 Good afternoon. My name is Ray Tsuchiyama. I am hosting or guesting, as we say, for Jay Fidel on a beautiful balmy day in Honolulu. We have a great backdrop of sky and sea that we'll be talking about a lot more with our two guests, and they're from the University of Hawaii, US Carnegie One Research University, with lots and lots of research topics going on. And one of them is dealing with the ice and what its implications are for society in the future. And we have guest Professor Chris Measures. And welcome to the show. Thank you. And we have Dr. Mariko Hatta, who is a researcher at the University of Hawaii in this area. And tell me, Chris, what department do you belong to and what it does? Well, we're both members of the Oceanography Department. I'm a teaching faculty member. Mariko is a researcher, as you can explain herself. And we've been working together for more than a dozen years now, and we do active research at sea. We go out on ships collecting samples, making measurements in near to real time on the ship to help inform how our sampling strategies will continue during the research cruise, wherever that happens to be. So you're really in the trenches dealing with the sea in your day-to-day world as well as research. You're out there all over the place. Where would you say you've spent the most amount of time? What ocean? Or have you been everywhere? I've been everywhere. It's hard to say. But yes, the data is out in the ocean, so we have to go out there to get it. I mean, if you want to know about the world, you'll have to go and sample it. And Dr. Hatta, where are you from and what university did you take your PhD? So I'm graduated from University of Toyama, which is inside Japan, and like middle part of Japan, beautiful coastal side and mountain side. And how long have you been at the University of Hawaii? That's about seven years. Okay, so here you are together. And what is the topic? I guess I sense urgency from you, Chris and Mariko, about what's happening in the ice that seems to suggest something. What is that going on? And why is the ISO important to understand in really projecting what we see as history of climate change? Well, the ice is very important. I mean, we could go back a bit further to see how this project first evolved. But just to answer your question directly, one of the things that people are interested in understanding climate and the history of climate on the planet is that we now know that the high-latitude regions are the ones that will respond first towards climate change. And why is that? As the earth is around orb, why does it happen first or something at the top? You know, that's a good question. I'm not sure I'm qualified to actually answer that properly. So I don't want to give a false answer. But basically the high-latitude areas are more susceptible to warming. Of course, once you have the phase change from ice to water, I mean, that is a big change in terms of the properties of the surface of the earth. But if we go back a bit further, the project that we're going to talk about today, the Arctic, was actually just one of several of a big, large international project that was started about, let's say about 14 years ago, we had an international meeting in Toulouse, France where a lot of trace element scientists, we measure trace elements on the ship. Now, trace elements are not of much interest to most people because basically, you know, they don't even know what they are and why should they care. But we use them as traces of processes in the ocean. So they're like dyes, I like to, you know, and they have different colors. So we can look at the ocean and we can envisage the processes that cause the distribution of trace elements if we understand them properly. So about 12 years ago, a group of us got together to put together a big international program called Geatraces. There were 20 of us wrote a science plan which then went out for international review by large numbers of bodies, and then we got comments back and we finalized it. And it was finally approved by the IGBP, which is a big international global biosphere program. And we started the program with, I think, probably about 10 countries involved, and now we have about 28 countries involved. We produced a science plan, and we now have cruise tracks around the world which are to look at the distribution of trace elements in many different areas, covering different hydrographic and biological regimes to understand how those distributions come about and how we can use them as traces of process, not only in the ocean today, which, of course, they are, but also those signals are recorded in the sediments. So by carefully looking at sedimentary concentrations, we can go back and look at how the ocean was long before there were any oceanographers or even any people. Sediments meaning at the bottom of the ocean, the earth or whatever, and all the clams and so forth. Well, in the deep ocean, there's no clams. There's a lot of things that come down and then kind of have a whole history of what's been happening. Oh, and the sediments record history of the planet going back millions of years if you can go down deeper. And that's similar to scientists in cores in the ice. Am I correct? How was the trace elements or what percentage was oxygen or carbon dioxide 100,000 years ago? It's a very similar thing. And again, it's because of an accumulation bit by bit over time. Once you understand how that works and you can date it, then you can go back and start looking at how the planet has changed over time. Shall we go to the first slide? Yeah, we could show one of the slides up there which actually I'll talk you through though. We didn't put them... So this is actually an example of... This is the cruise tracks of the Geotraces program. All the ones that are in black are the ones that we've already taken. So different countries are doing different cruises. No one country can afford to do that. So there's a lot at the top and some at the bottom, right? A little bit at the bottom. And so actually the ones you see there in yellow, these are the ones that the U.S. occupy. But France, Germany, there are 28 countries putting their resources into this. In fact, the one in red in the middle that you see is actually the one that's planned for 2018. And actually, Mariko is now the PI on this ground. She just found out she was funded a few weeks ago by National Science Foundation, so she's going to be the boss. It looks like a date line. Well, it is. It's meant to go down. It's not on the date line, but it's meant to go down. I passed the date line and had to wear a funny hat. The King Neptune was there. Well, we usually do down the Arctic and Antarctic and equatorial crossings. So I have been on the trip. So first slide, you want the next one? Well, let's have a look. All right, so this is actually the cruise stretch that we had in the Arctic. And we were actually doing this with other countries, so Canada and Germany, as you can see in the USA. Actually, at one point, Spain wanted to be involved in Norway, but they could not get funding for their cruises. But we divided up the Arctic into these different sections so that we could all, on the same year, get samples, compare our data together, and then we will get a picture of the whole Arctic. So there's some of the fringes, I guess, of the Arctic center at the North Pole and some right at the North Pole. So when I look at this, Mariko, you can chime in, the North Pole and the highest point of our planet is not, there's no Earth, it's just water. And ice, am I correct? Yes, that's correct. And Greenland is a big island with rocks and it's Earth, right? But it's covered by ice. Yes, correct. So the Arctic is covered by ice usually in the winter and then that ice melts again in the summer. We'll come back to that maybe later when we look at how that's changed. What's the Arctic? That actually had a good talk at the U.S. meeting not long ago. The law of the sea is very complicated here and it was very badly written by lawyers who don't know much about Earth sciences and it's quite possible that the Russians could lay claim to most of the Arctic based on the way the law of the sea was written. And that might mean that no other country will get in there to do oceanography in the future. That's bizarre. Do you have some Spitzbergen and some islands up there with a very close to the Arctic? I mean, that's Russian territory, am I correct? Well, Spitzbergen actually is run between Norway and Russia. That's actually a cohabitation. There used to be a lot of coal mining there. I almost got there once, but my ship I was getting on got stuck. That's another story. All right, another slide, go ahead. Well, this tells us a little bit about how the Arctic works. So one of the reasons for having an expedition to the Arctic is it's a very unusual ocean compared to the others. And why? Because it's covered with ice. So you form ice every winter and then that ice melts in the summer and it gives you a layer of fresh water on the surface. And when you get fresh water on the surface of the ocean, you can no longer make deep water, which means you can't sink water from the surface. So when we stop doing that, the whole circulation of the Arctic will change completely differently from what it is today. Because as I understand, there's also movements of great rivers of deep water that go along the ocean that has a lot of effect on climate. The ocean circulation is incredibly important to climate. We know some of the connections, but there are many we do not. And we know that if that changes, of course, the day after tomorrow was a classic example of a science fiction, of a complete wrong of course. In terms of science it was fiction. But what if, you know, why certain regions of the Northern Europe is warmer because of the circling of stream? Exactly. So there are benefits to these currents for mankind. Absolutely. And I think as we were talking earlier, there was a global period, there was a mini ice age starting around 1350. But before that was relatively warm, and that was of course when the Vikings managed to settle Greenland and actually engage in agriculture there, which you cannot do today. But as soon as it got cold again, they were forced out of Greenland, and in fact their adventurous journeys pretty much came to an end. Very sad. Any, the next slide please. Well, this is something we were going to talk about was the actual change in the ice that we find at the North Pole. So I was there in 1994 as part of a different expedition with a Canadian ship and an American ship, and actually in the foreground is a Russian ship, the Yamal. So we actually had three ships together at the North Pole. I don't think that's ever happened before. To get to the North Pole it's like ice breakers, right? You have to go there and create your own road. Basically you have to break the ice and it can be very thick in time because the ice flow is actually rough together. They get jumbled up on top of each other. It's very hard for a ship to break through. Go ahead. But if you look at the bottom of that slide. Can we go back to the slide? Yeah. What you see, this is when Mariko and I were up there in September of 2015, open water at the North Pole. And we'll go back to this slide and the evolving conditions of the North Pole after this break. One minute. Yes, I remember of course the tragedy of the Shackleton. Shackleton. Shackleton. Yeah, the endeavor. What a leader. What a man. I mean he got all these people out. But we remember the ship, those was all brood and ice and would crush the wood. But the Fram, you know, I've seen that in Oslo. The Fram was... Ten seconds. My name is Ray Tuchiyama. We are back in the middle of an exciting discussion on conditions in the North of the world, which has a lot of lessons. It has a lot more insights to climate and through researchers like Chris Measure and Mariko Hatap. We are discovering a lot more on how we understand all these things happening in the ice and ocean. So I'll go back to another slide that we have, so a new one. Well, we could just finish. Can we have the last slide up, please? Great. So you can see that when we were there that we had a lot of open water. In fact, we made it to the North Pole much faster than we expected. We were on a Coast Guard vessel this time, the US Coast Guard vessel, Healy. And for them, of course, getting to the North Pole is the main goal. For us, it's the sampling on the way. But we ended up there much earlier than we expected because the 15th is normally the lowest ice in the Arctic. That's summer in the Arctic. Most of it is melted. But we were actually making eight knots sometimes through the ice, which is almost unheard of. Now, a little question. If you are there and have a compass, what would the compass say? Well, it's supposed to point down. Well, actually, no, because the magnetic North Pole is not at the North Pole. The North Pole is in Northern Canada. Oh, okay. I didn't know. It moves, right? There was flippings of the poles in the past, but we won't go into that. But it's never actually been at the geographic North Pole. It's always been somewhere in Northern Canada. So your point by these photos is that there's been change that you could make a track or track to the North Pole way faster than before. And this is a a nerving moment because I always thought it was solid ice all the time. People, of course, are interested for shipping reasons to be able to ship across the North Pole. In fact, the first time I was at the North Pole was the first time we accidentally were the first ships ever to go across the Arctic Ocean. That was not intended because we had a ship problem. But the Arctic is really like the Canary in the coal mines. These are the places where there are changes first, and we're already seeing them. Next slide, please. So actually, it's not just the surface water that's melting. I don't want to bore your viewers with this, but we are looking at the temperature and salinity. That's the amount of salt in the water of all the samples we take. And we had someone on board from Scripps, a good friend of mine who's also been to the North Pole and he was plotting the differences that we were seeing. And this slide shows how much change between 1994 and 2015. So that's a pretty short period of time in terms of ocean circulation. Very short, yeah. We're seeing things warming. We're seeing whole bunches of changes and they're all climatically related. Next slide, please. So this change in ice cover has actually been visible for some time now. Ever since satellites started measuring the ice they can get very good measurements. It's very hard to do this sort of thing directly from the ship. But as you can see in that this is the Arctic sea ice minimum coverage. So that's around September 15th. That's when we get it. And what you see is there's quite a lot of jiggles in that line because there are many things affected. But the direction, the trajectory of that line is very low. And we're seeing it. And actually there are bets out there as to when the Arctic will be ice free in the summer. Some people are predicting within a few years. And that will be a massive change for the planet. Next slide, please. In fact, this is something that was published very recently showing that in fact these were some people from Germany on the left-hand side of that right figure. That's the amount of sea ice. And along the bottom axis is the cumulative amount of CO2 that's been put into the atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic activity. And it's not a perfect correlation but boy it's really suggestive that essentially as we add CO2 to the atmosphere we're reducing the amount of sea ice. So the question is that we always historically have seen ice at the top of our world. Is that a good thing? Or that there was ice so that we have a better seasonal climate for people to grow crops and live in temperate zones and so forth. Or what would it mean if there was no ice at the top for longer periods? That's a good question because we live in this world now we've built our infrastructure to deal with the planetary temperatures we have. And when we start to change it then we will not be well suited to live on the planet and we will have to change. So one of the things I tell my students is the areas that have agriculture now because they have enough rain and good temperatures also have railroad lines and roads going to them. If you move agriculture into the middle of an actual land there are no railroad lines. That's right. When you're saying it's a transportation infrastructure how to get crops to people who eat them to cities. We need to move stuff from farms to cities and if we suddenly change the climate that's all going to change and it will cost a huge amount of money to rebuild that infrastructure. Next slide please. Is that the end? That's kind of a warning. I don't know whether this will show up but this is a GIF and this was the last and B ice shelf that broke up in 2002. This is Antarctica. Antarctica is affected by the temperature just as much as the Arctic. That broke up and surprised everybody because nobody expected it and the reason was that satellites can see the ice on the surface but they don't know how thick it is. And remarkably we showed this at the first Science Café a few weeks ago and since then Larsson Sea has now broken off and this is an iceberg twice the size of Lake Erie. So we are seeing this. This is happening before our very eyes. Some people of course wish to ignore this. How many slides we have more? That's it. Dr. Hatta you've been on the ships and so forth just to give a personal how is it on these ships? What kind of experience is it? I've actually been to only research ports so I don't really know about the real like a vacation type of port. Right, right, right. Like a precious cruise you're talking about. We are generally at particularly this cruise I've been on the ship for two and a half months without any port so it's the first two weeks we can have fresh products fresh vegetables and yogurt and these kind of things but after two weeks we don't have one. So how many people on the ship? So it's like this cruise was 150 people 50 people scientists and 100 is a cost God. So the 50 scientists all are doing experiments day and night, what is the schedule like? And depending on when you cast these are three big different groups. One is collecting water, collecting particle which is some small biological particle or some sediment particle and core which is the sediment we are talking about in the bottom ocean. So two and a half months is a very long time to me to be on a boat with the same people all the time. What did you miss the most? What you wanted to do when you came back to land was there anything? Well it's very comfortable in general speaking but I really want to cook by myself. So you missed your own cooking? It's like living in a dorm I guess. And having a beer. There's no alcohol. Because it's a coast guard, the Navy. No actually even the research vessels now have no alcohol. Well as you know the UK Royal Navy has a rum Russian so that's a tradition there. It's happening for people to fight. So we're coming to the end and you shown us some scientific data some evidence that changes are happening at the Arctic and at the Arctic. What would you want the person on the street in Hawaii or in the globe to take away from this? I think the most important lesson is that everywhere we look on the surface of the earth we are seeing the climate of the planet changing at a dramatic rate. That is taking us into the unknown in some circumstance. I mean the climate of the planet has been hot in the past but it didn't have 7 billion people living on it trying to feed themselves. This is really a very urgent problem and there's someone at Scripps I think made a very good analogy and this is all related to CO2 of course which some people just don't want to believe but basically if you go to your doctor and he tells you you have to lose 20 pounds in 20 months if you do it a pound a month it's feasible if you don't do anything and you're after 19 months you've got to lose 20 pounds you're never going to do it and this is the problem with climate it's going to be harder and harder until it's impossible to change the trajectory and that's very scary. In a very substantial way what do we have to do as a society as an industrialized society? We have to learn to live in the most sustainable manner we can it's not possible to not affect the environment but we have to minimize those effects particularly the ones that we think are most dangerous CO2 is one that is actually relatively easy to avoid I mean it's just a question of money and finding out power from other places use the fossil fuels for making plastics that's actually a very good use of them but burning them for energy is a very poor use and it's dangerous Well we're coming to the end and I want to thank you both for giving you insights I'm reminded when I was working for MIT the experiences of Mario Molina professor who proved that it was a hole created by Flora Carmins refrigerators and so forth and the CFCs and they took a dramatic step of ending CFCs and it's taking 50 years to recover from that but we are recovering but that is a case study that science and data did change policy and in a society so it can happen and I think what we need more is people like yourselves to carry out a scientific case to our leadership, government leadership and industry and business because this is not just one side it's a whole society kind of a movement I think Well but we do need them to understand that science is the truth it's not a political issue scientists are not politicians we search for the truth and we are not making this stuff up Well science is to understand That's our goal Thank you so much for joining us today on Research in Manoa and again we thank you for viewing Think Tech in Hawaii