, you know, here's, I was so out of my league, right? at working, you know, in dirt and rock, you know, it's not what I grew up in.

So I was kind of out of my league on that. But I really loved it and I, and I stuck with it. And in graduate school. And fortunately, I, um, you said, yeah, I love it better. It's interesting. I think it's important to talk about sticking with it, by the way, because too often people, you know, think that they get turned off, even in physics, they're not the smart.

They don't, they're not the best mathematician. in their class or not this. Other people seem to find easier. And the point is that hard work gets you through and really interest, it's more interest and enthusiasm almost than anything. You can overcome a lot of things and learn how to do things. And not always necessarily be the naturally,

initially the best. As I say, I have lots of friends who are Nobel Prizemen physicists who are not the best mathematicians in their class or even, you know, or some of them even maybe having any background in an experiment. And so it's, it's often, people often say, well, I can't do that. I can't do science because it wasn't easy initially. And like anything, like music or anything else, you can eventually become proficient if you're interested.

Yeah, you got to stick with it. I mean, I think in a lot of this, it's just the persistence. And a lot of, in fact, a lot of the discoveries we made, or actually that same pillar to persistence. And just sticking with it, like you say. I mean, and just being patient with yourself a little bit, you know. And I didn't know that at the time I was actually quite impatient with myself, but I knew what I wanted to do.

And I decided, you know, to keep on it for a little bit, you know, give it a try. And I'm glad I did. And in fact, actually, the persistence comes from interest. Most scientists, you know, most scientists are not out to save the world. they're doing what they do because they love it. And persist is important because, again, unlike the modern conception, scientific breakthrough happened every day, you can't work for 10 or 20 years on something most often failing. If there isn't something about it that fascinates you and keeps you going. Oh, yeah. I'm failing all the time. The question is, how do you deal with that

failure? And how do you adjust and what you do? And in fact, I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for all my failures, right? And so that was a lot of it. I didn't know that as a young scientist or one of the, but I knew I, but I was kind of fearless in, I wasn't, I was never

really, and I don't know, now I look back in it now, I look back in it now, never terrified to fail it. It never really bothered me too much to fail, which is good, because I'm very good at failing. Well, you know, the only things don't teach well enough and cool, I created an entrepreneurship program once when I share

of a physics environment is we don't, one of the things the entrepreneurs came back and told us when we asked them what we should be teaching was how to fail effectively. We, you know, we give students where they're designed to succeed, but in life and research or outside, you're failing a lot and how you use those failures, perhaps the most important lesson you can get. Yeah, persistence, patience, passion, the three Ps, I think, are the ones to get you through it, you know, and the ability to learn on the fly, right? Yeah, and learn, continue to learn. I mean, I don't know about you. But often, first of all, I never took a, I've as a professor of astronomy for many years, I never took a course in astronomy in my life. But I learned a lot more physics and astronomy after my PhD than before.

And I think that that's a really important thing is how much you learn after you, you know, you get that credential. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, no, no. I mean, it's like, you know, that's why I'm in the field I am because it's just, it's always learning. I mean, it's just every day is learning, you know. Yeah. And, you know, you, it's almost like. the red queen, you have to learn just to stay in place.

And if you want to get ahead, you really have to put them on a, you know, a real burner. No, I love that part. And, and it's, you know, it's also, it's also humbling. And I think that's a big part of it, too. You know, you have to remain humble, as you well know, in the face of the natural and physical world. I mean, there's just so much we don't know. And you have to be humble in the face of that, that, that, that, that, that,

just our own ignorance, you know, and, and, and, and, uh, and, and, uh, in, in the face of your own, um, your own family sometimes. And, you know, and I work in, um, in the landscape where you actually have to, you know, when you're working in some of the regions we work, there's a lot of levels of learning to do, um, not just the scientific piece, just like living in a polar region. Yeah, we're going to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So there's a lot of learning at a level. Yeah. Um, it. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I have, for the, think of that as a theoretical physicist, so I just sort of sit down and do my stuff. But, but, but in your, as we'll talk about, and when you're working at the polls, before you can get to actually do this

stuff, there's so much, so much other stuff that needs to be done just to survive often. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And survive in the field. You go. But, but, but, so you went after you got your, you, so you, you, you went to Harvard and you chose to, and you'd already chosen this, the organismal biology, uh, which is a famous group at, at Harvard.

And what, why, why, why, why that specific part of, of biology that got your interest? So that at the time at Harvard, this is like in the late, so this is some, the early 80s, you had a really fabulous paleontology group, a fabulous evolution group. And there was a very integrative way of thinking that the paleontologists were also working on living animals, many of them. There's a lot of bold ideas out there. It was, you know, like Gould and Lewington and Meyer and Wilson and all these, you know, luminaries were there. And as a graduate student, I was able to just go all between them.

And it was really kind of a very fun time, humbling to say the least. But no, it was really, it was really fabulous. And I remember I took a course in my first year, which was just changed the way I see the world. obviously. It was, it was, it was like the great transitions in vertebrate evolution, right? So 500 or so million years of vertebrate evolution. And each week was a different great transition. And I had to present, and I thought I went to graduate school to work on mammal evolution, in Cretaceous mammals, Jurassic males, to understand how they evolved to climb and things like that. And I had to present the week of the fish to tetrapod transition, the transition from life and water to life on land.

for you know for the words and I'm going through the papers and I'm going through it and I just wow this is a first class scientific problem heck with the mammals I'm going to do the fish and honestly I didn't look back because you know there I saw hey man this is a field that's right for new fossils for right for new thinking about maybe development and evolution and so I was I was captured by that puzzle and it captured my imagination and That was my first year. And so then I started to think about, you know, hey, how can we find fossils to tell us about that? But then there was another revolution that happened at that time that also changed the way I think.

And so the, this is like in the mid-1980s by this point. And paper, scientific papers started to come out of people working on fruit flies. They found genes that control the development of the major, the major architecture of the body and the right placement of, the organs in the body. But what was really cool is that versions of these genes were not just in fruit flies. They were in worms, fish, frogs, mice, humans, balk. And I remember thinking, holy cow, geneticists are unlocking sort of this evolutionary toolkit that could provide the basis for understanding the flourishing, you know, the origin of diversity, you know. And so that was a moment for me, too, because here I was stunning to be a paleontal.

and now I'm seeing this molecular, this new molecular biology, that's kind of revolutionizing the way we think. I'm thinking, oh, man, I better learn some molecular biology. I'm going to go extinct just like the fish I want to find. I was like, change or die. So I had to, that's when I became more of a developmental and molecular biology. So my laboratory now actually reflects that shift in my life. I'm very much a fossil finder leading expeditions, but we're very much involved. and genes and development developmental genetics of living creatures looking at the synthesis that we can have by merging these different lines of inquiry. And just another example, you know, I mean, you have to be ready to change. And it's, I love the, yeah, I mean, throughout my career, one thing I've always done is I've always had imposter syndrome.

that is when I go into a new field or a new way of integration and now we're doing it with robotics and physics and development, you know, I'm always a new kid on the block and I'm always behind the curve and I don't really always feel that I'm the expert, you know. And then when we do something, I feel like, well, I don't know. Maybe I'm, I don't really deserve it, you know, because the pros have been over a long time. But, you know, I'm just, yeah. So, I mean, my career has really been a story of kind of. kind of learning and shifting and adding new things and, but always moving into an area where I'm outside my comfort zone, right? Fieldwork was outside my comfort zone.

You know, working on fish was actually outside my comfort zone. Working in developmental biology and developmental genetics, totally outside my comfort zone. You know what I mean? And then working in polar regions, completely outside my comfort zone. You know, so learning is sometimes not only failing, but getting out of your comfort zone. you know, and part of that might mean, yeah, exactly. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, uh, and, and, uh, and, uh, and, my background was in particle physics and then I, I, I, and moved into cosmology. And, um, and, and it's a

new field. And, and, and, uh, and, uh, and I wonder, for me, sometimes I wonder, I wonder, sometimes I wonder, whether I like to go outside my comfort zone because I, there are different guides of scientists. And I have to say that, you know, you certainly, your work on discovering earner fish is certainly, it was a long story directed towards a goal. But there's some people,

scientists, I know who are great at focusing for 20 years on, on a topic and making progress in it. I personally like to move to new topics. I think some of it is just because I like to, I get, it's just the way I am. I sort of like to hit and run.

in some sense. It's fun to learn new things and not, you know, focus on one area. Does that relate to any, you sort of your own personal inclination as well? Oh, definitely. I mean, I might stay interested in the same problem, but I might, like, search new tools to find it, to dig into that problem and that might change my mindset. Or am I find new problems? My lab right now is working on a whole new set of problems. We always are trying new things, you know, and I'm fortunate to have a really great bunch in my lab. I'm really talented, a bunch of people in my lab who, you know, take things in different directions and run with it. And I learned from them, you know.

Well, look, I want to, before we get to the, I want to go through so many interesting topics in the book. But I do, because you're most well known for discovering something very important, which is how fish came on to land with Tiktalek. And I want to, I want to just take a few minutes for you to walk us through that. because it's interesting to me that the first presentation you gave as a graduate student in some sense was about the same topic that ultimately your research would lead you to, which is, which is, you know, marimals on land. And could you just give us a brief overview about how you got there and how that discovery took place? And one, one question I have that actually, you know, I kept asking when I was reading the book. And it's not, it's not, you never, maybe because you've talked about it elsewhere and you presume one knows.

but why, why is one driven to polar regions, mountains and polar regions to look for fossils that are related to when fish came to land? I mean, it's implicit in a lot of what you say, but you never explain why are you driven there other than a day? It's fun to go there. Yeah, because I did a bit about an interfish and I didn't want to repeat that. Yeah, I figured that was the reason. But, you know, but you asked the right question. The, I guess the, what got me into it was actually a diagram that I saw in an intro textbook, honestly. So it was like, it had like a cartoon of a fossil fish that we knew about from rocks, about 3090 million years old, maybe a little bit older.

And below it had an early limbed animal, one of the first creatures to walk on land, a cartoon again. And it was an intro sort of thingy. And I remember looking at the critter on top and the critter on the bottom and thinking, holy cow, that's a lot of changes. had to happen there. Yeah. And, you know, maybe if we sort of targeted expeditions right, that we could fill a gap that is, you know, you had changes in the head, you had change, you know, we'd go from a conical head to a flathead, you had changes in the appendages where you go from fins to limbs, lots of changes

throughout the body. And I was thinking, well, you know, if we found something more on the fishy side of this, that's sort of a proto-tetropod, but kind of a fish, um, uh, you know, uh, you know, you know, you know, that would give us a great understanding of not only this particular transition in the history of life, but maybe we can understand general principles about how these transitions might more generally happen. Are there ideas that would emerge? And so there's a lot at stake for finding, you know, sort of this object that would tell us about the transition. And so I was learning, I was actually studying to be a paleontologist before this molecular biology

stuff hit the scene. And so I was learning that toolkit, which is, you know, you go to places in the world that have rocks the right age to answer the question, wrecks the right type to answer that question, maybe rocks that are exposed and accessible. You know, so you have a series of filters, age, type, accessibility. And, you know, you take this globe and you apply those filters, you know, looking at the geological literature, geological maps, satellite photos, aerial photos.

You know, we have all these information about different parts of the world. And it became clear from understanding, of what other people have found was there were a lot of discoveries that had been made up to that point. It's like mid, mid 80s, early 90s. A lot of discoveries by that point, many of them really, really cool and very important. But they pointed to us to the fact that maybe we want to look at rocks around a particular time period, 380, 375 million years. We wanted to look at rocks that were formed in ancient rivers and streams draining into the ocean. So something that would take us from like a tidal flat, an estuarian environment all the way upstream into rivers and streams,

and then to look for the geological signature of those environments. You know, so that's huge clues right there. I knew I wanted rocks a particular age. I wanted no, I wanted rocks that were formed in particular environments. And then I needed those rocks exposed to the surface, bum, bum, bump, three of those major criteria. And so, you know, with those lenses, I look, me and Ted Deshler, who is my, my, been my partner and all this for years. It was my first graduate student, and we've been colleagues ever since, partners and

co-pIs ever since. And, yeah, we became clear that, you know, one of the great places to look, although there are a couple others that haven't looked at it, but one of the great places to look that was completely unexplored was the Canadian Arctic Islands, essentially extending from Ellesmere Island all the way in the east, to about 1,500 kilometers. all the way to Melville and Banks Island all the way to the West, the Canadian Geological Survey published some amazing papers and maps. I mean, Canada spent an enormous investment in mapping the rocks up in the Canadian Arctic,

largely for national reasons. I mean, nationalism is what drives a lot of this, you know, maybe the possibilities of extractive industries or other things. But in this case, actually, it was Cold War, too, because, you know, that would be the pathway for nuclear missiles shot from the United States to Russia. And they need as well. And the other one is as well. Right.

So they had to understand how the gravity would be acting on these things. So they wanted into the rocks there. So we had our disposal of stuff. And it was really clear. Bingo, this was the place to go. And so I became clear that that was the case. I, you know, I was like, oh, Ted, what do you think about working up in the Arctic? This is going to be a whole new gig.

He's like, I don't know. What do you think? We'll see. Try it. Give it a go. And so, yeah, that was in the mid-90s, mid-late 90s. And then we had a new problem, though. So that's what led us to the Arctic, right?

You know, it was because of the rocks in the Arctic that they were perfect for this search. And it turns out the rocks in Antarctica pretty good, too. Let me stop you for a second because, again, it's not there. but I presume the point is, we talk about the right time. I assume from studies of organismal biology and evolution, the era where fish first made them moved on to land was temporarily defined, you know, estimated to be a certain

few hundred million years ago. And that determined the age of rocks you were looking for and, and, yes, go on. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you got it. And so because basically you have a lot of fossil amphibians with fingers and toes, like in the late Devonian period, around 365 million years. And you have a lot of fish that are kind of looking, starting to look a little bit like them, but that have fins and, you know, conical heads a lot earlier. Yeah.

So you can constrain it that way. And honestly, we take it a little more detailed. We used evolutionary phylogenetic trees and we calibrate them over time. So we have these time calibrated phylogenetic trees where we take the stratigraphic record, the geological organ on one side. the evolutionary trees on the other, and we can see where the gaps emerge. And again, you're dealing with estimates on either side. You know, they can be wrong. You know, so you're always sort of kind of tying together estimates on either side to make another estimate of where to look, right?

And yeah, and that and then that's what led us to the polar regions, not the ice. It was the rocks that did it. And, you know, and again, just so I can step back for people. So the idea is that you might say, why do you look in a certain place for a certain time? And the point is that the dynamics in the earth and certain rocky regions from certain times have been pushed up and are exposed because of glacial dynamics and because of global tectonics. And therefore, in certain regions, the exposed rocks are characteristic of a certain time. and the regions, the times you were looking for around 300 million years ago were rocks that are exposed in the Arctic.

Is that, is that a fair? About 300, we'd look again, 375 million years ago. Yeah. But yes. And so, you know, so remember the continents are always moving. Rocks are always eroding. And so what was at, what is now in Ellesmere Island of Devonian Age rocks was actually formed when that landmass was closer to the equator, 377.

35 for you million years ago. So, you know, moved up. Yeah. Which creates this incredible juxtaposition between present and past.

And I felt that really acutely, you know, in Antarctica, but very much so in the Arctic. And I hear you're standing in the Canadian Arctic, you know,

at a latitude of about 78, sometimes 80 north. There's glaciers at the head of, you know, head of the valley you're working on. There are muscocks in the distance, maybe a polar bear trying to leg along.

And you're working on a tropical world inside those rocks, right? You have this juxtaposition between, you know, present and the past. It just shows you how much our planet is capable of change, right? Yeah, and so that's exactly what led us there. And then, you know, so then we had a new puzzle, right? Now, okay, we know this, this region in the Arctic is kind of ideal for finding these things. But, you know, the Arctic, Canadian Arctic is a very, very, very big place. and these fossils are relatively small.

How do we, you know, where do you go? What do you begin? How do you do this? And I remember viscerally feeling this when we led our first expedition there in 1998, landed, I'm sorry, it was 1999, landed in the western Arctic of Canada. And the plane took off. And we had all our food. We had all our tents.

We had, you know, we had a crew of six people. the plane takes off to go back to the base in Resolute Bay, which is a couple hundred miles away. And we're all looking at each other thing, what the hell are we going to do now? It's like, we're going to look. Now what? Okay, we had a great idea in Chicago and Philadelphia. Now what was great on paper. Now we got to walk this thing.

You know, and then you're going to do the hard work. And then, you know, that's when you got to really think about the geological record, what rocks are likely to hold the fire. fossils, then you got to look at them, you got to walk to them, you got to, or fly over them, or, you know, you got to, then you got to make it work. And that's just, that's the, that's the, you know, the boots on the ground piece is really challenging. But that's, you know, but it takes time and we just step it. Well, well, yeah, I mean, and there are lots of stories we'll go over about taking time, but I would, but, and I want to get now to the book, but the last thing I want to say, so just so people know, put in context, from the time you

started to look, you knew you were where you sort of wanted to go and, where the clues were and, you know, Elmere Island and and the Canadian Arctic. How long was it before, from that initial moment to, to the discovery? Six years. Six years. Yeah. So 98 is when we had the idea and it became very clear this is what we want to do. And, you know, July, mid-July, 2004 is when we cracked that first rock and there it was.

and that was like both and wow and oh my god thank goodness moment you know but that's yeah and there's a lot of years in between where you're cracking a lot of rocks and you're not finding what you want you got it and I think that's important

and you know there are lots of examples on that and so great I wanted to give that personal history of how you got there and why you go to the polar regions which I think is an important you know precursor that that maybe that is useful to add to the book, I think, is before you go to the book, why did you end up on these?

Other than, hey, it's fun and this is neat, why go there? The book, what I like about it is just like the discussion we had. It's a mixture of discussing science, personal experiences, politics, and also ultimately the future, which we'll talk about. And I want to go through that, those things in some detail, because there are lots of fun stories, but there are lots of important lessons, I think, to go through. And I actually want to start at the end.

I was particularly taken by a story in the epilogue, which I think, which, as you say, in retrospect, gives you sort of a picture of really what you've talked about. And that's the story of these plover eggs. Yeah, it was crazy. And yeah, I love that story. And I wonder if you could talk about it here because I think it's a good, even though it's the epilogue of the book, I think it's a good way for us to segue into the issues that you're going to talk about that we'll talk about together. Yeah.

So I was invited on a polar expedition when in 1988, joining three-season paleontologist. I was a blown student on that thing. And, you know, I was not particularly really well prepared for it. I was not cut out. I mean, you would not have seen me as somebody. It was one of my first camping trips, right? Yeah, you know, and here I'm going to like East Greenland, living in a tent for four to six weeks, and I think.

And I, you know, and there's a lot of vulnerability associated with living in a tent. You know, there are polar bears around and you're in the food chain, and I felt profoundly in the food chain. But also the weather and things like that. And I was pretty scared the whole time, which is good. Good to have a little fear. Yeah. And I remember I

I said, such things, ever the nerd, I brought a, you know, I brought field guides to birds and mammals of North America, you know, you know,

we had a strict weight limit of what we could bring, you know, and I had about, you know, 40 pounds of books, you know. It was like, is it.

And half of them were like, field guys to like bugs and, and birds and mammals. And so, yeah, in the early days, we were, We're walking, we set camp, and this is a problem a lot of times with working in polar regions,

is you have to choose the right camp spot near the rocks. And if you don't choose the right camp spot, and it's non-trivial to do that, you can be out of luck. Because if you can't, there's no roads. There's no, you know, you can't just call an Uber to get to these things. You have to take a sometimes a pretty long hike. And that's what happened in this first camp. And I remember we had these long hike. And I ran and it would be like a two or three-hour hike just to get to,

promising rocks to look for the fossils we were after we were actually oh in this case looking for early dinosaurs i was on somebody else's expedition and early mammals too and i remember that's all this bird and i'm like oh a bird i got to identify this thing and it was like clearly not doing well it was it was dragging a wing and was flapping the other one and it was chirping really loudly and i'm like damn that thing's hurt and so i walked up to it and i like took off like six feet away i'm like oh let me just check it out so and i just followed this like wounded bird for, you know, for a little while. I remember how long until I realized I'm never going to get this bird.

It's going to do its thing. I'm sorry. You know, it is what it is. And I went to later that night or another later night, I went back and worked with one of the seasoned veterans and went through one of the field guides. And it turns out it's a winged, it's a blackneck plover. And they have a characteristic defense that they can lure, predators away where they fake an injury. And what they do is they have a nest, supposedly, I didn't see it yet,

and they could fake an injury by, you know, dragging a wing and chirping real loudly. And that way they can, you know, keep the fox or the raptor away from the nest. And they keep on luring it away. So they, you know, they treat these predators just like suckers. Well, guess what? I was that sucker too. And I was like, oh, wow, I just felt like an avian ruse that's probably millennia old and it's fooled every animal. Now it fooled me. And I were thinking, okay, I'm going to find this nest. But I didn't want to disturb the birds because it does cost a lot of energy for it to do this display. And I felt guilty.

I didn't want. Anyway, how to hike through that spot a number of times to get to the work in a triassic age rocks at the time of 200 million years old to get to those rocks. And eventually I saw the nest. And I remember just being profoundly affected by seeing this nest. It looked like the rocks. It was just basically three eggs, each the size of, I don't know, like a Brazil nut or something. Colored. And there's this, it's not even a nest.

It was something like a pile of tundra dirt and rocks. And it was like, and I'm thinking, this is, this little creatures are so exposed at the surface that they, They're developing and there's foxes and polar bears and muscocks and raptors and giant falcons and you name it. And the elements, you have like 70 mile an hour winds and polar storms. And they're sitting naked on the surface. Their only protection, they're camouflage and an adult who can lure predators and sometimes humans away, you know, as suckers and their day. And I remember feeling profoundly affected by that. I was like, this is my first expedition there, you know, as a student.

And I came back and I actually wrote in my journal that day about that. And I wrote this thing, you know, I wrote a poem called, you know, I am the plover. It was the dumbest poem ever. I thought it was like brilliant literature. But it was like, you know, I read it years later. I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe it. Anyway, I wrote this embarrassing poem. But it captured something in me that I,

that again came out when I was writing the book and I was writing the epilock, that whether in the helicopter over parts of Antarctica or in the field or at the tops of mountains or on Traverse or whatever, that image of the plover really stuck to me because it gives the sense of the endurance, the resilience, the subtle harmony and vulnerability of the life and in fact these regions themselves, you know, and that vulnerability is something I felt profoundly as a scientist working in these regions, like, I, you know, feeling akin to the,

feeling the clover image inside of me. But also it's a metaphor for these regions that how profoundly fragile they are and how they've changed over millennia. And importantly, how we as a species are so tethered to these, remote and fragile and vulnerable places that much of, you know, what we take for granted about our world today and what will guide our future is happening, is changes that are happening

in the northern and southern, most extreme regions of our planet. And it's funny as I was beginning to think of the epilogue for the book, that the plover image just came out of me, you know. And then I dug out my old field notes and I ran into my embarrassing poem. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, maybe we can do a little bit better, you know, almost 40 years later. didn't even go home because they might have taken away because obviously I'm returning to it because it affected me. That image stayed with me and it's a wonderful image. And I'm going to read what you wrote there. You've expressed it eloquently anyway, but I think it's a nice introduction to where we're going to go. Journeys to the ends of the earth help us see ourselves in our home in

new ways. Like the plover, humans live in a fragile balance with the planet. One, that for those of us who do not live at the poles is masked by our built environment. A human body is a speck and a continent-sized sheet of ice. Our lifetimes are tiny moments in the multi-billion-year history of the meteorites inside glaciers and rocks and valley walls. And we live in a relationship with a planet that's capable of dramatic environmental change. And I guess if I had to sort of summarize in some sense what the book is all about, I think that that really captures all of the different things. and I thought it was a nice way to sort of take us to there. And then I want to go to two quotes and I ask you to comment them right at the beginning of the book.

You say, science in the polar regions means confronting emotional, physical, and logistic challenges in order to ask fundamental questions about the past, present, and future of life on our planet. And then another facet, which will come back to near the end of our discussion. For European cultures, polar science began as a nationalistic enterprise, driven by attempts to achieve or exploit the points farthest north or south. The race for the poles or the discovery of the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, pitted nations against one another and often tragic attempts to be the first to arrive at certain destinations in the globe. Scientific discoveries emerged as teams mapped these regions and studied the natural history of peoples, planets, and the climate of the new terrain. So I think the combination of the challenge of working in that region as a scientist and an individual learning, and the fact that a lot of the science has done ended up being sort of peripheral in the sense that the reason these regions were explored were first nationalistic.

And later on, now it still may be nationalistic when we talk about resources. Absolutely. And so I just thought I'd ask you to comment on that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think in some ways our understanding of polar regions, it mimics kind of what we know about the moon, right? I mean, the Apollo missions, I mean, science wasn't the primary, right? Science was a big piece of it. There's just no doubt. But it was a nationalistic enterprise.

But we learn a lot about the solar system from the geochemistry of those moon rocks that came back. We learned about the origin of the moon. We got learning some insights in the origin of the solar system and so forth. And that was a byproduct, really, you know, and it wasn't the direct goal. And I think a lot of these expeditions that were run by European explorers, many of whom ultimately ended up deploying Inuit technologies to survive up there. You know, we, there were so many theories about these extreme areas of the world, these extreme environments. Some of them crazy today, but they were able to, you know, test those theories. they developed not only the science of studying the polar regions,

but the science of exploration, how you do it. What do you, how do you survive up there? That the polar regions tell us about this, like the subtitle of the book, they do tell us about life in the extreme adaptations of life. They tell us about, you know, the cosmos from, you know, giving us a window into the solar system and beyond, and even some of the telescopes earlier. And also, you know, our world and how we're tethered to these regions.

But to get to that really, and I guess what I wanted to capture with parts of the book was, you know, particularly for somebody who wasn't raised, as somebody who ever really camped or anything like that, I had to overcome, I had to learn about myself and not all of it's pretty, you know, about overcoming limitations, helicopters break down, storms like this past summer, wipe out camp, and you worry about people who were injured in camp, and all our food was across the tundering. This was just in past July, you know, and we had to be evacuated. And, you know, there's humility with that, but there's also, you know, just being able to handle these situations really takes a lot of patience with yourself, takes patience with other people, takes patience with the landscape,

you know, and to do that, you really do have to be in learning mode all the time. And yeah, that's that's kind of why we do science and experience right you know it's not always pretty though and and something again and for full disclosure i mean i'm i've become fascinated by polar regions and i mean and not obviously my own work well my own work almost brought me to south pole once but but um uh i've been in in antarctica and led to west antarctica and then up to greenland and it is it is fascinating to me and the lure of it, I understand why people get driven back, go back there over and over again and some people live there. You might think it's so desolate. There's something, there's something magical about it at the same time. There really is. But there's also, you know,

as you point out, the challenges of survival. And then you, even in the very beginning, which you talk about later on, of course, I remember the first time I was in the north of Norway in Tromsa, Norway, in the summer. And, um, the light is a challenge, right? Because, I mean, for me, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but during the week I was there, the weather was such that it was cloudy during the day and clear at night, which was much brighter at night than it was during the day. And for me, that was such a strange experience. You know, the night was the bright time. The day was the dark time. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, there's a lot to adjust to when you first get there,

as you just described, it's kind of very well, actually. You know, I mean, we're living in a tent in the middle of, you know, two and 300 miles from base. And, you know, it's daylight 24 hours a day. And what happens is, you know, you have to adjust all your body cycles to this. It's challenging because you realize we are circadian animals. Yeah. You know, many of the cycles inside our body, all of them depend on the night,

light, dark in many ways. And you can enforce that on yourself a little bit. bit, you know, you can wear eyeshades and, you know, typically what happens is you're working so hard during the day, at least what for what we do is you go in a minute, you go in the sleeping bag. It's a joke in camp, by the way, where like I go into the tent, you know, it's nine o'clock. We keep on a regular schedule. Not so.

Yeah. If you don't stand a regular schedule, you can go a little crazy. So to. Yeah. You talk about that later. You're, you're, you know, rhythm is well, you change. And people do go crazy. You shift.

And so to not go loco, you sort of enforce the schedule. So I black out wearing ice shades at around nine. But I'm famous for going into the tent. They hear the zippers all close and I'm snoring about 15 seconds later. You fall asleep so fast. I do. Because we're out. Yeah, I'm so tired.

And, you know, there's no internet. There's no disturbance. You're just whatever disturbances are that's what you brought inside you, right? And so, um, but the problem is, um, you know, you have to hydrate like crazy and drink a lot of water. So come one or two in the morning, you're thinking of, oh, man, I have to get out of this sleeping bag because biology is, you know, biology. And then, you know, getting out of the sleeping bag, getting out of the tent, you take off the mask and you're, you know, boom, daylight. You know, it's impossible to go back to sleep, you know, so that's the trouble. And that's that kind of.

So I learned to keep my eyes closed when I go out of the tent. There's viral breaks. Yeah, you talk about. And then your wrist, then your fall. So it's, you know, it's never pretty. Yeah. Yeah. I know that experience in a number of ways, but I think that's an important feature.

But also at the same time, what you realize when you're there, and again, the context of the book is these regions which for most people are just, they might read about or hear about, and a remote are nevertheless connected so intimacy with our history and change. You point out that polar regions encompass 8% of the total surfs the Earth, 70% of the planet's fresh water is on it, and permafrost in the polar regions, which we'll get to at the end, holds 16,000 billion tons of carbon, which is double the amount in the Earth's atmosphere. These regions will impact us, and what you don't realize in a human lifetime,

we always think the world has always been the way it is and will always be the way it is. and it's a natural thing to assume, is that there's been tremendous change. And the first example of change in some sense is the realization of how, as you point out, of the fossils you're looking at in the polar regions were once in the tropics. And that kind of change jumps out at you there in a way that we often don't recognize. And something that I actually hadn't really appreciated until I read the book enough, I guess it was implicit in some sense, is this notion of polar regions is itself recent.

It's the fact that we have ice in the north and south. Sounds like, oh, well, there always should have been because after all, that's the way they are. But until 34 million years ago, it wasn't that way. Exactly. No, you described it incredibly well. I mean, we are, we're so biased by our own experience. You know, there's ice at the polar regions. Well, that's kind of rare in the hit.

That's not the common mode in the history of our planet. there have been, you know, most of the time there's no ice at the poles. Sometimes there's been ice at one of the poles and not the other. Another time, short times, there's been times when the whole earth froze over. And then there's been long times when again, there's no ice again. And then now we have ice at both poles. And so, you know, these poles are very dynamic. So like the, this book is about the science versus polar regions and how it changes

the way you see the world, at least it did for me. And, you know, when what you describe is like, you know, standing atop a mountain in Antarctica and, you know, finding these tropical fossils, yet being surrounded by the ice plateau in every direction, you know, it shows you the juxtaposition of present and past. It shows you how much our planet is capable of change over these long geological timescales. But the more you look into the glaciers and the oceans and climate, the more you realize that changes can happen extremely fast. that they've happened extremely fast in the past before humans. And now that you add humans to this again, we really are at a bit of a knife edge with regard to what can happen with the ice at the pole.

So the ice comes and goes. That is actually can change really rapidly. And it's that sort of changes that can really impact all of us who live closer to the equator. Yeah. In fact, that'll be a lesson we'll get to. I mean, some of the change has been remarkable

as we talk about, you know, as we talk about what humans are doing to the planet and people say, well, you know, geological time doesn't matter, but then we realize there have been dramatic changes that have happened quickly, and we'll get there. One of the first realizations that things change was the fact that ice isn't static because it moves.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And that was a great discovery that the ice, you know, from one part of Antarctica, you know, moved right across the continent. And I guess it's kind of interesting that it wasn't until the 90s, I guess, that we actually had a ways of really measuring it from space, from using space. And it really talked by that for a second. Yeah, it's basically, you know, the remote sensing, you know, from space has really changed the way we see ice. You know, I talk about Eric Rigno, who's just an amazing scientist, so he's the glaciers. And he's been, you know, working at

New York California Irvine, but also Jet Propulsion Laboratories, really thinking about, you know, the kinds of devices to measure the changes in ice. Because, you know, from space, what you can do is you can look at the entire ice cap. You can monitor it every day, every hour. You can get very refined measurements from space. They shoot these lasers down. They ping them down and ping them back and they can get a sense from that. I'd be very fine, down to a micrometer almost, a micron, how, you know, how much the ice is changing in terms of its height.

They can look at movement of relative parts of the ice. they can using two satellites tethered to one another look at the changes in the height of the ice and the changes of the thickness of the ice because they can look at the gravity changes. It's a grace mission. I have to say, you know, that, I mean, to me, as a physicist, when I was writing a book on climate change, I learned a lot about the grace mission. And it's amazing, I think I can't help but to mention it briefly because when you talk about how different parts of science come together, who would have thought that precision

ability to measure gravity would be really important for studying the pulse. And it's a really neat idea. And again, as a theoretical physicist, I would have said, nah, it'll never work. And then these experiments, those always do it, where you fly these satellites in together in tandem, and they keep the same distance, which by the way, in other areas of physics is now going to become very important as we look for gravitational waves. But, but, and then the point is, you know, if you can measure it with with light, you can measure the distance between those satellites incredibly accurately. And as they go over the earth, when one gets to a region where there's more gravity because of a mountain or something else, it gets tugged a little bit.

And that changes to distance a little bit. And amazingly, that allows you to measure incredibly precisely, as you point out, not just where things are to micrometer, but later on also how much ice to stay on Greenland. because you can, you know, because a lot of ice speeds, a lot of gravity. And it's amazing how you can use these techniques to, from one field to measure another. I love that.

That's the fast in science that I do. It's amazing. So one speeds up, one slows down, and they're coordinating. And the light can give precise measurements and they can measure the gravity changes, i.e. the thickness of the ice.

And they can do it every day, all day, with clouds, without clouds, Greenland, Antarctica. You can get, I mean, just the science, you know, when you write a book, you know, you touch pieces of yourself in terms of the, you know, the emotional and the connection and awe and the wonder. But every now and then you touch, I mean, often you touch science. That's the same thing. It's like it just blows your mind,

you know. Yeah. And they call one Tom and Jerry. They're Tom, because, you know, presumably Tom's chasing Jerry. Yeah, Tom and Jerry. It's a, you know, and I think you've had that same thrill writing books as I do. One, I like to write subjects because it's always amazing to learn about other science. You know, you get wrapped up. in your own and it's just shocking and wonderful to see how much has done in other fields. And that's what I love about I love about writing. But it's also your

point you just made is an important one that I hadn't, wasn't going to emphasize, but I think it is probably important to emphasize that it's it is remarkable how our understanding of the earth has changed completely because of our access to space. And how tragic in some sense it may be

that the current administration is going is made more or less suggesting we end study of the earth from space are removing funding for it. It's really unbelievably tragic if that happens. Yeah, it's a self-inflicted wound. I mean, it would be of tremendous proportions

because what these satellites have done is they've changed the way we see the Earth. Okay. So like for a long period of time, like when I was taking my intro geology classes, we learned about Antarctica. We learned about, you know, in Arctic ice is the stability. It's the, you know, it's, yes, it's come and gone, but it's, you know, the last thing to change on this earth.

And then what the satellites have done, and as well as ground-truthing with people working seismically on ice and doing other things, shooting robots down and sover. It showed just how fragile that ice is, how much it can change and how fast it can change. You know, that it's anything but stable, you know. And that, as you mentioned earlier, that ice is always moving. There's these ice rivers, these ice streams that move maybe one or two kilometers a year. So the ice is moving from the center of the continent towards the coast. You know, and sometimes it's moving very fast. And in fact, that rate is actually increasing.

And so ice is incredibly dynamic. And one of my colleagues actually made the comment that, you know, ice does not move at a glacial pace. And I actually put that in the book. It was just a great lot. Yeah. It's a great lot. Well, you know, okay. And the movement of ice, which will become important,

later on we talk about a variety of things. But also I want to talk about now one of the first kind of fascinating bits of discoveries, which has been aided again by space, although not initially done so much, is the realization that not only, well, that ice, you know, I think you pointed out, and many people do that the Inuit and any other people have many different words for ice, because ice is not just ice. Ice changes depending upon where. it is and and its characteristics.

And that is fascinating and important for not understanding how, say, Antarctic works, but understanding how we can then use ice to study our own history and the evolution of the planet and life on the planet. And one of the features of that ice is how it changes with depth, the simple physical property of ice, that its temperature of freezing depends on its density. and pressure. And one of the great discoveries they talk about early on, which is really kind of fascinating, is that there are lakes under the ice in Antarctica. And it's something where, again, we're learning, using space probes to help us with. And it's telling us a lot that allow, that will be

probably relevant for study of life, not just here, but elsewhere in the universe. So, why do you talk a little bit about that, about the lakes under the ice and how that was first sort of realized? I mean, you know, it, you know, so one of the things, this book was born largely, not only living in it, you know, 40 years of almost four decades of working in polar regions, but also being in the scientific mix, in the scientific bases in Canada, Resolute Bay, or in Antarctica, McMurdo Station. And being at this, in these places where scientists are coming and going from around the ice and the continents and, and glaciologists and zoologists and zoologists and zoologists. and zoologists and ecologists and cosmologists. And it feels like Moss Isley Spaceport, the canteenist scene, with all these different kinds of people together. And it was there that I learned about these lakes under the ice.

And it blew my mind because for, and the history of it's really beautiful, because it was proposed by some Russians that there should, based on that sort of the pressure density relationship of the freezing point of ice, that you should have fresh water under the ice somewhere. And then one Russian working at this Vostok station, which is in the middle of the ice cap, a crazy place, hard to get to you. It's an awful place doing. Yeah, it's famously terrible. But they found that the ice in certain parts around Vostok is kind of flat.

It's not ruffled. So if ice moves over continent, which is always moving, it'll be, it'll have contours and shapes in certain way driven by the changes. because it's the friction underneath the ice. But there it was kind of flat and had other properties too, which suggested maybe there are lakes under the ice there. They did a series of drilling projects and then found almost two and a half miles under the ice in Antarctica. They found a freshwater lake, this is just the first one, that was estimated to be about the size of Lake Superior, the Great Lakes,

had islands in it that had fresh. water. And, you know, that's kind of, when you think about that alone, that just tells you just how much we have to learn about our world. But then NASA would figure out ways to assess that from space. And that was calculated, the calculations vary somewhere between four and six hundred. I think the maximum is that maybe there's about 600 of these lakes underneath the ice. And we, the American USA Antarctic program has drilled into two of them to sample them. But, you know, you'd think about just the surprises that exists in this world. And what it took to get there.

You know, doing that drilling project was non-trivial. They had to work. You know, you only have a month a year where you can get supplies there. Stuff breaks. You got to do it in a sterile way. Oh, man, it was just, you know, it was something. But you have these lakes under the eyes. And what we don't know is how interconnected they are, right?

You might have a whole world of the, you can have lakes that are isolated. You can have lakes that are connected with each other, maybe through under, under ice, subice rivers, subglacial rivers, you might have them connecting some cases with the ocean nearby. Exactly. It's probably flowing out in the ocean like more lakes. Right, exactly. So, you know, just understanding the map of the world,

you know, we know more about, you know, parts of the moon than we do our own planet. We know that. That's a metaphor, obviously, for the deep sea. But also underneath the ice is the same sort of thing. And where the rubber really hits the road scientifically, I think, is, you know, when those waters are pulled up and people apply, you know, metagenomic technology, they can either, you can look under the microscope, but better yet, you can sample all the DNA inside there and get a sense of what, if there's anything living.

And they find whole communities of microbes underneath the ice, you know, and, you know, that have been probably separated from the surface, maybe for millennia, if not millions of years, or communicating with one another through unknown, unknown rivers of ice. It's crazy. And that, first of all, I have to worry about it because, well, first of all,

you've got to ask, are these really isolated? I mean, obviously if they're before the ocean, and oxygen, but if there are ones that are two and a half

miles deep that are isolated, they can be, have been isolated for not just thousands of years, but hundreds of thousands of years or longer. Yeah, maybe millions. Yeah, go ahead.

Because then you're looking at early life if there are microbes down there. And the first question, I mean, I think 50 years ago, when you and I were younger, everyone had said, that is no life down there.

And now we've learned, for it, Life is everywhere. It's extremophiles are everywhere. And then you want to say, wow, I can sample directly life that may have been separated from life for hundreds of thousands of years at least. But then you got the problem if you drill down, you want to make sure you don't introduce. Don't mess up.

Yeah. You know, you don't want to contaminate it because then you screw up the whole experiment. Yeah, exactly. That's scary. I was down there in 2000. I was down in Antarctica in 2000. last time I was there was in 2019, pre-COVID. And the team that was drilling into one of those lakes was there.

Yeah. They had a whole technology where they had, you know, hydrogen peroxide. They had UV lights. They had robots. They mean, they really designed technology that was highly sterile to get down to at the time they were drilling the one called subglacial Lake Mercer, which is one that might be connected to the ocean, but that's where they pulled out all kinds of microbes. Yeah.

And the interesting, yeah, there's tons of microbes and a whole community is of microbes. and as you point out in the book. And before we go further than microbes, you know, I think you mentioned there, if not elsewhere, that I would see an area that I've thought a lot about

is, you know, life elsewhere in the universe. And it's kind of fascinating to me, this emerging field of astrobiology, which is almost a science, I would say not quite yet one, because it's mostly speculative. because we don't know, I mean, anything about life elsewhere in the universe. And what we realize is how little we understand about life or on Earth.

And it often seems to me that the most important astrobiology that can be done is the biology that's being done on Earth, because then we learn about how life evolves in a way that might give us data, which could then allow us to better probe elsewhere in the universe, including ultimately when we, you know, give us better research. for knowing whether we should go to Enceladus in Europa, moons where we now realize are probably the prime places to look for life elsewhere in our socialism, which could in principle be not related to life here. Exactly.

We'll get to why life on Mars was interesting, but it might not be so interesting in terms of being independent. We'll get there maybe. But these could be, these are moons which do have oceans and the life that's that. if there is life, would have been separated from life elsewhere. And we have a great testing point here in Antarctica. I'll throw it to you. Yeah.

Yeah. So in Antarctica, you know, you think about these communities that exist under the ice. And what, honestly, we don't know much about them, right? We've only sampled a couple of these subglacial lakes. There's a whole world of life. There are whole ecosystems. We had not even discovered yet underneath the ice of Antarctica. Right?

We talk about Nazi bases and aliens and, you know. Yeah. and you know, H.P. Lovecraft monsters under the ice. But the real world is kind of amazing, too, that we have all these ecosystems. And they're chemotrophes, right? They're separated from the sun, so they're getting their energy from breaking down, you know, molecules and so. Yeah, totally different metabolisms, which are new eyes. It's totally different. And the waste product of one becomes the nutrient for another. And so they, they form this sort of this interleaked chain, this trophic chain, which is incredible. And, you know, and you know,

when you think about the insights that we get from these extremophiles and these isolated forms to think about life on the other planet, I'm with you there because I mean, you know, you think about what the Europa Clipper was just launched in October 24 to go to Europa to begin to map that surface. And, you know, that's the first step. And when I was talking to folks in preparation for the book about, you know, maybe a mission to Saturn's moon, what? Enceladus. How do you say Enceladus and Saladus? Well, I said Enceladus, but I don't know you never know. I never know how insolidus. those few sandsalotis, it's all that tastes the same. Right. But the, but the, again, that's a mission there would be, you know, because they're, they have the warmer water, the clumes through the ice. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, I think, you know, to give us a model of how to think about what metabolism is to look for, what to think about geotemically. So when you have a model of something like the life underneath, I, the ice of Antarctica, you kind get a sense of what kind of metabolisms arise that allow creatures to break up chemical bonds

and to break up the and to use the waste products of one species for the nutrient of another and the kinds of links that can form, knowing those kinds of ecosystems could give you a sense of what chemical signals might exist in the waters that would tell you about life itself. So when you're looking for signs of life elsewhere, I think these extreme environments that model what exists elsewhere in the solar system might give us a clue to what to look for in terms of the kinds of devices that will be necessary to detect space to monitor there.

What sort of signals might be indicators of life versus indicators of an inorganic world, you know, that kind of, a non-living world. And also how to take the technologies that we're using Antarctica, namely the ones that ensure we don't contaminate the water there, make sure we refine them for ones that can be used remotely if we ever do drill down

an insolatus or... Yeah, yeah, it's exciting. It's really exciting. I want to ask you a question. I mean, by the way, I always tell people to take every claim of habitable planets, life elsewhere in the universe with an incredible grain of salt,

specifically because we don't even know understand, you know, life here on Earth enough to know. But there are two things about these lakes that intrigue me. One is, as you point out, these new metabolisms, these metabolism, that require that obviously don't use light.

When we first think about the origin of life on Earth, which is speculative right now, obviously the earliest organisms probably use the different types of metabolisms. And they didn't photosynthesize. And so as we look at, and we can talk about what they might have done, but in order to see the kind of things that are done,

you need to either go to the bottom of the ocean or go to these lakes and learn. Nature will tell us what, and those. So we may learn about, about about the origin of life on Earth by looking at these lakes as well, right? I think, yeah, I think it's a great mirror what you're saying. Looking at, you know, looking at the bottom of the ocean also gives us insights as well.

And so, you know, the more we understand about these extremophiles, you know, these creatures living in inhospitable environments, the more we know about what life can do on our planet. And then might give us an image about what life is doing on other worlds and what to look for, you know. you know, because, you know, we're going to need different tools to look, to assess, look at life. You know, if we can't send a probe, we're going to have to use, you know, our imaging technologies. And so what can we get from imaging technologies that might, you know, from things like the web space telescope or other things that would tell us, that would give us an indication that life exists on a body. And I think, again, it is these natural experiments that have been done over millions of years in our planet that we still don't need. even know much about, you know, and hopefully, you know, we don't even know much about life on our

planet. And so when we make claims about life elsewhere, it's going to, it's, you know, we have a lot to learn. And, and I think, I mean, I think that's, you work in the polar regions. That's what it tells you. I mean, polar regions are telling you, we just, you know, we don't even know what's going on to the ice there. Yeah. We really understand ice. A lot of thing to do before we can, before we can accurately say what's out there and, and, and, and, and, and, I just want to ask you, my own feeling is that, um, when you see these microbes in lakes. I mean, I'm incredibly optimistic

that life is teeming in the universe, not intelligent life, but I'm wondering if you get the same tape. It seems that Mike, totally. Life can just arise wherever it can arise. Yeah, I think, you know, kind of life might be easy to above.

I think conscious life, not so much. I mean, it took almost four billion years to happen on our planet and a lot of contingent events. But life itself, you know, you know, however you want to define it, you know, you think about it, it arose. There's some evidence that's just that the earliest life on our planet was probably four billion years, you know, maybe only 500 million years after the origin of our planet

and the origin of the solar system itself. As soon as the laws of physics allowed it to, after the early ended and life arose within 100 million years of that. It seemed to be really easy. Yeah. So once you have the physical and chemical possibility, opportunity for life, boom, it happens, you know. So that's why I'm thinking, yeah, it's probably abundant.

So you agree with me. I'd make a bet that if we go to Enceladus or rope and drill down, I wouldn't be it's all surprised to find life there. I'll be jumping up and down like a nine-year-old. But yeah, I'd be, yeah. But, yes, I wouldn't be a Irish president. We'll see if we'll be. Yeah, exactly.

For that discovery. And we'll say why, and later on we'll talk about why that's, you know, people are, especially in this administration, are fixated on Mars, in my opinion, inappropriately. but I'll be much more excited to go to Enceladus in Europa for reasons we'll get to. But anyway, okay, microbes are one thing. That's fine. You have a wonderful statement in the book somewhere, and I happen to have the page noted.

You said on page 15, everywhere we look for viruses and ice, we find them. Now, that sounds scarier. Microbes sound okay. Viruses sound scary. Yeah, they do. Yeah, exactly. And should we be worried? So the point is that if there are microbes, there are viruses,

and if there are large regions that have been out of touch with the modern world for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and there may be viruses that are ancient, should we be worried? Yes. I wouldn't stay awake at night worrying, you know, about it. But I would definitely think it's one of the things with climate change that can really practice. Look, we know when permafrost melts, it can release microbes, i.e. anthrax, which can cause infection. So you can have ancient infections that reemerge. Like in Siberia, we've seen that. We've seen human fatalities, you know, where the permafrost melts. You have an H in old corpse that had was infected by anthrax and it affects human populations or reindeer populations or whatever.

Now, a team in a Canadian team, a team from Ottawa, was working in Lake Hazen, which is in northern Ellesmere Island and about a decade ago. And they sampled the waters from the melting glaciers there. And they looked for the signatures in those waters, the chemical signatures, of viruses. And they found numerous viruses there. In fact, they found numerous viruses that are known to infect animals. And we know that viruses can be reanimated after, or if they're life requiring it reanimated. They can become active again. Animated assumes that they're living.

I don't know that has a lot in associated with it. But that they can cause infections, you know, 50,000 years after being frozen in the ice. So, yeah, so you have the predicate for that. But you couple of that with a couple things. So with climate change, you have the melting of the ice, which is releasing these viruses and other microbes. But with that warming, you have southern species moving north. So you now are setting up the mix where, you know, you have novel species heading to the polar regions, you know, from the south to the north. And you're exposing them to new microbes that are older microbes that are, the older microbes that

it being newly exposed by the melting ice, you have the possibility for infections. Now, what would those infections be? Would it be something that would harm humans? I think we're a long way from that to some extent. Yeah. There's definitely that that's the mix that I think is of concern for, you know, for the melting of the ice. You know, the ice is like a vault that holds a lot of things. When water sprees, you have everything that was in the atmosphere and oil. It gets caught in that ice. And so when it melts, you're getting these ancient denizens of our world that are reentering, you know. So, no, it's cause for concern. But I, you know, I wouldn't yet worry too much. Yeah. Well, I think it's worth raising that issue, obviously. Exactly. And the point, yeah,

and we'll get, again, we'll get to other impacts of the melting ice in permafrost. And it's not just viruses that maybe we're aware of us. But taking bigger animals. I mean, I love this stuff. It's a non-biologist. It's always fascinating for me to learn. So yeah, there's strange microbes and new metabolism. But I love learning about these strange animals, too. And what biology can do never ceases to amaze me. I kind of, I dropped biology in high school, by the way, when I was a kid. My mom wanted me to be a doctor, but I took high school biology and it was memorizing the parts of a frog.

And this was like early and before, you know, DNA and all the other things were. And so for me, it was just the most boring thing in the world. And I saw that's when I decided not to be a doctor. But since then, I've just got, I mean, what we've discovered about biology is amazing and not just genetics, but I love these things when you talk about these animals and what life can do,

in particular what life can do on larger scales, not just microbes, but larger scale, apt to polar environments. And I would be remiss if I didn't raise the woolly bear caliped caterpill. Oh, thank you for doing that, Lawrence. When people ask me, like,

what is my favorite polar animal? Like, is it a polar bear? Is it a penguin? I say, no, it's a, little caterpillar, it's a little ball of fur that's about an inch long. And it's just an amazing creature. And one that, yeah, I mean, I remember, you know, if seeing one for the first time, I wasn't really prepared for it.

Because it's just a nondescript little, you know, brown, black caterpillar. But they can be seven, eight years old or even older. That can be an, you know, that can be an elder statesman, that little thing on those. So we're very careful to where we set up our tents, not to disturb these. these animals because these little caterpillars can be really old. And they have an incredible life cycle. And this is what's special about them and what enables them to have this life cycle is they spend about, you know, four to eight weeks every summer. When it's warm in the Arctic, they feed voraciously and feeding, feeding, and they have this, they fur on the outside.

So it's sunny a day, they're 24 hours a day. So they're, you know, they heat up pretty nicely because they're dark and the light of the sun. and their hair holds the heat in, and they feed voraciously, and they store all that. And so the summer is a time of eating and storage. And then winter comes long and they freeze. And they're, you know, frozen,

like a little frozen cylinder. And then they thaw again, and they feed another summer in store. And then they freeze again. Then they thaw and feed again. And so they do this, feed, freeze, thaw, feed, freeze. Thaw, feed, freeze.

thaw they do that for about six or seven years all that and then in one year once they've stored enough energy then they metamorphose into a moth for about a week find a mate reproduce and die it's like you know seven years of freezing and thawing and feeding until you know you fly around for like a week and have your fun and then boom you're gone and so

yeah it's not crazy and and the way they do this is even crazier. So they obviously they have the fur, they have the life cycle. But then in their bodies, like a lot of polar animals, they have an antifreeze protein, which keeps them when they're in that. What amazes. Right. Yeah. Sorry. They, so an antifreeze protein doesn't make sure that either ice crystals don't form throughout the body. So they don't freeze solid or it keeps the ice from destroying the cells. So you have these specialized proteins in their body. which prevent the ice from, you know, having a form of frostbite, of caterpillar frostbite, you know. And so, and then those antifreeze proteins are actually really special because typically what they are

is they're modified other kinds of proteins in the body. So there's simple modifications of other normal proteins in the body. So they're not invented out a whole cloth. Yeah. They're like tinkered and jerry-rigged and repurposed proteins that do other things in the body. But other creatures have these protein, these antifreeze proteins as well. They're a variety of fish. They're varieties of worms.

You know, so antifreeze proteins are seen both in vertebrates as well as invertebrates. And they're often a strategy to avoid like what we get, which is frostbite, you know, when you get that frozen skin. So it's incredible. I mean, the woolly bear caterpillar. I mean, I've never heard of. Yeah, I mean, antifreeze proteins were novel for me. And the fact that they're so ubiquitous in many ways. It's just the fact that, you know, biology makes handy freeze.

Just, you know, I love it. But now there's another. Apparently a zillion types, too. I mean, it's not just as once. It's not one off. It's lots of. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, and the little, I love that.

I loved it. We told the story beautifully. It's a little frozen caliber. Just freezes. Boom. It's frozen. Yeah, exactly. And it just sits in a whole bunch of years.

Just to have that one week of boom before it dies. Oh, well. It's a nice week. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing that fascinated me, again, it's not, biology finds many different roots, and some are convergent and some are not. And I was equally fascinated by this desiccation. What some, you know, there's two ways.

Obviously you want to worry about freezing, as you point out, because it'll destroy the cells because ice expands and then it contracts its water and deforms cells and breaks them. So you want to have antifreeze. But the other way is to get rid of water. And why do you talk about that? There are other organisms basically become glass, right? Yeah, exactly.

They become a kind of a glass. And so when you think about Antarctica, Antarctica is super cold, but because it's so cold and it usually at high altitude because the ice is so thick, it's also super dry. So, you know, so the risk in Antarctica is you can have both cold and dry and that neither one of those environments and particularly together are conducive to life. And so animals, we talked about the antifreeze proteins, but as you mentioned, there's the desiccation threat. And so there's a species of worms.

In fact, these are seen in other creatures as well. It's actually not a rare strategy. It's convergent, as you mentioned. That they make a form of sugar. It's called sugar called trahalos. And the trahalos, as they desiccate, as the water, leaves their body, they make the sugar, Trahalos, and it binds to cells and prevents them from suffering damage due to desiccation. And so what that does is they trade the water for the sugar,

and that changes them into a solid. You can shatter them like a glass. You know, hit them, they're paying a thousand pieces. And, you know, you don't want to do that. Come on, these guys, they're trying to live. Right. Anyway, so, but they would if you did. And, and then when it, when it gets wet, again, the rare times it does, then the water replaces the trehalos and they, you know, wiggle away. You know, it's crazy. So turn into a glass, you know, hard and then when it's dry, and then they, then when water comes back, they thaw out and off they go, they're back into the races. You know, life is doing incredible stuff. You know, you have these anthraease proteins. You have these trachealose, these sugars. And you're seeing evolution coming up with multiple ways of getting

there. It's very inventive and creative. Yeah. And we can trace the ways they did it. And we can trace the ways they did it biochemically. It's not like they're invented in whole cloth. They're modified existing things. Yeah. I mean, it's just, there's a whole world of science and understanding these adaptations. Yeah, the fact that, you know, when, again, naively, you think of water as an essential part of life. And you get, you got, you got these animals that for a while are, don't have water. There's sugar, they're like, they're like, Star Trek aliens, the rocks, the famous one of my favorite Star Trek aliens is a rock. The Horta? Yeah, Horta, you got it. Um, and, and, And I've created some credit on this one.

You got Fred. You got street. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, it's, I guess that's the point. And that was my point when I wrote the, you don't have to go to Star Trek to find weird things. The real world is. No, exactly. No, right.

It's like what Richard Dawkins says, right? The magic of reality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so that was the conceit of that particular book. Mine. But anyway, the other, the other.

So that's fancy stuff, and it is amazing. And I love reading about it. I love giving me a chance to talk about now. There are other stuff that I love as a physicist. I began, everyone always says I make these things about me. But anyway, I'll get those complaints now again. It's your podcast. No, but I said.

I wrote a book, Fear of Physics, where I began talking about, you know, simple physics and scaling and how you can learn a lot of biology just by scaling without knowing any biology. But one of the, one example I didn't use, which I'm going to use for now on, is the wonderful fact when you talk about even bigger animals, that physics governs the shape of animals in the polar region. Just simple physics. I'll let you, I'll let you explain it. It's the famous surface area to volume relationship. Yes. So, you know, the, you lose heat based on surface area, you know, but volume your mass is basically what you're, you know, conserving heat with and producing heat with. And so it's, you know, so surface area to volume is really, is really critical. But, you know, as you scale upwards, obviously, you know, it's, it's, it's, these, you have properties that change at different rates. So one of the, the sequelae of that is as animals move into polar regions to conserve heat, what they typically do is reduce heat. I'm sorry, excuse me, really, really, if really is bad a little bit. Sorry, Corey, we're going to cut this again.

you know, as so basically surface area to volume your relationships really control heat loss in a lot of ways and heat gain in many ways. And so when animals, you know, migrate into polar regions, we typically see them evolving new kinds of body shapes that conform to the physics of the situation.

Typically what they have to reduce surface area, which is a way to lose heat, is they reduce the size of their appendages. They tend to have smaller appendages. They tend to be relatively large, larger than the southern species. So body shape conforms to the physics of heat loss and heat gain very nicely in terms of those proportions. Pretty remarkable.

And it's one of those things you see in different lineages. You see it in boxes. You see it in bears. You see it in different kinds of critters. It's not just a one-off. It's a team seems to be a general regularity. And as a physicist, I love when physics governs things. It's simple fact that area goes like R-scores.

and volume goes like, and therefore mass goes like R cube means the bigger you are and more mass you have for volume and that's, you see big animals or and you want to make or a tiny little limbs, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and it's fascinating that, you know, that you can, from very little,

you can get so much and when it comes. And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, and there's a whole science of that. And in biology, these regularities are called laws. They're in Birdman's rule or law and Allen's rule or law. You learn about of an intro bio.

These are the physical regularities of body shape as creatures migrate into northern regions. Well, there's another, there's two other things briefly I want to talk about before moving on elsewhere. And I am aware of time, but here, but there's so much to talk about. One is, I think I was going to talk about the sort of clocks, but I think I'm actually, which would allow us to go in a lovely segue about people going insane. But I think I'm not going to go there right now. I'm going to.

Which one? Does what I talk about insanity? Well, one thing was interesting to me, there was the different kinds of fat. Why do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, there's, there's, yeah, there are different kinds of fat in the body. And one of the discoveries in the last, say, five decades is really understanding that fat is not just often an inert tissue. You know, it's a tissue in our body. And it's a living thing, fatty tissue.

Yes, it provides, you know, it provides. provides insulation. When you think about the insulation of the body, you know, it's important to have, particularly in these regions, sufficient insulation around your organs. But some of this fat actually can produce energy. And it's called brown fat. And brown fat contains mitochondria. And those mitochondria can actually burn energy can create heat. And so brown fat is typically seen in polar creatures. brown fat can be stimulated to form in humans that are in colder environments. And brown fat is not only an insulator. It's a heat generator.

So brown fat is a good fat in many ways, you know? And it actually increases your metabolism and increases your heat. And yeah, how fat is not one thing. There was an experiment done in Australia of humans where they put them in rooms and kept them cold for six months at a time. And they measured their fat in terms of like they were able to produce. brown fat, actually started pretty quickly, you know, after a few weeks to a month of being starting, it's starting an experiment.

Yeah, that's great. It's like cholesterol. There's good and bad and bad, and brown fat and white fat. Yeah. Well, yeah, and if you want to lose weight, the best diet program is camping in the Arctic because you're cold all the time, you know, the type of fat you produce changes through spending a lot of calories just living up there. Now, you know, there's a money-making scheme to support your science.

Just take tea up in the, in the Arctic. Yeah, Shuban Industries. There you go. We're going to start a new corporation. They may not have any federal funding. Anyway. I'll meet it. Okay. Let's jump to the other area, which is an area I have had a personal interest, a variety of reasons, but also scientifically. And that's meteorites. And I used to tell people, you know, when you want to look for meteorites, you go to Antarctica. Why? and people come up with all sorts of ideas of magnetic fields of the earth and everything else.

No, because it's white. You see a rock on the surface. It came from up there. Unless it's in a mountain. And of course, that's true to some extent. But in fact, not quite true. One of the things I should preface this, because I almost got to go meteorite hunting

in Antarctica because I was the chairman of the physics. Department at Case Western Reserve, and my colleague, Ralph Harvey, over there in geology, was in charge of it. You mentioned them in your book. And I desperately tried to pull rank somehow to be able to get on that mission. And in fact, you talk about how wonderful it is and how democratic it is in terms of, in the book. And I'm an example of that, because the fact that I didn't get to pull rank to go to Antarctica is an example of the fact that it's really a democratic decision of getting people to, I mean, because I don't know how to say it's right. I mean, the reason I thought I could do, let me put in this context is it doesn't take a lot

of skill, right, because you're zooming along and you can, and, and, and yet it's pretty obvious, you know, what's a meteorite there. And I mean, obviously you have to be trained. But, but it's, it's actually, and that's why I thought I could do it, but it's actually a little more different than I thought. I'd always thought you'd just zip it along these planes of ice, the surface of ice and you see a rock. But in fact, actually,

the meteorites accumulate, and there's a strategy of accumulation. So, I want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think that's what, that's where it sort of got things going, really, was that. Now, you can find meteorites that way. You can zip around, see, you know, something dark on the ice to pick it up. In fact, that people

have found them that way. But more often than not, it was the realization by Japanese teams, and in the early days, Americans as well, but it began with the Japanese, they discovered this one spot, the Yamada Mountains in East Antarctica that had a collection of nine meteorites. And they were nearby each other, but they weren't from the same meteorite fall. They were different meteorite falls and they were different kinds of meteorites. So it means that the meteorites collected in that region for whatever reason. And it all comes back to moving ice. So the ice, as I told you earlier, is moving from more or less the center of

Antarctica towards the coast, along these rivers that are going a kilometer or two a year, right? And what happens is when that ice moves along and hits a mountain range, these are mountains that go pop through the ice. What will happen is they pile, that the ice starts piling up at the base of the mountains, such that what happens is the ice starts to convect upward. So ice from the deepest parts of the ice sheet start convecting upwards at the base of these mountains. So when you look at the mountains of Antarctica at the base of the mountains is the oldest ice. This is ice that could be, you know, a million years old. It's the famous blue ice.

It looks very different. You know, it's not white. It's blue. And it's because it's really dense. You can't break it with your hammer. If you start sliding on it, you can't stop because it's frictionless almost. It's crazy. And so you have all this.

this ice moving towards mountains and then it convecks up. And so everything in that ice starts piling up at the base of those mountains, you know, from all depths of the ice. And so think about this. If meteorites are hitting Antarctica at some small but constant rate, but you have this mechanism that conveys and collects all the ice at the base of these mountains through multiple layers of time, over time where you're going to end up with,

if you have the right conditions is a collection of everything that was in that ice, including those meteorites. And so what they do is the meteorite hunting team looks for places where you have this blue ice that's convective to the surface, usually at the base of these mountains. And then they go and they, you know, pop, up, up, pick up the ice. And they found, pick up the meteorites. And they found, I think, since the project began in the 70s, they found about 50,000 of these meteorites.

Yeah, it's crazy. It hadn't referred to me that strategy. And I was, although it is true, as you say. I mean, you see pictures of these meteorites on the high issue. You will find it that way. You could. Yeah, and people do. First point, I think in 1912, you point out was just someone wandering around.

Yep. And I thought the Al-Ole. I think the famous meteorite that I want to talk about a second was also, well, Alan Hill's movie, right? But, yeah, the idea. But, you know, but I want to point out something that, you know, made me think about it. I used to think, oh, well, of course, they come from up.

But it, then I would, as a sign, as a. as a physicist, I was amazed how stupid I was because meteorites are coming at a pretty fast velocity. They don't just land on the ice. So in fact, you don't, I mean, some of them, you know, end up on the surface like that. But one of the reasons you want to go to those convecting regions in the blue ice is that the meteorites penetrate and they go down. Yeah, exactly. And that's why. And so, yeah, I mean, that, obviously, that's the point.

You want to go to the point where they brought up because mostly meteorites have penetrated down and you won't see them on the surface because they're. That's right. It's a high velocity. And I slapped myself in the head when I realized that upon reading your book that, yeah, of course, you want to go to where they're brought up because most of them are deep down. Exactly. Exactly. And then there are two types, as I point out.

I mean, some of these, of course, the chondrites come from the origin of our solar system, 4.5, 6 billion years old earlier than the formation world. And they're fascinated to look at for those reasons. But what was the big surprise, I think, and Iran, remember it vividly from 1996, I think, but was the realization that if you want to find bits of Mars, you don't have to always go to Mars. And it was a realization that material is exchanged between planets, that no planet is an island. And the realization that, I mean, it wasn't first, you pointed out, I think it was in Egypt. When meteorites were found, which were very unusual

composition. And of course, it wasn't until we went to Mars and looked at the composition of Martian rocks with our missions that had gone to look at them, that we realized that the composition was exactly the same, and that you can get rocks from Mars and maybe somewhere else and the moon and everywhere else here on Earth. That's a fascinating discovery. Yeah, and you don't have to run an expedition to Mars to get these rocks. You just have to support polar research and people in snowmobiles and going to the right places. Yeah, and they're relatively, they're not,

the conrates, as you mentioned, are the most common kind of media, right? Yeah, the Martian ones are, are there. And, yeah, I think that was a big surprise to people. The Egyptian meteorite famously vaporized a dog when it hit it. Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know if it really vaporized a dog.

Yeah, I don't know. It's apocryphal, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that might be a little about apoccal. But, yeah, and you pointed out of how sad it was, you know, traveling for could be bouncing around and soap for hundreds of thousands of years

and then zooming in that poor dog was in the wrong place of the wrong time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But this one meteorite became famous and it was in the White House, as you know, I think, Allen Hills 84, A-LH-84001

because it was analyzed and I was almost I thought afterwards it was trick photography because these small structures were seen that if you looked at them look very much like the oldest fossils on earth that are 4 billion years old from Australia. Oh, totally. They're just a lot smaller. But I think we were a fool.

You could tell me if I'm wrong. In retrospect, I realized we were kind of fooled because they looked like them, but they're about 40 or 50 times smaller. Yeah, they're a lot smaller. And that was the, to me, that's the Achilles heel, the fact that there are plausible non-biological ways to produce such things. Yeah. I mean, but you know how you talked about before is where we don't really know what to look for

for life on other bodies. I mean, so I talk to people who think about these things, think about Mars surface, things about meteorites and so forth. You know, oftentimes people say, you know, you really just don't know. I mean, it's unlikely it's a living form based on what we know, but we can't exclude it, right? I mean, just because it shows the gap in our knowledge. I mean, yeah, it's likely formed by an abiogenic process, you know, something with the lithography, with the formation of the rocks.

But, you know, you can't exclude. I mean, nobody's like sort of debunked it, you know, because you can't because we just don't know enough about what life might be. Yeah, it could end up. It couldn't in life. But I think the old claim of, well, Sagan border from other people about extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yeah, this is exactly right. Clinton in the White House got, you know, it's a very exciting moment saying we discovered, life elsewhere. And the point is, yeah, maybe life, but, but in science, you know, it's got to,

if you're going to make an extraordinary claim that it is life, you better, yeah, you can't say well, it might be. Yeah, you need a lot more than just a few rods. But what it did do was it changed, at least for me, and maybe for people who thought about this, it wasn't such a big change. It changed everything by realizing that, that no planet is an island. And that, and that, and that, and then if you want to. Right. And because the early life on, Mars may have been hospitable to life early on. It's certainly possible. I wouldn't say not plausible in my own opinion,

having thought about it a lot, but possible that life originated on Mars and then later on polluted Earth, because what we've learned is that microbes, as you point out, and extremophiles can survive in exotic environments for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. And it's plausible that a life form that arose on Mars

could have been knocked out and ended up on Earth and polluting the Earth. So if you want to know what Martians look like, look in the mirror, maybe. Yeah, I may agree with you. Yeah, I would say, yeah, I'd say it's plausible, but not probable, improbable.

But the more important thing, as a person who taught me a lot about this when I was writing a book about an Adam, life history of Adam, my friend Andy Noel, who's who you probably know. Of course. Yeah, it's fabulous scientists. And he's at Harvard at the,

in the Organizable Biobiles. Department. He's pointed out to me, he said to me once and he, that's the key point. If we find extinct or extinct life on Mars, the big surprise will not be, will be if it isn't our cousins. Because, because of that exchange. And that's what, that's the difference between looking for life in San Salatus or, or Europa, which has been separated from, from the environment by an ice sheet. for billions of years. There's been exchanged.

So do you buy into that? It's most likely if we see, if we find any evidence for life on Mars, it'll be difficult, unless, of course, it has a different kind of DNA and all the rest, which is, I think, highly unlikely anyway. It would be difficult to say that it is in our cousins. Yeah. And if we find a creature that clearly had some sort of nucleic acid that is, you know, similar to the nucleic acids on life, I'd say the default hypothesis is that we've traded,

material early on the history. And we have these asteroid impacts. They send ejecta and all. And the material goes off to the race, goes off to the races and lands on another body. No, I think if we find nucleic acid-based lysophobic form on Mars, I would think the working hypothesis might be that somehow there's been an exchange. And you know, that will take phylogenetic analysis. People have to look at the sequences and use some of those, these deep branch phylogenetic

methods to really test those things, whether you can or not. I don't know. but we'll see. We should be lucky enough to have that. Exactly. We'll be lucky enough to have that. Absolutely. But I have a bet, which I'm happy to lose with Richard Dawkins, but having thought about

this, I'm actually, I'm almost convinced that life found a unique way to exist. So my own feeling is if we find nucleic acids in life in Encelotis, any life we find in the oceans and Encelotis is likely to be a second. genesis of life. Oh, yeah, I would stick so. That's for sure. But I'm betting, and I'm happy to make this bet with you, and I'm hoping I'm alive to lose it if it is that way.

I tend to think I wouldn't be surprised to find that even if we find the second genesis of life under the oceans of Inslaught of Europa, that it will basically be DNA-based and have ATP and more or less the same biology as us. because I think life found a way to work. But do you think I'm being naive here? Yeah. No, I mean, I'm actually, yeah, you're not going to get a bet out of me because as I get older, it's nothing, I would bet if I disagreed, but I actually kind of agree with you because

as I get older, I move less from sort of evolution as a pile of contention events to more of the fact that the physics and chemistry of certain situations constrain the range of possibilities of the outcomes that can happen. And that what we see is probably in, in, in the history of life on Earth, we probably had multiple inventions of life on Earth. It didn't probably just happen once. It probably happened multiple times, you know,

when the slate wiped clean and you had different origins in different places. And, you know, I'm thinking, you know, you probably follow, you follow, I know, I know, I know, for a fact, you followed, you know, physics and the rules of physics and chemistry to have that life. And I think in all those cases, we've had nucleic acids. So I would be an argument that, you know, we're probably looking at. Okay. So constrained possibilities because of physics and chemistry, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's strange things. And life has found a remarkably way to maximize the opportunities provided by physics and chemistry. And it found a really good route. And it works. So, yeah, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, I guess. And so, yeah, okay, it's interesting that your feeling is the same. I think it's. Well, it may not look a lot.

like our DNA or RNA and maybe, in fact, it probably is like an RNA based or something like that, if I had a bet, and that aren't those RNAs may be very, you know, we know our own RNAs can be very, very highly variable. So I'm thinking it may be some kind of RNAs, maybe it's some kind of RNAs that we don't, can't even imagine right now, but it might be some. But people have argued, well, I don't want to push us too far because I'm, but I will push it a little bit because that's the way I am. You know, not all, you know, there's some subset of amino acids that we use and some and and and and the nucleotides are some set of possible nucleotides and people said well maybe there'd be other nucleotides but I'm willing to bet even that even down as far as

the choice of amino acids and the choice of nucleotides all of that is governed by chemistry I think a fundamental energetics of chemistry and I would be surprised if there was that much variability but anyway now okay going back to to to um to to some of the discussion the book that I would be surprised that want to really hit, especially as we get near the end of this, and for your sake, I want to let you know we are getting near the end. Probably one of the most important things that you can get out of the last, of the book in general is the fact that the earth is dynamic, the ice is dynamic, the history of the earth shows dynamic things, and that the way things are now is not the way things always were

or the way things always will be. And there's lots of great discussions. And I know a lot of that has been learned by looking at ice. And when I was in Greenland, I did the study of the science. And boy, so many things came out of that. And you talk about Fritchoff Nansen and what he learned and ice cores. But even Alfred Veginer, the guy who first came up with continental drift was in Greenland. It's really.

But one of the things that is interesting to me that you point out, and as we talk about slow and rapid change, which is really where I went ahead, is that there was really no ice on the earth until about two billion years ago. That, again, hadn't really hit me until I read it in your book. And, I mean, it stands to reason, I suppose, in some sense. I assume, well, tell me what I'm wrong here. I'm assuming it's largely because the early atmosphere of the earth had huge amounts of carbon dioxide. and thousands of times more than now, which stopped it from being frozen because after all, the sun was 15% less brightened.

But I guess I was surprised that ice arose 2.2 billion years ago, and that was before the period of great oxygenation, I guess. So what was it about two billion years ago that caused ice to begin to form on Earth? Yeah. So what we have is there's a mix. of things. And I think the formation of ice on our planet takes a perfect storm of events.

You know, there's things that are happening to the atmosphere, things that are happening to the dynamics of the Earth, things that are actually happening with life. And it's the interplay of all these three things. And what you have are these cycles in the movement of the continents. You have periods of times where the continents

come together, periods of times where the continents break apart. Again, periods of times the continents come together again in a different configuration and they break apart. in a different configuration. So we have these supercontinent cycles, supercontinent form, break up, form break up. And the distribution of continents on the planet can affect the global climate in very big ways because it affects the amount of ocean, the distribution of oceans, the distribution of land masses, how heat is absorbed by the earth. So that's one factor.

The albedo of the earth, in fact, a very important. Exactly. And then what life is doing is also a big, big factor as well. I mean, so life produces, is the outcome of, you know, of the, of energetics and metabolism, life produces a variety of molecules as waste products. It's either oxygen or carbon dioxide or other products as well. So that will change, depending on what life is doing, that can change the context of the atmosphere as well. And, you know, you have all these factors coming together, and there are moments of time where the earth is absorbing more heat, then it's releasing. And you have warm periods, you have cold periods and so forth.

But a lot depends on how not only the amount of heat that the earth is storing based on the distribution of the continents and the distribution of oceans, but how that heat that the earth has moves across the earth. Ocean currents can change. And ocean currents don't just take nutrients and things. They also carry heat and salts from one part of the earth to the other. A long way of saying that when you put all these, this mix of factors together, there are periods of times that promote cold, and there are periods of times that promote warm, cold, warm, cold, warm. And those cold periods can give rise to moments where you have ice either covering the poles, covering both poles, covering one pole, or covering the entire planet.

It's interesting. That's a key point, that it's not just absolute temperature. It's the way it's distributed. You can have cold times where there is nice and you can have warm times where there is, depending upon. Exactly. You know, and that there are drivers, as we point out and we'll get to, I guess, obviously the ocean current in the Atlantic that takes warm water and takes it up to the poles, and then that water sinks. And then that's driven, the energetics of that is driven by salinity in a large way. And it turned out that changed when the continents changed because when the Pacific and Atlantic were connected, when North and South America had a gap between them,

the salinity was very, the Atlantic was very different. But once that gap closed, the salinity of the Atlantic changed, and that drives that ocean earth that now determines not just the snow in the Arctic, but also why Europe is much warmer at the same latitude than North America. Exactly. And that's the example I mentioned in the book, but to show essentially that the distribution of the continents can affect these circulation patterns of heat.

And so tectonics and continental drift is intimately tied to long-term patterns of climate. And yeah, what you're talking about there with the Atlantic Ocean becoming more saline over time as it became separate from the Pacific, that drove that current ever found, made the fuel the current to become ever faster, which, you know, pushed obviously snow and moisture to form at the North Pole. Yeah, and also even I remember when I first heard about a snowball alert, it was from a then a young guy, Dan Shrague, who's now older, and worked with Paul Harville. Yeah. And that one of the key, there was a time, which is amazing, and it was pretty controversial when it's worth pointed out, when the Earth more or less froze over. And partly it was due to the fact that there was a supercontinent and its location near the equator that changed the albedo of the Earth, that initiated that whole context.

So this interesting interplay between the oceans and continents is important. But it does mean that there have been a lot of change over geological time, but we'll also learn that there can be changes over quicker times. But I think one of the things that you mentioned, which is surprising me, is that the polaritescaps have only been a feature of our planet for 10% of existence. Therefore, for 90% of the time on Earth, there haven't been polar ice caps. And that's really, so we're really in an anomaly. Yeah, we're living in a weird time.

Yeah, very weird time. In a very weird time. And as we pointed out, a very beginning or much earlier in the program, it was only 34 million years ago that I started to form, that now forms. But even then, it selectively did it in different ways around Antarctica versus the Arctic. Again, for it. Yeah. So maybe you can go over that a little bit, because I think that's fascinating. Yeah.

So we've been in, I think, you know, in a trend of global cooling, actually, for about the last 50 million years. And that's, again, because probably because of tectonic changes. I mean, the best hypothesis out there is that the rise of the Tibetan plateau, it changed global climate for the last 50 million years. Because as that rises, that pulls, that actually forms a mechanism for rot weathering to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's a great theory by Marine Remo of Columbia University. And it was controversial at the time. But I think what it shows is that we've been in a very special cooling period for a long period of time. And that cooling alone didn't cause the freezing of the poles.

What it took were other things to happen. And we come into continental drift again. What changed in Antarctica is as Antarctica moved towards the South Pole. So it was originally up where Australia is today and then moved further south to the South Pole. That set up an ocean that surrounds it, the famous Southern Ocean. and the tidal movement of the winds of the earth and the movement of the earth has created an ocean current. That is, if you've ever crossed the Drake Passage, I mean, it's ferocious. So you have this ocean current that basically spins around the globe around Antarctica,

and that current has actually insulated Antarctica. So as Antarctica was sitting at the pole, it had this current around it that kept the cold there, it insulated it. So it just got colder and colder and colder until it actually formed. and then wetter and wetter and wetter in many ways, and then it formed ice in the continent there. And that happened before, the formation of the ice in Antarctica, happened before the formation of ice in the Arctic,

which is largely driven by, we think, by the Atlantic Ocean getting ever more salty, as we talked about before. But that happened about 15 million years after the formation of the ice in Antarctica. What's remarkable is, if you look at the fossil record of Antarctica, it was a tropical rainforest teeming with life about 16. million years ago, teeming with life. And then when it went into the freezer, all the life's gone, pretty much, except for, you know, obviously the fauna and flora were familiar with today.

I mean, just remarkable. And that happened before the Antarctic, before the Arctic, the freezing of In America. Yeah. And we'll go into a little bit more detail here. But one of the things I remember what first jolted me about climate change, I was chairman for a decade or more. I was chairman of the board of the building atomic scientists, board of sponsors that terms of the doom day clock every year.

Yeah, so I was to Chicago. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I would visit there and we'd have meetings, doomsday meetings where I'd learn from experts about different things. And I remember the first time, I think was Jim Hansen, who I can't remember who showed this plot.

But during this periods of global cooling, I mean, when you're dumping more ice, you're taking water out. and the fact that sea levels can change. And I, you know, I knew about sea level change a little bit. And, you know, but when you see the data, the sea levels have changed on Earth by not just inches, but by 100 meters over different. Oh, yeah, yeah.

That, that, I mean, it's not, this is not science fiction. Sea level can change not just by meters, but by tens of meters or more. And it has changed over, over geological time by up to 100 meters or more. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. There's about, there's about 150 feet. of sea level change frozen in Antarctica and ice, right? And when you think about that ice has come and gone, well, think about that how much the oceans and the seas of the Earth have

changed, how that affects coastlines, how that affects islands, how that affects weather patterns. It affects every property of the planet in many important ways, all across the planet. And well, and then, and we've learned about this a lot. What's great is that not only do we see this in Antarctica, but we use Antarctica and Greenland to some extent as a tool. And again, I'd be remiss if we didn't mention it. You mentioned Willie Dansgard.

But the idea that Antarctica is a wonderful tool to look at the history of the earth because the ice captures the earth's history in two beautiful ways that I know of. You talk about one in the book, but there's another one too, I guess, due to chemistry, that the realization that first ice builds up every year

so that deeper down you go, the long, you're going back in the history of Earth, back to, I think the oldest ice cores are now 800,000 years old, I think. A little older, actually, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the famous ones who were 400,000, but now they go down deeper.

But trapped in that are fossils, not of animals, but fossils of the climate of the earth. And I'll let you, you talk about it a little bit. Well, think about what's frozen in the air. I mean, you have bubbles in the ice that preserve the ancient atmosphere. You have ancient particles, soot, and others that are preserved in the, in the ice itself. And we talked about the microbes that are in the ice itself. You think about these layers of ice as being a vault of whatever was in the air at the time, captured, like a museum piece, if you will, like a time capsule.

And that's what they call these things, time caps. And, you know, it gives a window into what the ancient era. atmospheres were. It gives you a window into what microbes were around at the time. The soot gives you a window into, you know, what was happening with different parts of the earth and, and, and, um, air circulation patterns and so forth. I mean, you can really, once you know how to look, you can read these things to tell so much about what the world would like at that time. It's amazing. And you can actually see the layers. It's like a tree. If you actually look at like it. And, and of course, yes, one of the things, which, which is the first thing, you know, realize is that these, these, these

do tell you the atmosphere. So that's how we know what the carbon, you know, when we have these graphs of what carbon was over, over back to 800,000 years, we can measure. We can literally measure the early atmosphere. Absolutely. The thing that's less, that's more surprising when I first learned about it, and you mentioned it also the book, is it is also a thermometer. It tells us what the temperature was, which is how we can know how carbon and temperature related. And the thermometer is fascinating. And so maybe you briefly mention it. Yeah. So basically, what they're doing is looking at different isotopes of oxygen. Yes.

And oxygen exists in a heavy and a light form. And that, you know, so basically there's an oxygen that's heavy, an isotope that's heavy, an oxygen isotope is light. And the ratio of the light to heavy form in a layer of water can give you a sense of what the temperature was at that time. Because they have different tendencies to evaporate or form. this go to the gas or go to the gas or go to the solid. So what you have is you have this thermometer, which is based on the proportion of heavy oxygen isotopes, the light

oxygen in the layers of ice. And you can calibrate that thermometer to known places. We actually know what the oxygen, you know, is actually are doing. So oxygen. It's heavier and it'll precipitate out earlier and if it starts to rain or if it's colder, it'll... Exactly. As you go to those lower latitudes, it'll precipitate out and you'll see less oxygen 18. And it's really kind of amazing thermometer. That to me was a big surprise, not just that you could see the atmosphere, but you could actually correlate it to temperature.

So we can check our physics and check that physics works, that there is a correlation between, say, carbon and... Yeah, I mean, so you can get these records of the relationship between carbon in the atmosphere in temperature, you know, through the bubbles, through the geochemistry of the ice, and you can map them. And you can see over time for the last hundreds of 800,000 and 900,000 years, you can track how they go in parallel with one another. It's a very remarkable curve because they do follow each other very. Yeah, it is. It is. But that was, that was in some sense, one could expect that, because it is physics. It's simple physics. It's not some fancy stuff. Climate change is

simple physics. But what was surprising and still is, surprising, and will lead us maybe to present and future, is the fact that when you look at these things, you don't just see changes over geological time. You can see temperature changes over what we might think of as human time scales, hundreds of years. Decadal, or decadal scale. Or decadal times. And there's evidence, I think, 26,000 years ago or 20, I mean, there's a bunch of them. Rapid, rapid, rapid temperature change has been confirmed a bunch of times and, associated with that in decadal time scales or century time scales, rapid sea level changes. And though that should give us pause.

So I'll turn about it. Yeah, I mean, that was actually a very, once people got these tools to measure temperature and carbon and evaluate ice by looking at ice cores, it opened up a whole new world to discover. And primarily working in starting in Greenland, but later in Antarctica, what, and particularly in Greenland, what was discovered in the north was just how fast this system can change. So there are moments where you had maximum ice in the history of the planet. But in recent years, I'll say 24,000 years ago, but what you'll have at these time periods are short intervals, maybe a decade to a century, where you can have a change in global temperature of about seven degrees Fahrenheit. And then you can, you know, then you can find massive breakup

both glaciers and you see, you know, the climate change changing very fast, the quality of the ice changing very fast, and the changing of the sea levels changing very fast. So you're seeing sort of naturally events which can drive rapid changes in ice, sea level, temperature, and so forth. And these all happen before humans. And it just shows how sensitive the system is to perturbation. Changes in temperature can change ice can change sea level. And, And it's not a system that is, that is, you know, very stable. It's a system, particularly in certain conditions that can change and that there's changes contract very quickly.

And that's empirical. That's purely empirical. That's just you can show it. Exactly. That's the important point. It's empirical. You can't deny that. It happens and it has happened and it could happen again.

And for those of us who've been in the West Antarctic, as I have in the ice sheet, you know, as we look at what's happening now, there are scary things happening. And we don't have enough time to go through all the details of the fact that that warmer water melts the ice, the ice sheets at the edge of certain parts of Antarctica that stand as bulwarks to glaciers that hold them back. And when those ice sheets are gone,

the glaciers can more quickly flow into the sea. And if the West Antarctic ice sheet, which seems to be breaking up, does break up, then global sea level changes will be like two feet, right? Something like that. In the past, it was actually about 14 feet. It's a whole sheet goes. The whole sheet goes is 14. The whole sheet goes.

The whole sheet goes. Yeah. But just the, even in the optimistic case. Oh, the margins, yeah. So where you're talking. So basically what you're talking about is that the, you know, as the ice moves from the center of the continent to the coast, where the most of the melting happening is at the coast, where warm waters of the ocean meet the ice at the margins. But the ice at the margins of the continent are like dams or breaks, bulwarks that hold that

ice coming from the center of the continent from going into the ocean. But as the ocean warms, it melts these dams, if you will. And as they melt, then we can expect more ice to go to the ocean. And the West Antarctic ice sheet is the one that I think is the one of most concern because that whole area, the ice is sitting on rock that sits below sea level. So the ocean at the coast is not only just sitting at the coast, but it seeps between the ice and the land going deep underneath. And that's warm water, causing the ice to melt from below. And so there's concern that we could see several feet of sea level change in the coming century or two based, just on based on what's happening on the ice in West Endard.

in that part of the West Ender. Just in that small part. You do say if the history of rocks, ice, and genomes, as any guide, our future will be one of rising seas. And it's not gloom and doom to suggest that rising, well, rising seas are happening. It's not just a future where the seas are measured to be rising by, you know, millimeters per year, but nevertheless at a measurable rate. And this, this hit home in a. me, and that's why I wrote the book on climate change, because so much of the population I was in the Macong in Vietnam at the time, where almost all of South Vietnam is less than

one meter above sea level. And so one can make projections, and you're right, projections are variable, but the example like to use is of Clint Eastwood in the Dury-Harrie movies where he points this gun at a guy and says, you know, I don't know if there are any bullets left. You're feeling lucky, punk. And I got it from the same way about the planet. Are we feeling lucky or not? And if, it seems to me, if, while it may be speculative

that large sea level change can happen in centuries, if there's that possibility, shouldn't we, the fact that there's uncertainty, it seems to me, should make us more worried then the fact that there is an uncertainty. Namely, if if, if, if, if, if the, if, if, if, if the, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if it moves us to try and think about how to make sure they don't, even if it's just a small possibility. Yeah, what's certain is that Caesar are going to rise. There's just no doubt about it. I mean, that's, I mean, it's already baked into the system. We can see that. You talk about remote sensing. We're seeing that we're losing 240, 280 gigatons of ice per year from green. It's accelerating. And, and Antarctica. Yeah. So an

enormous amount is going into the ocean, and that's just not disappearing. It's going to raise, it's raising sea level of about a quarter of an inch a year, and that's accelerating. And so, I mean, so the question is really, I mean, yes, we know it's rising. But the question is, how much will it rise and how resilient could we be to whatever rise that happens? Exactly. Those are the two unknowns, which we really don't know. You have estimates of sea level rise, some of which are not particularly scary, other ones which are truly scared. You have estimates of human resilience, which none of them really come out too well, because what we have is most human populations are along the coast. We have trillions of dollars of value along the coasts.

Not only do we have Pacific Islands, whole island nations that would disappear, but we also have, as you mentioned, whole communities, whole nations that are below sea level. But there's also other things that happen with changing seas. That is, have you changed seas, we've talked about global circulation patterns, of those. ocean currents, well, that changes climate patterns. Yeah. We have whole societies, geopolitical boundaries that are based on coastal margins, but also having certain climate patterns with agricultural belts and habitable zones and so forth. You know, what we're doing is we're setting up a world of really a lot of uncertainty. And that uncertainty starts with the amount of carbon that we're putting in the atmosphere. And, you know, and it's hard to predict the future,

but I can tell you right now that we can guarantee you we're going to have rising seas. I can guarantee you it'll cause changes which we're going to need to adapt to. But we just don't know. The problem is we have no idea really kind of what to what degree we can adapt or what degree we'll have to adapt. I can promise you there'll be some degree of adaptation, but it could be a lot. Could be a little. We can adapt. And that may be what's required because we're not showing any evidence of stopping what we're doing. We'll need to adapt. But one, I was surprised. You say one, somewhere you said that one, one prediction, was only 4.5 inches sea level by 2100.

I don't see that as... Yeah, I mean... Let me just give you the physics argument. We've dumped enough energy. Water, when you heat it up, expands. And oceans haven't thermalized all the heat we've dumped in the last 40 years. If you just talk about that heat that's already in there, when that thermalizes, that's going to produce an quarter of a meter increase in the sea level.

That's built in. I don't see how it could ever be less than that because of just the fact that heated up water or spend. Forget the glacier. Yeah, that particular estimate. So basically there was an issue in nature. It had two papers in it back to back with different predictions about what happened, what would happen with Western Arctic melting. And one was truly scary at several feet of sea level change in the next century.

The other was like four inches or something. And both of them were trying. One of them had an estimate that included kind of, kind of the, what's likely to happen with the margins, those ocean cliffs and how they're more likely, as they erode from beneath, how they're more likely to collapse catastrophically, which gave the larger estimate. Why you might have smaller estimates is really about the dynamics and uncertainty in the dynamics of the ice. And I agree with you, it's the less likely of the two scenarios. But there are two things happening. As you lose ice, the land itself rises up. So, yes.

based on that you kind of don't know and the other is as ice breaks apart you really kind of don't know what the dynamics will be in its pieces that it could be like forming clogging zones which hold that ice from the land back we just don't know the dynamics that situation and part of it is is that you know everybody thinks they understand ice because you know you see it in your class and it's the you know in a drink or whatever and it's the most simple of substances but the reality is when once it gains large size you know the size of the state of flor or the continental United States, it takes on properties and complexities

which are extremely hard to predict. And I think that's part of what we're encountering right now. The uncertainty in ice is the largest uncertainty. I was just saying there are other things, as I say, the heat content of the ocean that I say. Oh, yeah, no, I don't disagree with you. But the point you make, and again, it emphasizes the importance of the book.

Our future in many ways is going to be determined by the regions of the world that we tend to not think about a lot, the polar regions, because ice is ultimately going to determine in so many ways, the future of the world. And the point you just made about resilience, I think, is important. And I'm giving a short shrift because there's a fair amount of discussion in the book about it. But I think it's an important issue that we don't always know resilience.

I mean, doom and gloom scenarios often overestimate. And polar bears are an example. You point out, I mean, everyone's seen the pictures, the poor polar bear on a little floating on a little ice flow. Starbting, yeah, exactly. But in fact, as you point out, genetic evidence suggests polar bears have survived in warm climates. So it's not clear that, you know, that biology is resilient in many ways. And so one can make assumptions about extinction, but those assumptions are not always right. That's right.

The polar bears, you know, when it warmed in the past, the polar bears were treated to islands like Spalbord or other places further north. They interbreeded with brown bears. They, you know, they had, they gained new kinds of genes. and then their populations hit a bottleneck, but when it, you know, when it cool off again, then they expanded their range. So, you know, we really kind of don't know, you know, it's hard to predict extinction risks for species that can migrate so much

and interbreed so much with nearby neighbors. Well, okay, let's let's let the last thing I want to mention, you know, so the good news is that polar bears may not be gone. I've gone up and seen polar bears and I'd hate to lose those. They're lovely to watch. But one thing that is a real concern, or at least it's worth understanding. And when we talk about the fact that our future will be determined by ice, there's a lot of ice under the ground, and that's the name of permafrost. And that, it may be almost of more concern than glaciers in terms of affecting our future.

Absolutely. And why don't you elaborate on it since? Well, you know, and we have, so permafrost itself is a, an incredibly rich ecosystem. It contains, as we talked about before, an enormous amount of carbon because of microbial action over millennia. And it's a giant storehouse of carbon. So the first issue to really think about as we have a warming north is that we're setting off ever accelerating cycles. And this is where when we say it's hard to predict, yeah, that's true. But it also, what we know suggests that we're going to enter feedback loops, which will only increase

warming. And that is, as you have warming, as you have warming, you are melting the ice. When you melt the ice, the albedo effect changes in the sense that you now are, you know, now we heat up faster. As we heat up faster, the permafrost melts. As the permafrost melts, you're introducing new carbon into the atmosphere. A lot of enormous amounts of carbon. I mean, more carbon than it's in the atmosphere now can enter the atmosphere, which will warm things up more. So basically when you, the more you know about permafrost, the more you know about the albedo effect, the more you realize that global warming sets up a series of positive feedback loops. That's why it's a concern that as you warm, you're setting up the propensity to warm even more through melting permaferos,

which increases the carbon in the atmosphere, through changes in the albedo effect and so forth. But also more immediately, and this is just, I mean, really tragic, is whole towns in Alaska and Siberia, are needing to move just because the permafrost is melting so fast. They have to move whole towns, whole cloth, move them across river bases. And that's because, that's again, simple physics. When the ice melts, water takes less volume. And so what was ice when it becomes water, you get huge sinkholes and you get, you know. Oh, yeah.

And then they, and if you're by a river, that river will erode much faster. And so, you know, there are whole towns that are disappearing. I think the last conflation are 17 villages. The towns in Alaska need to move. moved two of them already. When you work in Nunavit, you know, you see whenever they have, when they have to build on permafrost, what has to happen in Nunavutia territory in Canada, if they're building on permafrost, because the melting permafrost changes what can happen to the, to the structures

on top. In Siberia, I mean, their whole cities are being affected by this, particularly cities that have refineries or plants that they're going to have to move them and restore them. No, it's changing. we're changing the geography of the earth in timescales that we can observe and measure. Absolutely. Not only is the ice melting and that's the peak piece, you know. Yeah, but everything else is it's, it, there's all interconnected.

And ice plays a key role. And just to, I was thinking I should go back for people who, when we talk about albedo, maybe that's a technical term, but the bottom line is that ice is white, it reflects sunlight, water isn't white. And it absorbs, so when ice turns of water, you tend to absorb more heat. And, and, um, and that's that feed. back loop. But the key point you made is that things are changing and our future is going to depend on a lot on what's going on in the polar regions now. And I want to give you the last word by reading

you. Again, two other quotes from the epilogue. It block starts with moving ice has transformed our world. Homo sapiens arose during a rare moment in our planet's history, one with ice covering the polar region. So humans have arisen in a very rare moment in history of the earth. And and, you know, we're just sort of insignificant in that sense. But the last paragraph I find is telling. But rather than make us feel small and insignificant, polar regions can enlarge us. Scientific discovery at the poles

reveals our deep connections to one another and to the planet. Here, life is only possible when humans look beyond themselves to survive, thrive, and adapt. Our existence on frozen tundra and ice is impossible if we do not learn from and collaborate with one another. And the more we look, the more we find that polar regions of the world, themselves fragile places, ones that can change in a brief moment of geological time.

It's profoundly humbling to find our own vulnerabilities, as well as our capacities for resilient growth and discovery in the most remote and delicate landscapes on our planet. And it has been fascinating to talk to you about that and everything else. As I say, I've always enjoyed our discussions. And I hope you've enjoyed it too, and we've done justice to what was a fascinating book and a fascinating discussion. It's been great to have you. Thanks so much. That was a lot of fun.

It was a lot of fun for me, too. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. And I know that people listening have enjoyed it. Your enthusiasm and the fascinating stories are great. Thanks again. Thank you. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our

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