Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:08] Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 772 for June 26, 2023, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. One of the joys of traveling with the university alumni program is that your trips include lectures by professors in a variety of interesting subjects. One of my favorite people to learn from on our trip to Antarctica was Professor Jason Briner. He's a professor of geology who studies Arctic environmental change at the University of Buffalo. I am very pleased to introduce Dr. Briner to you today. Welcome to Welcome to the show, Jason. Hi, Alison.
Thanks for having me. Hey, we had fun hanging out with penguins, right?
Yeah, that was a blast. That was enough penguins. What did they say, 40,000 on one beach?
I wasn't going to stand there and count them, that's for sure.
Well, while we were in Antarctica, you gave a fascinating talk about your research work in Greenland.
And when we were working on when to schedule this conversation, you said, you know what, I'm about to go again. So I think it'd be even more fun if you talk to me right when I get back.
So I'm just gonna open up the doors and let you roll. Why do you go to Greenland and what happens when you get there?
[1:16] Yeah, well, the Greenland ice sheet's a pretty important component of the Earth's climate system.
Of course, everybody these days is well aware of climate change and global warming and sea level rise.
And globally, one of the biggest contributors to sea level change, currently that sea level rise, is melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
So I'm part of a giant fleet of scientists that are studying the Greenland ice sheet and how it's responding to climate change and how it's contributing to sea level.
So like there's people who study the ice from space, there's people who study the ice from airplanes, there's people who study the ice from a boat, looking at it, calving and making glaciers.
And there's people who study how it's changing today. And there's people who study how it's changed in the past and trying to link that all together.
So I'm like, one, I bring like one kind of science to the big problem of Greenland melt.
So explain what an ice sheet is, separate from other kinds of ice.
And you talked about that some on the trip.
Yeah, an ice sheet is a type of glacier. So you've heard of a glacier And glaciers can exist in a variety of sizes.
They can be small glaciers, like the ones you might envision in Alaska.
[2:36] And then our planet has two ice sheets, basically the biggest category of glacier, something that we consider sort of like a continent in scale or nearing continent in size.
And the two ice sheets we have on the planet are the Antarctic ice sheet, which sits on the Antarctic continent.
And then in the Northern Hemisphere, we have the Greenland ice sheet, which sits on the island of Greenland, which is part of the North American continent in this case.
And these glaciers are significant because they...
[3:05] They form on land in cold areas that receive a lot of snowfall, and then that snowfall doesn't melt off the following summer.
[3:15] And so, in polar areas of the planet, you have these conditions where the snowfall builds and builds and builds and builds and forms glaciers, and then they like flow downhill or calve off icebergs into the ocean, and then they melt.
But in any case, it's the poles where these things exist.
And Greenland is the one in the northern hemisphere sitting on the island of Greenland.
It's three kilometers thick.
And if it were all to melt, it would raise global sea levels by like 24 feet.
Oh, jeez. OK, OK, that gives me scale. I can't picture it in width or length.
But when you say 24 feet, if the entire thing melted.
OK, so we don't want that to happen.
We do not. OK. I'm definitely not 20. I don't think we're 24 feet above sea level.
We might be, but that's tough. So yeah.
And the thing about that is it's like you don't want it to go away.
But even like minor oscillations of that ice sheet have a big impact on global sea level change.
Like even a foot, of course, is really significant. And that's just Greenland.
So if the planet is doing something crazy enough, to get a foot of sea level rise out of Greenland, then it's also doing something crazy on the other glaciers, on the Antarctic ice sheet and these other components that also lead to sea level rise.
Right, right, okay.
[4:34] So you go to, I've seen photos, and I've got a link in the show notes to Jason's galleries about showing his trips to Greenland and to Alaska.
And this is not that you go check into a Marriott when you get there.
This is, describe what it's like going there.
[4:54] Right. Usually, the style of research I do, where we want our samples from and the parts of the Arctic that we want to study, the parts of Greenland that we want to study aren't in like the towns there. They're in a remote part of the landscape or on the ice sheet, where there's no infrastructure and people don't typically go.
So these are areas we've identified that have scientific importance.
So I might go with a colleague from another university, I might bring along a couple of graduate students, maybe an undergraduate student.
So it's basically like a couple professors and a few students getting flown in to some remote location in a float plane or a helicopter, maybe a plane on skis, and they kick us out into the tundra or on the ice in all our duffel bags and we basically create our camp, a remote camp on the spot.
So we have all the food we need with us for the next whatever weeks, we have tents, and, we have our scientific equipment that's going to allow us to conduct our studies or collect our samples.
In your talk in Antarctica, you said that you love that first feeling of being completely disconnected.
[6:16] Why is that? What? Yeah, I think that, you know, this, this noise that we're surrounded by in our daily lives these days with social media and just plugged in digitally, email on my phone.
It's really quite amazing to be dropped off in this location and in the last thing you, sort of hear sense of civilization is the plane engines cranking up and then like flying away.
[6:48] Until you can't hear it anymore. And that's like, that's like literally the, the plug unplugging from the outlet, this thing going away. And then you're there and it's quiet. And your life becomes quite simple. You know, I also have young kids at home. And so there's, there's all these elements of how life goes from complicated, or there's just the number of things you think about in a day is vast, to maybe there's three or four things you need to think. Your life boils down to some.
[7:18] Few things, some few simple things. Wow. You know, when you describe it as being remote, I could kind of picture it, but then when I looked at your photos, oh my gosh, it's remote. I mean, the great wide-angle shots that you have that just show nothing but white, and then these little bitty tense way off in the background of you guys working. So let's get into the, research of what is it you're doing when you're there? Like on this most recent trip, what were you studying? How do you go about it? Okay, so I'm just back from Greenland a couple of weeks ago and I was there for about a month.
And I was part of a project that we call green drill. So this is drilling through the Greenland ice sheet, and in particular this, this kind of drilling or why we want to drill to the Greenland ice sheet relates to trying to get samples of the, of the crust, the earth's crust, the surface of the earth, the rocks and stuff that are buried by the ice sheet.
[8:21] And so, basically, some recent headway in scientific progress has resulted in some really interesting new insights about ice sheet sensitivity to climate change in terms of ice sheet history, like how long have these ice sheets been on the planet.
Planet, how often do they grow and shrink? We know that if we look to the Earth's past, and we look at temperature, temperature changes a lot up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. And this is the ice age cycles that you might have heard about.
And what we realize is that the Greenland ice sheet actually grew and shrank a lot in these ice age cycles under natural climate variability in Earth history.
That's before we were here. It was happening. Before we were here, yeah, I mean, you know, our ancestors were here, but before modern civilization.
Okay. The ice sheets are pulsing as climate is naturally pulsing.
[9:18] But we didn't know really how much. And it turns out when we started to analyze, we got this really special sample from the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, it was almost collected by accident.
And I was part of a team that made some analysis on these rock samples below three kilometers of ice.
And the analysis of those rock samples from way down there and this is like, this is almost as rare as getting a moon rock like there's no other.
No one gets a rock from below the middle of an ice sheet like it just hardly ever happens and so this sample was so precious.
Like I said, almost planted by accident so we finally measured it, and it told us that that ice sheet, a huge ice sheet that locks away 24 feet of sea level change, was gone.
Not that long ago, like sometime within the last million years, maybe even more recent than that. And this really- What do you mean by gone? What do you mean it was gone?
[10:15] Well, well, below its thickest part, the rock sample told us it had no ice over it as recently as sometime in the last million years.
So you're saying there's a pocket of something above the Earth when you got down there?
The ice sheet is covering the sample now, but the chemistry of the sample told us it, was exposed to basically daylight.
Oh, as in no ice sheet at all? in order to be exposed to the sky, you can't have the ice sheet there.
[10:52] And that wasn't that long ago. And it wasn't that long ago, and the Earth was in the middle of this Ice Age period.
And so we're like, why did the whole thing disappear?
You know, this recently in the geologic past, the scientific community at that point was like, it probably grew several million years ago when the Ice Age started.
And oscillated, it pulsed, but it never went to zero. Right. We wonder now if it actually goes to zero more frequently than we previously thought.
So back to this green drill project. So now this research is now intentionally putting holes in the Greenland ice sheet to just like stick a needle down and like we're taking a biopsy of the bed of the ice sheet. We're trying to drill through the ice and pluck up a piece of rock from from below the ice, so if we can ask it the same question, when's the last time you saw the sky?
[11:53] And this will give us more information about these oscillations of the ice sheet.
Does it really like go away periodically? Was it really gone recently?
And that's what we're trying to address. So is that to verify the results of the first accidental test?
Yes, to verify those results. Because your first thing is you've got to assume you either made a mistake, or this is something Andrea just said, You either made a mistake or you've discovered something and you need to know which one it is.
Yes.
[12:22] Geology is tough that way. It's not what we call experimental science.
It's not necessarily like lab science. You can't just set up another experiment and redo it.
Right, right.
So what geologists- There's no control variable or control system you can set up, yeah.
It just doesn't really work like that.
So geologists are like Sherlock Holmes is scouring the earth, trying to sniff up clues and make interpretations about earth history.
So in this case, we need to go sniff up more clues. We need more data.
And it's not going to be a yet anyway. It's not going to be an exact replication of this first accidental finding.
But we're trying to build on that to see if we can confirm, add, grow, build on that study to learn more about the problem.
So is it a dumb question to ask? Could it have just been a hole in it there, but you take a sample someplace else in this giant ice sheet and you don't find that result?
Could they sort of both be true?
That there was a hole in it, but it wasn't gone?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a dumb question at all.
[13:30] And this, therein lies the problem. This first accidental sample I'm referring to was some rock collected at the bottom of one of the long ice cores, really famous ice cores to tell us a lot about the climate history of the planet.
The diameter of the ice core and of the rock that was accidentally collected below the ice core is like as big as a tennis ball. It's like the diameter of a tennis ball that you cut in half.
So really is that biopsy?
It is. And you have this entire Greenland ice sheet. Oh, and we have one sample that's only this big. So your question, what we really how we try to tackle that is with like models, computer models that try to mathematically simulate the Greenland ice sheet.
And those models say that if there was no ice at our little tennis ball location, then, probably that means that the ice sheet had to have really, if not completely gone away, like 95% gone away.
Okay. Okay. Well, it would be a whole discussion separate from this, but it makes me want to go, okay, How do you write these models?
How did you figure out how to do that? But that's probably a whole other discussion.
It's a huge discipline within climate science. It's these same models that predict future sea level rise.
[14:53] You can't do that without having a whole research lab devoted to running fancy supercomputer models of ice sheets oscillating through time and how they get impacted by climate.
Because in those models, you need to have the physics of how glaciers flow, you need, to understand that when the atmosphere is this temperature, that means this much melt.
So this is a discipline in earth science, this kind of glacier ice sheet modeling.
I like learning this stuff from you because my entire view of what a geologist is, is the geologist on Big Bang Theory.
And I know you said you hadn't seen him, but he's just this big, slow-moving, boring guy.
Like you can't breathe, he's so boring.
And it's like, that's what a geologist is. And it's obviously nothing like that, but learning about all these different fields that you could go into as a geologist doing the computer science of it, that's cool too.
But I was really struck by some of the photos that it appears to be, you're part mechanic when you're working on the ice sheet because the drills and stuff, there's some really great photos up close.
I'm a mechanical engineer, I can't help myself. I was really excited by looking at the drills and the equipment.
Describe the process. How do you drill holes in an ice sheet?
[16:10] Yeah, so I'll start with the answer to that question by relating it to what you were talking about, the iconic geologist, and what geology, what my definition of geology is, or the way I would characterize it are, it's as a field, geology or earth science is maybe a more modern lingo buzzword to describe it, is by definition interdisciplinary.
It's you're integrating physics and math and chemistry, archaeology, paleontology, volcano studies.
In order to understand a process on Earth, you might need to rely on some computer science.
You need to go out in the field and do fieldwork. You need to collect data. You need to do data analysis.
And all these processes, understanding of how it works requires fundamental knowledge in physics and math and chemistry.
And now going forward to talking about this drilling.
[17:14] So like I might bring a particular expertise to this project, but I'm not a mechanical engineer.
I don't know how a drill operates.
So we partner with, we collaborate with mechanical engineers who are professional drillers.
And they're the ones who will collect ice cores for climate studies.
And the drillers that we hooked up with have expertise in drilling through the ice, but they're not interested in the ice. They're interested in then going into the rock below the ice.
So it's this program of drillers called the Ice Drilling Program, USIDP, Ice Drilling Program.
And they're the group of people that gets the contract from the US National Science Foundation to support scientists like me in their pursuits to get a sample to study.
So we partner with this engineering group.
[18:14] So we partner with this engineering group, the Ice Drilling Program, and they send drillers with us, the scientists, we all go to the remote corner of Greenland, and we work together to get our samples.
Okay. Now, it's intriguing to me that you're talking about drilling just down to the earth.
When we were on the trip, you talked about doing a core, which is you're pulling a cylinder out.
Are you not pulling a cylinder out now? You're just going, I'm just going all the way down?
Right. So this first sample that I talked about earlier, what that was accidental to get to the bottom of the ice sheet took like three or four drilling seasons. Oh, wow. They were collecting, they were collecting ice cores, right? You can imagine here we are, uh, society on earth, kind of freaking out about some sea level rise. And we want to go build on this first study to try to learn a lot more information about the Greenland ice sheet.
We don't have time to sit on the ice sheet and drill for three years before we get our sample. We need to speedily get down to the bottom and get our sample out.
And in order to do that, you need to not collect ice core as you go.
You need to just basically auger through, make ice chips and flush those ice chips out to the surface and then keep drilling and try to get to the bed as fast as possible.
So this is like two miles though, right?
[19:43] In our case, we use drills that are good at like, let's see, so the site, our main site that we drilled this spring that I just came back from was 500 meters.
[20:01] I'm an ugly American, I'm typing 500 meters. Go for it. 1,600 feet.
Okay, type 509 meters. 509? Yeah.
Yeah. 1669. Oh, that's only 12 feet.
[20:16] Oh, that's about 1,700 feet. Quarter mile or something, 1,700 feet.
Yeah. So that was the thickness of ice at this site. So the drill technology we're using, we need to fit it into an airplane.
Actually a lot of different trips on that airplane. And we need to get it out to some remote corner of Greenland, and we need to drill through of the ice and then we need to get it all back out all in one season.
So that limits how thick you can go through. So the kilometers, the ice sheet is three kilometers at its thickest.
We went to a site that's time in a meter. So we're maybe about 1700 feet thick.
And so that was our drill site. We went through 1700 feet of ice.
Geez. That's still, and we, it took a long time and we, we drilled, these drillers are so amazing. Like, it's just incredible, the skillset of these drillers.
It turns out my view is that mechanical engineers, you included, you guys are like professional problem solvers.
This is everyone. You're all MacGyvers. Like, it's not so much that, you know, how to use a piece of equipment that you know how to fix it, or, you know, how to like tweak it to do what you want.
It's like, it goes way beyond just like getting a tool and using it.
It's every day, almost every hour, problem-solving along the way and always making constant improvements or debugging something.
[21:42] For these drillers to get this thing to work the way they did was just absolutely astonishing.
I'm picturing Ben Affleck and his team in the movie Armageddon that can drill anything and they can solve all the problems.
That's what these guys were. By the way, that's a favorite movie of these rock thrillers.
Is it really? Oh, yeah.
I've had quotes from it the whole time. I like it. So you mentioned when we were arranging, when we were going to talk, you said this trip was challenging.
So what went wrong?
Okay.
[22:19] There were quite a few headaches. I would put those in two categories. One is weather. We had really crummy weather.
We had a lot of blowing snow, a lot of high winds, a lot of ground blizzard conditions.
I was at, we actually did two drill sites, one at 509 meters and one at 97 meters or like 300 feet.
And I spent my time at this 300 foot ice thickness site where we were using a drill.
[22:51] And at our camp where I was, we were getting like 60 mile an hour winds.
And mind you, we're in tents on the surface of a glacier, on a downward sloping glacier.
And these winds are blasting off the glacier. There's nothing blocking the wind from you at all.
There's no trees. There's nothing.
Yeah, exactly. So it was, I mean, that's, that's as extreme as it got, but just even like standard 20, 30 mile an hour winds with all that blowing snow means it's not only uncomfortable to work, but the power supply for the drills are generators, gasoline driven generators, and they don't like blowing snow.
So if there's blowing snow, you basically clog up the generator and it dies or you can't use it. So at both drill sites, the reliance on generators meant that any time the wind was really blowing, we had to not do operations.
So the first of two major challenges this season was the weather.
We had a lot of blowing snow.
So we could only work maybe like half the days we were there.
So that really cut down at the time to get the job done in the time window that we had.
[23:58] The second challenge was more technological. So this drill that got us through 1700 feet of ice, the previous, it had only been successfully used once before to go through a glacier, that was Antarctica, and it went through about 500 meters of ice.
Okay.
[24:20] Not 500 meters, sorry, 500 feet. Okay.
So we're basically more than tripled the depth of ice that this drill went through.
So in this new territory of these great depths, there's just new problems that arise that the engineers need to problem-solve solutions for.
One of the things that you need to do, remember how I said that the drill goes down and it makes ice chips.
If you didn't get rid of those ice chips, the hole would just clog with ice chips.
You need to remove all the ice that you're drilling, you need to flush it out of the hole, and that's done with pressurized drilling fluid.
[25:03] So you basically have a constant circulation of fluid. You have a pump on top, you're pushing a fluid down the hole, maybe all these rods that go down that their drill bit is on the bottom of, they're hollow.
Oh, so the simple way to think of it is that the fluid goes down the middle of all these rods and then flushes out the bottom of the drill bit and then runs back up the outside of the drill rod pipe up to the surface where the fluid is re-collected.
So there's a simple pressure at the top drilling fluid circulation.
Simple.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Simple in concept, but not in practice. Okay.
Problem with pressurized fluid down the hole, at some point, that pressure could theoretically get high enough that you can hydro fracture the ice.
Oh.
[25:57] And if the pressure is so high that you fracture the ice column that you're creating as you go down the borehole, you make a crack in the glacier, and away goes your drilling fluid.
And you can no longer drive those chips up to the surface and then you can get clogging.
So what makes the pressure go up?
Just because of the head? How far down you've gone? Yes, correct. And the amount of pressure you need to flush those ice chips all the way back up to the surface of a very, very long hole. Right.
[26:30] So it turned out that we drilled to 370 meters and then the hole got a fracture in it. 370 feet or meter?
This was meters. So whatever that is in feet. So, remember, we eventually got to 509 meters, and at 370 meters, on our way down, before we got there, the hull fracked.
And we lost all our drilling fluid, or up to a certain level.
Can you even get the drill back out at that point?
So the drill itself was still bathed in this drilling fluid, which can't be water because that would freeze. It's a purified kerosene kind of thing. That's collected in the hole in the glacier and the drilling bit is still bathed in this drilling fluid and it's up higher than it leaked out.
So when that happened, we basically thought the show was over. That we would have had all these resources and all this effort out on the glacier and we weren't going to get our sample.
Mind you, this is like...
[27:50] This is 60,000 pounds of equipment we had to fly onto the ice sheet.
Right. We had about 12 people out there.
We had this mini tent city you can see in some of these photographs on my gallery.
It's a pretty sizable encampment. This is a pretty big operation, especially relative to what I'm used to, which is a couple of professors and their grad students.
This is like a pretty big operation.
Right. For what a lot of this kind of work is.
And you're only able to work every other half of the days because of the weather.
Half of the days because of weather, and then this thing happens.
And then this thing happens, and it's like, well, we only have like a week and a half left before the planes coming back to start shuttling us off the glacier.
So, there was one thing that we could try, which is to pull everything out of the hole, and okay, maybe I need to back up.
[28:55] The surface of a glacier is snow. And eventually at some depth that snow gets compacted into ice.
That's how like most glaciers are.
[29:08] In the snow part of the glacier, the top part, you can't make a hole and circulate fluid through it, the fluid would just leak into the snowpack.
So the top part of the hole you need to line with hollow metal rods called casing, like, really like wide, just like a metal pipe, like a picture like a plumbing pipe that's, Like an irrigation pipe in a farm field in California.
The top of the hole is lined with this metal piping that we call casing.
And the casing comes down, it goes both through the snow part of the glacier.
And once we get into the ice density range, then we can just drill a hole into the glacier ice itself.
Makes sense. The junction between the cased part of the hole, that where the casing is, and the ice part of the hole, is the specialized coupler that couples the cased part of the hole with the uncased part of the hole called a packer.
And the packer is basically like it's an elongated intertube.
So it's like this long thing that's rubber and you stick it down there and then a little hose goes to the surface and you inflate it and it goes.
[30:26] And it sticks it into place.
And the casing screws into the top of that.
And then below that, it opens up to just the ice hole. Got it.
So, okay. So it turned out this Packer was about where this fracture took place.
So what they thought was that if they pull all this casing rod out and the Packer out, and then re-drill the hole that the casing slides into, they re-drill that hole to a deeper level in the glacier column.
Then the casing gets to go lower or the Packer gets to go lower?
Yes, exactly. put the casing lower and cover up that old tube which had to be tiled.
So that's what they did and it worked. Oh my god. But it took them like a week to do it because they had to do all this incredible manual labor to pull everything out, put everything back in, re-drill it, reset the packer, re-put the casing in.
So like a week or something later, meanwhile there you can't work a couple of days because there's bad weather, you're looking at your watch, you're you're like, oh my God, the plane's coming any day.
So they put all that infrastructure back in.
And then after a few more problem solving steps, they hit the bed at 509 meters.
Wow. Planes come in the next day.
[31:49] Then a storm comes in. Planes not coming the next day. Yay.
Storm and yay. Storm ends at like 5pm.
They all go into the drill tent and drill like crazy. So the other thing is once they drill through the ice column and they hit the bed, they need to pull everything up and put a new bit on the bottom.
Because they got to go pick this stuff up.
Yes, not only, yes, because now you're going from not collecting any core to collecting core, and you need a new bit that's, the first bit is just remember it's, all that needs to do is chip out ice. Now we need to drill in rocks, so we need to change the bits from an ice bit to a rock bit, and we need to put in this particular tube that collects, that is designed to collect the rock as we drill into it.
5pm, storm abates, they all run out to the tent, they work all night long, they collect 7.5 meters, so like 25 feet of core material, like a 25 foot tall core, and implements, they pull it up.
[33:03] And then the sleep like twenty four hours in the plane starts coming and showing people of the eyes oh my god i'm sorry but i can't stop having the analogies to armageddon you know i'm thinking no we got fifteen more seconds before the new blues you know we can't hear it comes comes the plane we gotta get it.
[33:22] Wow it was stressful.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It was tense.
And these drillers, you know, not only are they professional problem solvers, and like they just made this happen, but they have a tremendous amount of pressure on their shoulders. Right?
Like, yeah. Dedication. All the resources. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's never a given, right? It's never a gimme that you're going to go out there, you know, it just hasn't been done that often. like some like surgery that's so routine that it's just a no-brainer that it's going to happen.
Like this is really at the cutting edge. Like I said, this is the first time this drill has been used, first time it's ever been used on Greenland.
It was used through an ice thickness three times more than the previous time it was used.
And so it's really at the leading edge and these drillers need to acknowledge that success isn't a gimme.
Yeah, definitely. Can I ask a really obnoxious question? What are you and your team doing during this?
So you guys play poker while these guys are drilling?
What were you doing? No, no, this is a great question, actually.
So, like I said, we had two drill camps, and I myself was down at the drill camp closer to the edge of the ice sheet where we were getting these windstorms coming down the glacier.
And our drill was a smaller drill and it was designed to go through, while we went through 300 feet of ice.
[34:49] That actually required all hands on deck because every time we were going into the bed below our 300 feet of ice, it turns out we would go, we would get a piece of the core like 10 centimeters at a time and pull it up.
Okay. We eventually, from the camp I was at with this 300 foot drill, we got 6 feet of a rock core.
But it came out in like 6 inch increments.
Every time it came out, we had to put rod 300 feet down a hole.
So these are like five foot rod sections.
They screw together.
[35:28] So you're screwing together five foot rod to another five foot rod, dropping it down the hole, screwing another one on top, dropping it down the hole, screwing another one on top, repeat, repeat, repeat until you get to 300 feet, then you drill and you're like, Oh, I think we got six inches.
Oh, now the drill got stuck. Can't get any more. Okay. Pull it up.
Five feet, five feet, five feet, five feet, five, 300 feet, you're pulling it all out and you take your little baby core out and put it in the box and then you go repeat and do that again.
So the drill camp I was at, not only were the drillers busy, I was busy, my graduate student was busy, we were all really busy. It was a lot of manual labor.
Up at the 1700 foot camp, the drill was a bit more mechanized and the drillers there were a little bit more separate from the professor who was there, the graduate student who was there and so on. But it turns out that that's a huge camp that needs to be maintained. And Here's one example.
I talked about these windstorms.
[36:35] It turns out that if you're on the ice sheet and there's nothing else on the ice sheet and the wind blows really hard the snow just keeps blowing and the surface of the ice sheet doesn't change from before the storm to after the storm if you put an obstacle on a flat ice sheet surface and you blow snow against it you're going to get a huge carving out on the upwind side a scour like an eddy pool and on the downwind side you get a huge snow drift. Now picture not one obstacle on the surface of a glacier with a lot of wind but what 15 different tents and like equipment and barrels of fuel and barrels of gas and generators. The whole camp had these ginormous snow drifts everywhere. Then the next storm the wind might change direction and the wind comes from another direction. So now he has huge snow drifts in this other direction. So basically, it was a full-time job to be constantly digging out the tents after each one of these snow storms.
You don't tell grad students this stuff beforehand, right?
[37:46] You don't have carpal tunnel from making these connections and being...
And how strong is your back?
Exactly. Wow. Wow. So, there's a lot to do to maintain a camp that even if you're not in the drill tent helping the engineers as the science team, you're maintaining camp.
Wow. That is... I'm just baffled at how you get anybody to agree to go do this, but I bet it's an honor to get to go do it.
[38:17] Yeah, you know, the kinds of people that are attracted to this discipline or this kind of science are those folks who are interested in this kind of adventure.
Yeah. Yeah. The, um, that's interesting. So the total length of time that you were there this time, you said it was a month?
I was there for a month. The team, the whole team was there for basically two months.
There was a week or two, two-ish weeks in the beginning of the field season when we were sorting through all our equipment, staging what's going to go with what plane load, and getting everybody and all the equipment shuttled onto the glacier. That was a couple of week period and there was about a week-ish or more period at the end where things were were like shuttling off. And so time spent on the ice by anybody was probably like, seven or eight weeks. And then various people kind of came and went during that overall period. And I was one of the people that kind of came and went I, I came in after everything was put on the ice. And then my objective was to work with a subset of the drill team, and we got deployed the second drill site. And then when that job ended and we went back up to the top.
[39:44] That was about when they were really struggling to know if they were going to get it or not.
I shuttled off and came back to NARA at that point. And then they did a bunch of problem solving and that's when they later then got that 25 foot long core from the bottom. That's crazy. So as a scientist, what kind of science are you doing while you're there? Or is it really mostly the manual labor of making things go? It's mostly a sample collection mission. Okay. So we're collecting, the goal is basically to collect samples. Those samples we analyze back home.
Most of the science we do is after the field season when we have these samples back in our labs.
Okay, so how important is it to you to be there and experience it as part of what you're doing?
[40:38] Yeah, I mean, there's maybe two reasons why we would go. One is so we can appreciate what is all involved.
But the other reason is that there are decisions to be made about how the sampling is going and should we go further to get the sample or not, and these are decisions that are best made in the field when you're part of a team?
When the sample's coming out, do you need somebody to catalog it?
You need somebody to maybe like sort of like log it as it's coming out?
Or are we... It would be important to keep those in order, probably.
Keep it all in order, yeah. So when we have this 25-foot long core, it doesn't all come up in one big long 25-foot straw. It comes up in chunks. And so we've got to be really systematic how we catalog all that.
This is amazing. It's just stuff that I don't know anything about and I love learning new things that I don't know anything about. And the importance of the work you're doing, obviously there isn't anything more important to the world than what you guys are working on. That's really astonishing.
[41:41] Yeah, that's nice of you to say. I think the, I mean, the climate change issue is, we know a lot more about it than we did. I think a lot of the, a lot of the challenges we face as a society is on the action side. But certainly, there's still some questions on the science side as well. One of the things that really struck me on the trip, everybody on this trip that we were on was from some university somewhere. And one of the things I love about that is anybody you sit down next to, no matter where you have anything in common in life with, they're interesting and interested. Everybody was talking and telling stories and listening to each other, and it was really great. You did a talk about the core sampling done in Antarctica into the ice sheet there, and you explained how through the core sample, they were able to find pockets of air going back.
[42:41] How many, I want to say 800,000 years?
Nice. There you go. Exactly. I'm really bad at remembering numbers like that, especially the scale, I get it wrong all the time.
But so they were able to go back 800,000 years and look at the air samples over time, and they could measure the CO2 and methane in those pockets of air over time.
And that's how we get those nice cyclical graphs you can see where people say, look, it's not humans, because look, it's doing this nice little cycle. You see it happens all the time.
But the graph as it goes to when industrialized society starts, suddenly the scale of CO2 and methane is off the charts in height.
It's nothing like the natural characteristics you saw before that.
And I'd seen that graph before, but I hadn't heard it as well described as the way you described it.
The fact that I can repeat it since you explained it really well.
[43:34] I sat down with somebody at lunch right after hearing you talk, and I said, wow, that was really amazing. I mean, incontrovertible evidence of human-created climate change. And the person I was talking to was an engineer, and his answer back to me was, yeah, but I'm going to need to see the data. And I couldn't speak for a minute because I couldn't think of any answer other than that was the data. You just saw the data. The data is what you just saw. What is wrong with you? How can you stand it? Because I'm sure you get this more than I've ever heard it. How do you even respond to something like that?
[44:14] Yeah, it can be tough. Yeah, the data. I like to see the data.
Just show it to me. Do you want to see it again?
It's a real shame that something that is 100% scientific, grounded in science, has been hijacked as a political tool to bend people into their political parties.
This is what politicians do, is they choose a topic, polarize it to try to garner the votes into their camp.
And it's a real shame that that happened to climate.
And I start by saying that because.
Because in some ways there's some people that you can have a conversation with and you'll get somewhere and there's others that you won't and, I think it's a little bit sad, but in in in my experience so far.
[45:17] Maybe it sounds like a little bad to just say I've given up but like there's certain people no matter what you say They'll come back with The but or the sound bites that they heard somewhere and it's just you can tell you're not getting in and you might never get in, What is what is that phrase about something? It ends up annoying the pig and you get all muddy, you don't get anywhere with it the.
[45:41] The thing I always think about with a subject like exactly what we're talking about is what, possible motivation would anybody have have to get everybody all excited about this if it wasn't real.
You know, there's no motivation. There's motivation on the other side to say it's not real because we can make a bunch of money drilling oil and burning up dead dinosaurs and ruining the atmosphere.
There is motivation on the other side. There's no motivation to creating panic or fear or worry other than we need to fix this.
There is no other reason to do it.
It's not like a hobby. Yeah, my favorite one is that the professors are in it for the money.
Grants and billions of dollars that go straight into our personal pockets, you know, it has to be that.
Yeah, yeah. Obviously, yeah. That's what I've always heard professors make, make just huge amounts of money.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably the biggest problem in society.
Well, I think this has been really, really interesting and I love talking to you about this.
Maybe when you learn more about what you found, you could come back and tell us about it.
I would love to hear what you found in seven and a half feet of core of the earth from underneath the Iceland ice sheet. but it's just fantastic.
[47:00] Yeah, it's definitely something we're really excited that we have these samples and yeah, I mean, we're just like jumping into our labs right now to try to analyze it.
Yeah, go science everything now.
Yeah, we got a science that blanked out of it. All right, again, you are from the University of Buffalo and we've got a link to your website where everybody can look at these pictures and really appreciate the work that you're doing here. Thank you so much for coming on. This was just such a joy.
[47:29] Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pondlight. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported, it's supported by you. If you learned something, or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the Podfeet podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeet.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're going to find different ways to contribute. If you'd like to do a one-time donation, you can click the PayPal button. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the weekly Patreon button.
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[48:34] Music.