Unexplainable - Unexplainable or Not with Wyatt Cenac

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Our game show is back! This time, comedian Wyatt Cenac is in the hot seat in front of a live audience. Can he guess which climate mystery has been solved and which ones are still unexplainable? For show transcripts, go to bit.ly/unx-transcripts For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to read about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at ototrater.ca. Canada's car marketplace. A couple weeks ago, we released our 100th episode. And the next day, we celebrated by hosting a live taping of our game show,

Unexplanable or Not. It was at the Green Space in New York, and we had a very productive rehearsal beforehand. With all that extremely useful practice out of the way, we started the show, and the audience was pumped. Okay, that was maybe because I asked them to applaud for a sound check with our engineer Christian. Now imagine someone said something kind of interesting. You've done this before.

This is, okay. What about if someone told, like, a joke that's really bad and something I might do and you kind of have to groan? Yeah, okay. That's also very helpful. After all that, once the crowd was warmed up, and we had all our videos and graphics queued up on the screen behind us. We were ready for the show.

Let's start the game show, Christian. All right, this is Unexplanable or Not, the game show where we finally get some answers. I'm your host, Noam Hassanfeld. And we're going to bring out two other members of the Unexplanable team. So first we got our supervising producer Meredith Hodnaut. And then we have our science editor, Brian Resnick, professional man. And please welcome our special guest. you might know him from HBO's problem areas with Wyatt Sannack

or his topic show, aka Wyatt Sannack. Please welcome Wyatt Sannack. All right, okay, so... Just very quickly, the producer told me you forgot to get one more sound effect from the audience. So if everyone right now, if you could just all collectively boo, they need that one too, just in case something... No, no, no, I appreciate it.

This will definitely make it into the final. You never know. You got to act. We're journalists you accurately represent. Yeah. But if I lose this game show, then yeah. Exactly. The audience turns on you.

They flip the stage. They break the windows. So how are you feeling about science? Have you read up on all the latest scientific papers? Sure. To prepare. Yes. That was what you told me to read all of the scientific.

All of the papers. Yeah, I mean, if I'm being honest, there's like three that I didn't finish, but I got all, most to all of them. I'm glad you mentioned, because we're going to tell you three stories. Oh, no. And it probably should have read those three. So, but, so, so unexplainable or not, the game we're going to play, it's a game where you have to guess what we know and what we don't. So you're going to hear three stories of scientific mysteries, and you're going to hear them from me. You're going to hear them from Meredith.

Hello. And from Brian. Hey. Once you hear these mysteries, you're going to have a chance to guess which one has actually recently been solved. This week, as part of New York's Climate Week, we're going to be telling you three mysteries all about climate and climate change. And Brian's going to kick it off.

Yes. My mystery is all about plants and a very special thing they do, photosynthesis. Okay. Noam insisted a photo of me with some of my holidays. It's a good photo, right? That, you know, along admired plants in nature, do you,

how do you feel about plants? I'm into them. Cool, cool. That's my generic icebreaker question, you know. But, how many people have you met who are like, not into them? I don't trust him.

I don't like the look of them. You know, people have traumatic experiences with poison ivy or... There's someone who's made a hat that says, like, cancel plants. Well, I think some of the, might be poisonous to cats or something like that.

Oh, yeah, cats hate plants. Yeah, but I'm not a fan of cats. Sure. All right. So to the mystery. It's about photosynthesis. So this is one of the major things that plants do. But one key part of the process is that plants or anything that does photosynthesis,

they take water, H2O, and they split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Yeah. All of our oxygen on Earth comes from this process of photosynthesis, either from plants or algae or a lot of other things that do it. You like breathing? Think a plant. Yes. So it produces oxygen, but it also produces hydrogen.

And scientists really want to know about hydrogen because they want to try to make more of it here on Earth without plants. So hydrogen is also a fuel we can use as clean fuel. So when hydrogen is burned in cars or trucks, It basically generates no emissions. I think water comes out of the tailpipes. And so this is a really attractive option to use instead of fossil fuels. It's the most abundant element in the universe.

So why aren't we using more of it? The problem is hydrogen is often tied up with other things. So in water, H2O, it's very hard to find hydrogen just on its own, which is what we need as a fuel. So there are ways to do this, and they involve, like, a lot of electricity. So scientists are looking at plants because plants seem to do this, no problem. They've been doing this for billions of years. So water enters, like, a tiny, tiny factory inside of the plant cells.

Like, this factory is so tiny. It's, like, on the scale of nanometer. So a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. There's something like 100,000 of them in a single width of a piece of paper. So scientists are trying to peer inside this tiny factory. I talked to a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Then they use these x-ray lasers to, like, try to capture what is happening in this factory. Like, we see the water come in, and we see the hydrogen auction come out.

And they use the x-rays to kind of take these teeny tiny photos. Why not just shrink a person down? Why not? That might be the next mystery. But it's really painstaking work. For one, x-rays really powerful, but also damaging. They kind of damage the cells when they try to peer into this tiny factory. And yet at the airport, we have to go through them all the time.

So I'm told, like, we don't have the full picture of what's going on inside this factory. If we did, scientists hope to take some inspiration from plants and make better ways to make clean fuels like hydrogen. Or we might fully understand how they do it, and Brian is lying. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the whole point in the show. Totally, yeah. Yeah.

The mystery is have scientists figured out how plants split water into hydrogen oxygen or are they still not have the full picture? Sure. What do you think about splitting water? You think we have it? You think we don't? If we can make hydrogen peroxide, then maybe. Yeah? If we can make something.

Yeah. We can probably make other things. Yeah. I'm already nailing this. Amazing. So we got another mystery for you coming from Merritt. again, all about climate. All right.

Hello, hello. Hello. So I have for you tonight the case of the missing carbon. Okay. Every year, billions of tons of carbon disappear without a trace. And scientists are trying to hunt them down. I've talked to these, you know, dedicated scientific detectives, and they are looking for this missing carbon.

So with anything that's missing, you've got to learn a little bit about it to try and find it. So let me introduce you to the carbon cycle. Every year, humans are pumping about 11 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, anywhere from smokestacks or cars, anywhere where we're like burning fossil fuels, goes into the atmosphere. But not all of that carbon stays in the sky. About half, so I'm talking here about like 6 billion tons of carbon, gets sucked up by the Earth.

This happens through chemical reactions with the ocean. It gets absorbed by plants in the land or in the sea. And sometimes it just misses us. It does. It just wants to come back for a hug. Absolutely. And so scientists call these ecosystems carbon sinks. And so these carbon sinks are super important because otherwise climate change would be going a hell of a lot faster than it already is.

So you can think of carbon sinks as a little bit like a buffer, like our safety net against much more extreme climate change. So we want the sink. We want the sink. Okay, gotcha. The sink has been helping us out this whole time. Oh, all right. Yeah.

How do we get more of this carbon dump? Exactly. Yeah. So scientists want to know, like, what are the most important carbon sinks on the planet? So is there some forest out there that is just like particularly good at sucking up carbon or, you know, a patch of the ocean that just has these like carbon sucking superpowers? Right. Yeah.

And also, like, how long are they going to last? Like, there's no guarantee that are special. safety net is going to continue in the future. So the more we can learn about how they work, the more we can understand, like, can we rely on these moving forward? Yeah. It's like figuring out who the carbon influencers are. It's true. Who are they going to follow? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. So to find these sinks, you got to follow the carbon and see where it goes, like ecosystem by ecosystem. And so almost all of the carbon that's being pumped into the atmosphere is coming from the northern hemisphere, like 88%. And that makes sense because it's where a lot of the big,

industrialized countries are. And so when scientists measure the air in this region, they find a lot less carbon than they'd expect. So that leads them to believe there's probably a carbon sink somewhere nearby. So their calculations led them to the boreal forest. These are forests in the high north, north of Russia and Canada, like the tibity top of Sweden. And, and the And so these forests look like particularly good carbon things, like sucking up two and a half billion tons of carbon every year, which is like a huge percentage of what the Earth is sucking in. We wanted to find out, like, why these forests, like what is so special about them? They measured the boreal forest with satellites to see how big it was.

They took soil samples. They like cored trees and buried detectors so that they could see if there was carbon underground. They're looking sometimes literally tree by tree. And as they're searching, they find a little old lady. She's like, do you want to know where the carbon is? Follow me, little kids. Well, they found the little old lady, but they didn't find the carbon. Yeah.

So. And they got turned into soup. Yes, exactly. So basically, there's two and a half billion tons of carbon just missing. There's a gigantic carbon sink somewhere out there, and it's sucking up billions of tons of carbon every year. But we don't know how it works or where that carbon's going. And hopefully we can find it so that we can help protect it, since it's such an essential part of how we are mitigating climate change. Or we've already found it.

We know exactly what's going on. Tricky. Yeah. This is, wow. This is really... And you say if I get this wrong, something terrible is going to happen to my family? And I have to answer these correctly.

That is the plan. Okay, gotcha. All right. You got it. That's fair. So we've got two mysteries so far. We've got how plants are splitting water efficiently into hydrogen and oxygen. And we've got, where's all the missing carbon? Sure.

Those are both about elements. I will continue with a nice pattern completer. And my question is, why Siberia exploding? Did you know that Siberia is exploding? I mean, a moment ago I didn't, but now I have a sense of it is. So here's what's been happening. So in the last, like, decade or so, there's been 20 huge explosions in northern Siberia. So chunks of ice and dirt get, like, thrown up hundreds of feet.

And in their wake, they leave these huge craters. So over 60 feet wide, almost 200 feet deep. You can just see, like, the people walking up there, I mean, I mean, these are enormous things. That is a skateboarder's dream. It is, I don't know if you could get out so easily. You could definitely get down. I don't know that they want to get out.

This is what I've been looking for my whole life. So there were a lot of theories that were presented when these craters started being found. There were missile strikes, asteroids. People put out aliens. What about Thor? Did we have rolled out? He catches it and goes right on the ground.

We need to figure out. We need to figure out. out has Chris Hemsworth? Where is Chris Hemsworth? When these happen, where is Chris Hemsworth at that moment? The case of the missing Chris. Exactly. So they think they're related to climate change. Basically, they think they start with things called pingoes, which are hills that are basically formed by water running underground and pushing up permafrost, frozen ground. Usually, you know, they form over years, decades. They form very slowly. They grow like a couple millimeters a year. And then they sink back down slowly, and you kind of don't notice them.

They're just sort of this like... Pimples. Exactly like pimples. They're earth pimples. And you want your pimples to slowly fade away, right? But something's happening with these pimples, these pingoes, that is causing them to... Let's call them pimples. You want to call them pimples?

What's called them pimples? So something is happening with these pimples. The earth pimples. The earth pimples that's causing them to suddenly explode. And scientists aren't really sure why. They think that gas, is pooling under the frozen ground that's pushing it up. And the more these explode, the more gas will get released.

That's bad for climate change. These explosions are also super dangerous. But scientists don't know exactly why they're suddenly exploding and how to predict them. I talked to two scientists. One of them is in Moscow and sent me this video. His name is Evgeny Chuvilin. And he told me that this part of Siberia has some peculiar features of the landscape. So there's this thick layer of ice that is covering the permafrost.

There's also like pockets of unfrozen ground in between. And then there's these really deep gas and oil deposits. So the ideas are potentially the gas could be coming up through the unfrozen pockets. It could be trapped in the ice itself. And then as the climate is warming, it is escaping from the ice. And then the last one is that there's a bunch of microorganisms living there. And as the ground thaws, they could be breaking down the material. in this sort of recently thawed ground.

But there's still lots we don't know. And it's basically, because these things are really, really hard to find. Pretty soon after they form, they end up flooding with water and becoming a lake. So after a while, they would just look like a lake, right? Because this whole environment, permafrost, there's ice under there. There's just tons of liquid.

And one of the scientists told me this thing that I found really, like, it stuck with me. It's not just about the warming climate. as the climate warms, like these unexpected things start happening. So it's not just that temperatures get hotter and storms get worse, but there's been research that shows that new surprising geological phenomena start happening. So there's been research linking climate change to earthquakes in some cases, to volcanoes in some cases.

The earth is changing in ways we can't predict. And I don't think people would have thought, you know, 20, 30 years ago that we'd suddenly get these enormous 60 by 200 foot craters. potentially due to climate change because of exploding pimples. It's not, I don't think it was on people's radar, and that just shows you how unpredictable climate change can be. So when you're figuring this out would help us potentially get some start on breaking into the unpredictability there.

Or we understand it fully, which is why we have all these really great photos. Like maybe we have solved this. Okay, so that's all three. Some of us are trying to trick you, remember. No, right. We are a sneaky group. I don't know why you would do that.

That seems really cruel to just try to trick a person. Science is all about trickery. That's... I feel like there are some Congresspeople who would love you to testify to that on their behalf. So we've got three mysteries for you. All right. And you're going to have a chance to guess after the break. It's all about you.

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Mystery one. I think there's a fourth mystery. Where is that sound coming from? You all hear it too, right? So, mystery one. No one answered my question. You hear it two, right? I don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, God, not again. So mystery one, how do plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen so efficiently. Mystery two, where is the missing carbon? And mystery three, why are many Siberian pingoes exploding? So without making your final guess, just tell me what you're thinking about. I'm feeling like we maybe have a handle on the hydrogen, oxygen splitting. So, yeah, that one is feeling a little bit like maybe we've got an answer.

Because it's so basic. I mean, I didn't want to say that. It's like an essential process of life on earth. Like, how do we not know about it? So to help you out with your decision, we don't normally have like a live audience when we do this. And I'm wondering what anybody out there thinks. You can feel free to yell it out like Price is Right style.

Wow, that's really helpful, huh? Yeah, that's, I don't know how people do it on the Price's Right. Just like a hundred different. Like, I already had a bunch of answers. my head. Yeah. And now you've just added more. Yeah. Not a helpful crowd. No, it's, I mean, I'm sure they're helpful. They're nice people. They seem nice. Yeah. Yeah. They booed when I asked them to. Yeah, they were very, yeah. And then they were empowered and just booed on their own. They just kept through it. Yeah. It was pretty great. Yeah. So, which one do you think has actually been solved?

How plants split water, where the carbon is, or why so many pingoes are exploding? Uh, because, uh, over your shoulder. there is someone who seems incredibly assured. I'm going to go with the, I'm going with pimples. You think the pimples have been solved? I'm going pimples. Okay, final answer? Is that our final answer?

Oh, now, oh, wow, look at that. The pressure, now you're starting to feel, yeah. It's real, you're real confident until the spotlight's on you. So you're going with pimples. We're going pimples here. All right, let's hear the answer. there was what was referred to as a missing sink, a large sink of CO2 in the north that nobody could find.

I trusted you. How could you? You, with so much assurance, you just, you kept, like, she kept pointing, and she was like, you want, like, there was so much, like, power behind it. And I hope you asked for a raise today and got it, Because you walked in with a full power stance and you tricked me into answering something wrong

and looking like a fool in front of all of my new friends. Apologies to your family. Yeah, no, and I don't get my family back. This is dangerous. Yeah, this weird game show slash taken movie. So it turns out that scientists have found tons of missing carbon, and Meredith is going to tell you exactly how it happened. Absolutely.

So we just heard from Britt Stevens at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Sure, Brit. Yeah. Britt. Yeah. Brit. Britt and his colleagues believe that they have found a billion tons of missing carbon. So to find it, they took to the skies, and here's some video from a recent mission of theirs.

They took small propeller planes and flew up really, really high in the atmosphere, and then dipped lower and lower down to different altitudes, taking air samples as they went. And so this was a huge international collaboration. So samples collected from all over the world over dozens of years. And with all this information, they basically built out this 3D map of carbon in the atmosphere. And with this map, Britt and his colleagues found that previous attempts to find this missing carbon really, underestimated the amount that big storms and winds like churn up the atmosphere. So carbon moves around in the atmosphere much more than we previously realized. So they thought that the missing sink

was up here in the boreal forest because, you know, that's where most of the carbon's being generated in the northern hemisphere. But it turns out that winds come and spread that carbon around and like mix it with the rest of the atmosphere, diluting it across the whole sky. So carbon from northern industrialized countries gets whisked away before local sinks can, like, suck it up. And that carbon might end up traveling, like, thousands of miles away to tropical forests along the equator. Yeah. These tropical forests were once thought to be, like, a huge source of carbon in the atmosphere, mostly due to, like, deforestation and burning. But, thanks in part to Brits' work, we now know that intact tropical forests,

are one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet and potentially getting even better. So tropical forests are actually taking up more carbon than they used to. And this could be because they're being fertilized by the carbon in the atmosphere. So the more carbon in the air, the faster these trees grow. But we can't really ride the tropical forest to salvation from climate change. We don't know how long this carbon sink superpower is going to last.

You know, tropical forests, they're still being cut down, still being burned down, and even the untouched forests are being stressed by climate change. And while this is happening, like, the whole global carbon cycle is changing rapidly, like in complicated ways that we're really just starting to grasp. So Britt and his colleagues are continuing their work. They're mapping the carbon in the atmosphere, hunting down. carbon sinks. And today they're using a private jet rather than the propeller plane. So he told me this is like the most environmentally conscious way to have a private jet is to use it to fight climate

change. Sure. And then occasionally you like go to an island and party with like dust and do. Right. Taking air samples. Where's that carbon going? This plane has to land. Oh, it just happened to land in Mallorca. Oh, no. There's carbon there. Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, they're using it to hunt down carbon sinks and find the rest of this messing carbon because there's still another billion and a half tons out there that we don't know where it is. I guess we both learned something to do. So Wyatt, even though you didn't guess the correct answer. Well, hold on. It's not that I didn't guess it.

We, us. We're all in this together. I mean, I'm looking specifically at one person. I trusted. So even though you didn't get the correct answer, we do have a little consolation prize for you. My own carbon sink? No carbon sink.

It is related to carbon. It is a... A diamond? Ooh. That would be really nice. Everyone, look under your seats. You get a diamond and you get a diamond. You just get some coal

that you get to crush into a diamond. So it's a song and I'm going to go try my best to play it for you. Okay. Oh, we're going to make eye contact. All right. Sound good? Sure, yeah.

Let's do it. Look at me. So I was thinking about all the carbon and how no one really knows where it is and how it's gone missing. And just gave me lots of feelings. What are those feelings? I don't understand. Where the carbon went, I looked in North America and all across Japan, I looked near major cities and I looked under my bed.

But the carbon wasn't there, so I grabbed some tiny planes and flew them to some places that were all so far. I never thought the carbon could have made it, but there's one thing that all of us, the scientists, forgot. forgot. We forgot about the wind and the way the earth spins and how it kind of breathes in and out and blends the air from north and south and mixes it together. It's basically the weather and we forgot about the weather. We forgot about the weather. I mean we knew weather existed but not how carbon exactly got mixed up in the air and

got transported to the tropical rainforest so it's quicker, at least for me as the singer, to say, We forgot about the weather, we forgot about the weather, we forgot about the weather, we forgot about the weather, don't forget about the weather. Very nice work, so very nice work. All right. And now you each have a song as well?

We've prepared a interpretive dance. All right. Okay. Well, let's get to it. You're ever going to forget about the weather? No. Good. Yeah.

You got the message. Yes. Yeah. It works. Yeah. So what do you think of all the mysteries? Are you glad we found a whole bunch of missing carbon? Do you want us to figure out plants and pingoes?

I do want the plant. and the pingoes to get figured out. Yeah, I mean, the plants one, come on. I am told that they are very close. Like, the scientists said, like, three years, but he knows. But then he's also told me he's been working on this since the 1980s, so maybe he's been doing that for a while. I don't know. But they came, they've come a long way. Not long enough. Let me talk to your plant person. I'll send you his email. Dear plant guy, you don't know me, but. Figure it out. Sincerely, a guy who used to be on TV.

With that final word, that's it for Unexplainable or Not. Thank you to Wyatt Sennak and to our presenters, Meredith Hadanat and Brian Resnick. Thank you to our audience for joining. We just released our 100th episode yesterday on our podcast.

We really hope It doesn't take us till our 200th to do another one with all of you in the room. This was so much fun to do this with a live audience. And that's it for Unexplainable or Not. This episode was reported and produced by Meredith Hodnott, Brian Resnick, and me, Noam Hassanfeld. I did the music. Christian A. A. A. A. A. A.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.O.A.O.S.O.O.S. Sorena. Manding W. M. Mandewing has spent a bunch of time listening to Bob Marley and the Whalers recently.

and Bird Pinkerton listened intently to the octopus. Birds and octopuses have been at war for generations. The birds started this war because they can't stand our octopus beaks. But our beaks are part of who we are. Thanks so much to Wyatt Senac for joining our live show. If you've somehow missed his excellent show's problem areas with Wyatt Senac on HBO or AKA Wyatt Senac on topic, go check him out. You won't regret it.

Special thanks this week to Sue Natali and Vitale Chandra. Thanks also to everyone at Vox and the Green Space who made our live show happen. So thank you to Liz Nelson, Lauren Katz, Melissa Bell, Sarah Frank, Catherine Wells, Benji Jones, Brian Walsh, Amber Wright, Ricardo Fernandez, Chase Colpon, and Live Nazaire. If you're ever looking for transcripts of our episodes, you can find those at Vox.com slash unexplainable. And if you have thoughts about the show or ideas for episodes, please email us. We're at Unexplanable at Vox.com. This podcast, and all of Vox, is free, in part because of gifts from our readers and our listeners. You can go to Vox.com slash give to give today.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week, but we'll be back in your feed on October 18th.