Episode Transcript
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Right on Radio. I'm Eric and on tonight's program, Josh talks with Neil Shubin about his new book, Ends of the Journeys to the Polar Regions In Search of Life, the Cosmos and Our Future. Ends of the Earth reveals the polar regions as never before. Meeting with the leading scientists working in these extremes, Neil Shubin presents the compelling new science of the Arctic and Antarctic with characteristic verb and expertise. All of this and more. So stay tuned to write on radio.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: For the first part of the hour, I'll be talking with paleontologist, evolutionary biologist discover of the missing link between fish and land animals called the Tiktaalik. And popular science writer Neil Shubin about his latest book, Ends of the Earth Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos and Our Future. Neil is the best selling author of youf Inner the Universe within and Some Assembly Required. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. Neil, welcome back to Right on Radio.
[00:01:42] Speaker C: Great. Well, thanks for having me this evening.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: My first question. So, funnily enough, my initial exposure to Tiktaalik was a few years ago through memes where people had images of Tiktaalik with texts complaining that they had to go to work because 375 million years ago this jerk decided to come on land. I was curious to know how often you get complaints about Tiktaalik following your discovery.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: I'd get lots of emails, I'd get lots of memes sent to me on Twitter and so forth. I just laughed so hard. How many times do you find a fossil that becomes a meme? Right.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: So let's go into your book. You describe your early expedition to Greenland in 1988 as a novice among veteran paleontologists. How did that experience shape your approach to future research in extreme environments?
[00:02:34] Speaker C: It shaped me as a scientist. It shaped me as a human. It's really, I mean, it's almost four decades of work in the Arctic and Antarctica.
That's what it set off. You know, it set off almost a lifetime of working in these polar regions and these polar regions. And science of the polar regions changes the way we see the world. It's changed the way I see myself. It's changed the way I see humanity. I changed the way I see our place in nature. And it changes the way you see the planet and the cosmos. It really is very powerful stuff.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: You discussed the intense logistical and environmental challenges of working in Antarctica. How do these challenges compare with those faced in the Arctic? What was the most surprising in your transition between the two?
[00:03:21] Speaker C: Oh, man. You know The Antarctic, you know, what I didn't really realize until I was there is it's a continent. As you know, I learned that in school. We all learned that in school, of course. But there's miles of ice, so you're at altitude. The South Pole in Antarctica is almost a 10,000ft. Right? So not only are you dealing with extreme polar conditions, you're dealing with in this case, altitude and wind. And so it's an extreme cold, it's also extreme dry. Whereas the Arctic, where we worked for a number of years, is not as when we're up there in the summer, it's mostly around freezing. We're not working on the ice cap, we're working on land, looking for fossils. And so it's quite a bit warmer than Antarctica where we've worked, but quite a bit wetter. So it's a trade off. One's colder and drier, the other one is a little warmer but wet. I'll take the drier.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Big red Canada goose parkas are an almost symbolic piece of survival gear for Antarctic researchers.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: You bet.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: What are some of the other essential adaptations, both human and technological, that enable successful scientific work in such extreme conditions?
[00:04:31] Speaker C: Well, really what enables our work are obviously aircraft that can get us there. I mean, that's the separation between explorers today and those in the distant past. And you know, we have helicopters and airplanes that can get us to these places. We have tents, mountaineering tents, small ones that can withstand winds sometimes up to 80 miles or 100 miles an hour. You know, so we have all kinds of, you know, high tech gear which allows us to, you know, live up there and also do the science. But, you know, when you look at the, the extreme adaptations to living creatures there, you know, there are animals that have antifreeze in their blood. You know, there are animals that go into suspended animation because they can replace all the water in their body with a sugar and they turn into glass only to dry, you know, when they wet out, when they, when the conditions change, they thaw out and turn from glass back to an animal. So, you know, you see the extreme adaptations of life in these places. And it's not just humans who have to adapt these places, but it's the living world, the entire living world.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: So as we just discussed, Antarctica, it's windier, it's drier and colder than the Arctic. How does this impact fossil preservation and discovery efforts compared to other environments where you've worked?
[00:05:41] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a little harder to work there. Right, because, you know, I mean, it's, it's really hard to concentrate when you're at the top of a mountain in Antarctica, Maybe at about 7,8000ft, the wind is blowing about 30 miles an hour. The, you know, wind chills about minus 40. And you know, you're looking for tiny fossils on the rock. You know, just being able to stay in the game and focus on that is really hard. So the mental part of it and the physical part of it is extraordinary. Challenge I hadn't had even in the Arctic, you know, or I work in the American west, we've worked in China, we worked elsewhere. I had not had that sort of experience where you have to really sort of think about your body and your mindset and, you know, your well being and the well being of the crew.
You know, safety first in these places, which is kind of the biggest thing.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: In your chapter, Hidden Worlds, you suggest that some of the wild ideas about what lies beneath Antarctic ice has, have actually been found to be true. Could you elaborate on one of the most astonishing discoveries that validate this notion?
[00:06:45] Speaker C: Yeah, one of the great joys of writing this book, you know, because this book is on the science of Earth's polar regions and all the exploration that people have done well, the incredible surprises that exist in these places. You know, think about this. Russian teams, along collaborating with Americans and French, drilled, you know, over two miles into the ice. And what did they find underneath the ice in Antarctica, in the center of the ice cap, you know, we're dealing with ice that's about the size of continental United States. But drilling two miles into it, they found a freshwater lake. They found a freshwater lake about the size of Lake Superior in the Great Lakes. And it even gets better. This great lake is about 500ft deep. It has fresh water. And when they sampled the waters, they found living things. They found microbes, they found a whole ecosystem of microbes that lives under the ice. And NASA satellites and European satellites have scanned the ice and they can actually look into the ice and they found that there are about 600 of these lakes, hidden lakes under the ice. Think about that. Whole worlds under the ice with life that hasn't seen the surface for millennia, if not million hasn't seen the sun for that length of time, that has evolved independently. I mean, you have lost worlds of light, of hidden worlds of life. It's just remarkable. And that's just like, look, I pardon the pun, the tip of the iceberg. For what we can study, what we can learn by studying these regions.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Can you talk a bit about the history of this? Because I Was. Okay. Also shocked that I did not expect, reading your book, you'd bring up Peter Kropotkin. I know him as a political philosopher. And then I.
[00:08:12] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Of course, I mean, his background. He's a geologist, so it didn't. Like. Of course it made sense. Can you talk about his. Because he initially is the one that posited this idea that there was lakes that are kind of buried under these glaciers in Antarctica.
[00:08:25] Speaker C: Yeah. What a remarkable thinker he was. I mean, real polymath, right? I mean, a true polymath. We know him for politics, but he also speculated about the ice ages and speculated about ice. And he made one observation that is at great depth, the ice, you know, at a mile or two or whatever he was thinking about ice is it exists at high pressure. Now, the melting point of ice is dependent on pressure and temperature.
So he theorized that because of these high pressures at the. The base of the ice, there would exist fresh water. So he made this speculation, you know, without any satellite data. You know, this is in the early 1900s, right. Late 1800s. And he's thinking, you know, this is all speculation. And it was brilliant because years later, another Russian scientist, this Russian scientist working at Vostok Station on the polar ice cap, noticed the surface features of the ice were very different because ice, when it's over land is very crinkly. Ice over water typically is very smooth. And he noticed that there is this large, smooth patch there. And he speculated that maybe, just maybe, Kropotkin was right.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: You draw parallels between H.P. lovecraft's at the Mountain of Madness and real Antarctic science. I was wondering if you talk about how science fiction and pop culture influence public perceptions of polar research.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: Well, you know, you think about what the polar regions are and what they've been throughout human history is a great unknown, a lot, you know, an unknown that's yet to be explored. So for much of human history, there were indigenous peoples living there for the last few thousand years, but for. For Europeans, these were like another planet. They were like the surface of the moon. And expeditions that went to polar regions were expeditions that were, you know, like the. Like the Apollo astronauts were in the late 60s and early 70s. These were expeditions to the extremes of the world. And these extremes really fostered all kinds of speculation, all kinds of mystery. And, you know, Lovecraft was part of that. There are all kinds of, you know, speculations about aliens under the ice. There are all kinds of speculations about Nazi bases under the ice. It's the unknown. And people fill the unknown with all sorts of fantasies, speculation, hopes, dreams, fears and so forth. And the Arctic and Antarctica are. No, no, no, different.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: I'm kind of curious, so I mentioned if I ever went to Antarctica, I feel like I'd be obligated to watch the Thing at some point being Antarctica. Oh, yeah. See, I'm guessing you watch the thing in Anara is that.
[00:10:58] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. So, okay, so McMurdo Station, which. Which is the main US base in Antarctica, has a cozy little wine bar that basically has that movie on a loop at some points. So you can't avoid that movie now. You know, when you're there, it takes on an extra, like, creepiness, I must say, you know, because then you're in the. You're in the base, you know, and then we fly like 2, 300 miles to our. To our sites, and then, you know, the plane goes away and I'm with six other people for four to eight weeks, you know, living in tents in the middle of the ice and that isolation, you start thinking about things like, you know, HP Lovecraft, and you start thinking about things like the movie, the Thing and so forth.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: That's really cool.
You explore the ways in which extreme environments affect human psychology and group dynamics. What are the key social strategies that ensure the success of an expedition team in the polar regions?
[00:11:54] Speaker C: So if you look at successful expeditions over the past few hundred years, they've all done similar things. They've focused on food.
Food is key, right? We're animals. So one of the things that's key for keeping people in the game is having good food, having a menu of their comfort foods, having surprises in the food. So really, creature comforts are essential, particularly when the weather's terrible, when you're not finding anything. You can go whole seasons without finding fossils up there, which we've done. We were failures for five years before the 6th when we actually found that Fishapod, Tiktaalik, Rosia.
And having something to look forward to at the end of the day is really important. But the other thing, there are lots of things. There are lots of rules to life there. The other mental rule is to really celebrate people as much as possible, to have celebration events as much as possible, to break up the drudgery of the. You know, to break up the drudgery and the routine with celebrations and particularly celebrations of the unique talents of your crew.
And what I like to do is something that's a page out of the book of Shackleton, which is to engage everybody in decision making. If everybody feels empowered to make decisions and they don't feel they're being told what to do, but they feel they had a say in things. It makes for a very comfortable situation. And particularly when things get tough, people feel their voices were heard. So that's really important, too. So there are all these little tricks that really successful explorers have used over the centuries. And food, you know, creature comforts, celebrations, celebrating people and involving everybody in decision making is. Those are some of the prime ones.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: Okay. From that conversation, I kind of. I feel obligated to ask you this question then. I know this is a huge departure and this is not your expertise, but I was curious if you thought Kropotkin's exposure to the harsh Antarctic environment influenced his political philosophy regarding the necessity for cooperation in our species. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that.
[00:13:45] Speaker C: Well, he was in exile for a long time, right. And I think that exile probably affected him in a degree where he said he was in exile and he was separated from humanity for a long period of time. And I think that naturally would make you see humanity in a different light and see the need for the social cooperation to be better. Look, working in these regions is a team sport. You don't do this alone.
And successful people have known that this is a team sport and have really thought about the team before themselves. And that's what successful leaders have done in these things. And so science there, and this is a book about the science there, every type of science, whether it's physical science and astronomy or cosmology, geology, glaciology, they've all involved large teams, and they've all involved large teams working together. And cooperation is key. So one of the lessons I've drawn from my work there is really how these regions bring about human cooperation. These are international science expeditions we're talking about. It's Russians, Americans, French, Chinese, Koreans working together. You know, it's, it's, it's really wonderful to see. It's wonderful to have been part of that. As for my career, you mentioned the.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Importance of traditional knowledge, particularly Inuit. I'm going to make an attempt to say in this, but the Kao Yi Mu Ya taught Kangit in surviving and thriving in polar conditions. Can you share a specific example of indigenous knowledge that's proven invaluable to modern science?
[00:15:11] Speaker C: Well, I think that really the key thing is cooperation. The, that the, that cooperation and the recognition that the individual needs to function within a unit, within a group, is really important. But the other thing, I think that's, that's really important about their way of seeing the world is that another part of that ethos which you just mentioned is understanding the connection and the tie to the land and having great respect for the land. And so the Inuit lifestyle is very tethered to the seasons and the. And the changes in the land. I mean, the changes from 24 hours of darkness in the winter to 24 hours of daylight in the summer, that involves all kinds of changes in behavioral practices and so forth, and respect for. And ties to the land are such an important part of that ethos that I think, you know, there are lessons for all of us in that.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Polar explorers often emphasize that food is more than just sustenance. It's morale, its comfort and survival. What were some of the most essential or surprising foods on your expeditions?
[00:16:14] Speaker C: Well, look, if you were to come on my expedition, one of the first things I'd ask you is not about how you find fossils, but what your comfort food is. And so I've had people's comfort food being everything from Australians with Vegemite or Marmite to people who want aloo gobi or hot spicy vindaloos. I've had people who wanted me to make a crawfish etouffee. And I figured out how to bring it there and make it there.
We have all kinds of chilies. I mean, you know, you still lose tons of weight there because it's so cold. And we're walking 10, 15 miles a day and climbing mountains and so forth. But we have really, really, really strive to take the kinds of foods that make people put a smile on your face. And we have, oh, I bring a tub of candy, of chocolate, of candy and chewies. That has been, that I've. It's been known to have eminent senior professors open that tub and see tears come to their.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: You know, that early polar exploration was the equivalent of the space race in terms of its technological and national significance. Do you see any direct parallels between early polar expeditions and modern space exploration?
[00:17:24] Speaker C: I think, you know, if we're going to be sending people to Mars, which may happen, you know, within the next decade or two, certainly there will be lessons. And I think there have to be psychological lessons. I mean, there's a whole study of human behavior in isolated conditions. And, you know, honestly, the kinds of practices that polar explorers developed for successful teamwork and expeditions, I think, you know, people are going to be. Are the same as they were a century ago as they will be in the decades when they're going to Mars. And they're going to have the same needs for social connections, quality food, and things like that. So the lessons, I think will be about humanity and how humanity can work in these extreme conditions.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: You write about building 157X McMurdo Station and the running joke that it houses alien bodies. In a more literal sense, how does Antarctic research contribute to the search for extraterrestrial life?
[00:18:17] Speaker C: Yeah, it's incredible what you can learn from studying the ice in Antarctica. The ice in Antarctica is always moving. And what that means is deep ice, from the base, from the bottom, miles below, gets pushed to the surface from time to time, particularly when it moves and hits a mountain. Well, what that means is anything that's in the ice over time will get pushed up and they will collect in certain places. And what's remarkable in certain places of Antarctica, there are fields of meteorites, pieces of the solar system that have hit the Earth. And they might have hit the earth, you know, 200, 150,000 years ago, but through the movement of the ice, they've been pushed to the surface. So about 50,000 meteorites have been collected in Antarctica in the last, say, three or four decades. And from that, we've seen pieces of the moon that have landed on Earth, pieces of early asteroids that have landed on Earth, and even pieces of Mars that broke off through an asteroid impact billions of years ago and hit the Earth. And one of those meteorites that was discovered in the 1970s and was studied by scientists a little bit later was thought by some, was proposed by some to have microbes inside of it, suggesting that maybe there was life on Mars. Now, that was a hugely contentious claim, and in fact, it received a lot of criticism, but nobody's ever really disproved it, you know, so it's been sort of one of those things where people have shrugged and say, could be, probably not, but who knows, right? But it's. It just goes to show just how much we have to. We can discover by. By looking at the polar regions, particularly the rocks inside the ice.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: In your chapter, A Brief History of Ice, you describe how ice core provides a record of Earth's climactic past. What is the most shocking discoveries to emerge from these frozen archives?
[00:20:09] Speaker C: Okay, here's what really dropped my jaw. When you study the ice. When they studied ice and they tried to look at how fast temperatures can change on Earth, they found in these ice cores, you can actually look at changes in a seasonal way, really detailed changes to the temperature. You can see, you know, and what they saw was that the temperature of the Earth temperature can heat and cool by 7 or so degrees in a Decade. You know, there are some periods where you had enormous changes of the temperature of the Earth in a very, very short period of time, heating up and cooling off. And so what that shows is by looking at the ice, you can really see just how fast and how rapid change can happen on this planet. I mean, dramatic changes, you know, heating up and melting of, melting of ice can happen extremely fast, just naturally. And when you couple the kinds of changes that humans are causing on the planet, that suggests that we could indeed see even more rapid change.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Well, how does studying the past, you think, help us predict future climate patterns, especially now with climate change?
[00:21:15] Speaker C: Well, what it does is it shows us the dynamics. It shows us the dynamics of the system. How does the system change, what causes these changes and how much change can we expect? And we can map what's happened in the past. And we can see, okay, if you have certain amount of temperature rise, how much does that ice melt, how much of the ice melts and how much sea level rise as results from that. So you can actually map these things and see what's happened under certain conditions in the past. That gives us the tools to ask, to answer the question, well, if the Earth heats a degree or two or three centigrade in the next century or two, how much of that ice will end up in the ocean and how much of that water, new water that's in the ocean, will cause sea level rise and how much sea level rise will happen? So, you know, it gives us tools to predict the future.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Honestly, you describe the accelerating loss of polar ice as a pressing issue. What are the some, what are some of the biggest misconceptions the public have about ice loss? And what are the most urgent realities we have to face?
[00:22:15] Speaker C: Well, the urgent reality is in Antarctica. And we can map this from satellites mapping the ice on the, on, on from this, from space is we can see that we're losing about 280 gigat of ice a year in Antarctica and about the same amount in Greenland. And that's all ice that's going into water in the ocean. I think one of the biggest misconceptions and one of the things that would surprise people is not only does that change, would that change lead to sea level rise? Right. You're putting more water in the ocean, obviously, and the sea level will rise, but that'll change so much on the planet. You're going to be changing. With all that fresh water entering the ocean, you change global circulation of sea, you know, sea patterns of global circulation that moves heat around. Ocean currents change and those changes in ocean currents change global weather patterns. So really, what is greatly surprising is the degree to which much of our lives here, closer to the equator, would change as a result of melting at the poles.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: And I believe my last question for you, Neil, if you lead one final expedition with unlimited resources, where would you go and what scientific mystery would you want to solve?
[00:23:25] Speaker C: Okay, so I would go to the Transantarctic Mountains, to rocks that are about 480 million years old. That's 4, 8 0. And I'd be looking for the earliest creatures with backbones, earliest fish in the fossil record. And that would tell us how worms evolved into fish. Beautiful. That would be my dream.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: This has been my time talking with Neil Shupin about his latest book, Ends of the Earth Journeys to the polar regions in search of life, the cosmos and our future. Neil, once again, thanks for your time on ride on radio.
[00:23:56] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: And now this.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: You'Ve been listening to right on radio. I'm Eric Zimmerman and we would like to thank Neil Shubin and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible.
