 Welcome to Inventing Our Future at Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Brittany Zimmerman. Your co-host, Richard Hall. Joining us today is our guest, Dr. Billy Jenkins, who will help us do a deep dive into our eye conversation. This week we're gonna be addressing ice. So everything you think you might know about ice, I think we're about to expand your knowledge on this particular topic that might at the surface level seem surface level, but it is not. So to help us do this deep dive, let's welcome Dr. Billy Jenkins. Welcome, Billy. Hi, Brittany and hi, Richard. Thanks for having me today. We're excited to have you. Where are you turning in from? So this week I'm in Sydney, Australia and I'm at a conference that does acoustical oceanography using sound to study the oceans. Ooh, is there much ice in Sydney, Australia? I have found no ice other than ice cubes in my glass, but. Awesome, wonderful. Well, Richard, first question to you. Tell us what you know about ice. You know, the first thing I think of ice is internal combustion engines, but I don't think that's what we're talking about. We're talking really about real ice, right? That's my understanding, yeah. I don't know much about combustion engines, but. Wonderful. All right, Billy, we'll give us some education. I'm really excited. I think at a very high level, when people think about ice, specifically here in Hawaii, right? First thing is what does ice have to do with ice? Second thing is that just grows in water. So please educate us a little more on the topic of ice, Billy. Sure, yeah, so I figured I would talk a little bit about why ice matters to Hawaii, specifically in the context of discussions around climate change and how specifically the North Pole, the South Pole regions affect Hawaii. And so I wanted to talk about a little bit about the role that our poles play in our climate regulation. And very briefly, if you look at an image of, or a sketch of how the Earth receives its solar radiation from the sun, most of that radiation enters the atmosphere at the equatorial regions and the tropics, so the lower latitudes where Hawaii sits. And through dynamic processes, atmospheric processes and oceanic processes, that heat is transported from the equatorial regions poleward. And that's through ocean currents and through weather systems. And so the poles serve as a very important heat sink, essentially, for that heat budget for the planet. And in the last several decades, since we've been keeping track over the years, what we have realized is that the poles are heating much more rapidly than anywhere else in the world. And so that is important implications for analyzing and understanding climate change. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about why the ice matters in that context. And so I guess I would start by saying that between 2003 and 2019, study was conducted, published in Science, and talks about satellite measurements that remain estimating ice loss in both Greenland and Antarctica. In Greenland and Antarctic are two places where there is a lot of ice. These are two regions on Earth where there are very massive ice sheets that are locked over continental land. And so these satellite altimetry measurements basically measured the difference in ice altitude between 2003 and 2019. And have found that Greenland over that period has been losing 200 gigatons of ice per year. And Antarctica in total has lost 118 gigatons per year. That's a lot of ice. And that's contributed over that 16 year period to about 14, 15 millimeters in sea level rise. So a lot of us are concerned about sea level rise, especially low lying islands in the Asia Pacific region, Bangladesh, as well as coastal communities around the world. And so these kinds of sea level impacts, they sound very small for so much ice, but there's a lot more ice on those ice sheets and we're observing accelerating warming in those places. So we may just be seeing the beginning signal of a much larger change that's occurring on the Earth. And then the other thing I would say about the loss of ice and specifically the loss of sea ice in the North Pole is as that ice retreats, there's several important climatological and oceanographic changes that occur. So ice, as you know, it's white or blue and it reflects light very efficiently. So Brittany and I both grew up in Wisconsin and you go out on a bright sunny day. If you forget your sunglasses, you're blinded because it's just so bright. And so when you take an entire region that reflects light back into outer space and that melts and you no longer have that, what's left behind is a relatively dark ocean or even dark landmass. And of course, from basic physics, dark things absorb light much more efficiently and they heat up. And so that has very important implications. And so this is just, it's intuitive, but it's also very complex. And so people are just beginning to understand what is the effects of the loss of ice cover in places like the North Pole and what are the follow-on effects to weather systems, climatological systems, believe it or not, Hawaii's climate is affected by polar climate because it's all connected and a very dynamic system. So with all of that, I have a couple of questions. And I'm thinking about this, you know, from a Teach Me Like I'm Five mentality. So help me out here, right? But in terms of thermodynamics, right? Let's say I'm sitting in a real and it's a warm room and have a glass of ice, right? Or a glass of ice. My hand is warm. I grab the glass, right? And maybe I drink it. But I'm grabbing this glass and there's heat that's moving from my hand into the glass, right, in cold water. And then eventually that heat moves from the glass into the water and then from the water into the ice, ice starts melting. You know, there's a period of time between when I grab the glass and when the ice actually melts because of the heat that I put into the glass and the outside, right? I mean, there's a delay. How much of the ice melting at the poles, right? Is directly because of things that have happened today versus things that have happened at some period of time in the past and in their some amount of like hysteresis or time between the damage that's already been done that is gonna come to fruition regardless of whether we shaped up today, right? Like let's say today, we stopped releasing greenhouse gases and fixed all the atmosphere issues that we're facing and we get back to a spot that's extremely healthy in terms of thermal input. Is there still so much damage that's been done that that will still relate to a very large amount of ice that's actually melted or is it a very quick response, right? Or are we seeing like in a day or does it take a year or does it take a million years? Can you help us understand, right? The effects that we see today versus when the impacts that we're making those effects were given? Is that question makes them? Yep, yep, that's a very important question actually because, you know, we from an economic perspective, governments around the world are looking at spending hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars try to tackle climate change. And one of the important questions that everybody is wondering right now is, okay, if we do everything perfectly and fix our emissions issues immediately tonight, how long will it take for us to see the results? And the international panel on climate change report, they actually address this and, you know, current estimates indicate it ranges anywhere from it'll take decades to millennia to actually curb the amount of heating that we're seeing in the environment. So to answer the question about the current warming that we're seeing today, you know, is it possible to directly tie it to a certain timeframe back in time where, you know, melting we're seeing today was a direct result of increasing emissions in this, you know, some previous decade, that's a very difficult question to answer. And I'm gonna just say, it depends your typical scientist answer. It's a very active area of research because, you know, there's no doubt that, you know, humanity anthropogenic or man-made activity has been a very powerful forcing function on our climate system. And, but there are also natural cycles that occur in the climate. And so it takes a lot of work, a lot of data, a lot of measurement and analysis to understand what are the contributing factors to what extent do they contribute and over what kinds of time scales do they contribute. But there is broad consensus that the acceleration in heating, particularly in the polar regions where the ice is melting so rapidly, that is the IPCC, the Union Climate Report uses language like very likely, which is about as solid of an answer as you're gonna get out of a consensus of scientists. So I hope that answers a question a little bit. I think it's hard to say where we came from, but what I care about is the future, you know, our children and our children's children. And will they be having to overcome challenges that were set in motion 50 years ago? And for how long will they have to overcome that? Will it be decades? Like I said, the UN says it could be decades to millennia before that momentum isn't quite the right technical word, but it's a nice intuitive way to think of it before that momentum is checked. I have a comment. You know, I'm a founder of this group, Kyo-Kye and Malia, and our objective is to try to see, given the information that we have today, what can we do to make life better for coming generations? So let's say 25 years from now, they look back and look at the information we have, the discussion we have, how do you think they're gonna think about us? That's a big question, and it's frankly something that motivates many of us scientists to try to, you know, rapidly understand what is actually going on and what can be done about it. I think, you know, I think there will be, you know, trying to fast forward 25 years, I would say some judgment will be passed, you know, by our children on those who insisted that nothing was wrong, nothing was happening. We see accumulating evidence that something is definitely happening, and you know, the consensus is very much that this is a man-made effect on the climate, you know, natural cycles notwithstanding, but the fact that we have all these clues that are pointing towards the fact that we are creating the serious, geologically important, and by important, I mean, you know, geology moves very slowly. So the fact that we are creating a geologically important moment in geologic history is very troubling, and you know, people can either choose to be a part of the solution, to try to understand it better. You know, there is validity in saying, you know, there's not unlimited amounts of money. We can't just throw money at everything and make this all work out. We have to be wise with how we spend our resources, and so, you know, kind of where I said is we need to really pay attention to the science and get more measurements, more data, while also taking actions that make sense immediately that we know can help alleviate the problem. And you know, I have to think that it's not getting better in the next 25 years, so you know, people will be judged according to where they part of the problem or part of the solution. Yeah, I wanted to follow up with the last question, and that is, first of all, I give you a lot of credit for doing what you're doing. Yeah, so now, I have to mention this, you know, I work with Brittany pretty closely, and you know, what she's doing is she's taking the waste we have here and using it for something like cement, which takes a whole bunch of carbon out of the air compared to what we use today. You know, and to me, I would feel good thinking about what future generations think of me. You know, and I'm just a farmer now, and I'm looking at you two guys, you know, you scientists and what you folks are doing. I just needed to see that, I just, yeah. I appreciate that, you know, the other thing I was thinking about with ICE, thinking about this talk was, you know, the biological side of the loss of ICE on our planet. And you know, of course, Hawaii is incredibly dependent on marine life for food, for tourism, for economic activity and industry, and you know, the sudden, again, geologically disruptive, sudden disappearance of sea ice is having profound impacts on marine life, and that has connections directly back to Hawaii because we know animals migrate, you know, the whale, I think the annual whale migration is just beginning right now, and so people will be able to start to see whales off the coast of the islands. So, you know, those are enormous migratory paths, and so you're seeing, you know, major impacts in these ecological communities in the poles, which will have effects, you know, to what extent that's what ecologists are currently studying, but so there's all these complex connections and both biology, human activity, climate, and so you know, it's not just an isolated problem, and so taking it back to Brittany's work, the idea of upending an industry, which is one of the largest carbon emitters in the world is, you know, concrete production and taking one of our biggest polluters and being able to convert that industry into potentially a major carbon sink that also brings infrastructure to places that really need infrastructure and those are exactly the kinds of big solutions that I personally, I think we need more of those kinds of, you know, outside the box, creative thinking, because people who thought they would never benefit from a solution like that will benefit from it. It's all interconnected. And speaking of the CO2 part of this, can you talk to us a little bit about the effects of that? I know that CO2 is largely sequestered in the ocean. It's right, we've utilized our oceans as a massive sink naturally here on our own planet. Oh, what role does the ice play in that sequestration and does the melting of the ice have any type of effect, either linear or exponential, on anything that may be stuck or captured or sequestered in themselves? That's a very good question. And there's a lot of really exciting work being done on that specific question. It's a very active area of research. So I won't answer with the state of the art because that's not my particular specialty, but I'll answer from kind of a more general perspective, oceanographic perspective. And that is that we do know that the southern oceans, recently, we've begun to understand that the southern ocean, so the ocean surrounding Antarctica is one of the most important sinks for atmospheric heat as well as atmospheric carbon. And there are these really neat oceanographic instruments. They're called argofloats and they're deployed continuously for years, basically until their battery runs out and they just float up and down through the water column and they drift around the world's oceans and they collect data like temperature, salinity, and the newer generations are measuring things like biological markers, so measuring the primary productivity of the ocean and as well as geochemical markers like carbon. So there's a lot of active interest in answering these questions. And so I'll just say that about the southern ocean, very important sink for both of that, for heat and carbon. With respect to melting ice, so the ocean's long-term transport, so you have currents, we know things like the Gulf Stream or the Kuroshio Current and there are equatorial currents. Those are very measurable, they're high energy currents moving a lot of water relatively quickly. And they're very important for regulating climate on land. But there's also something known as kind of colloquially called the ocean conveyor belt. And this is a transport of water that goes, it takes about a thousand years if you were to drop a parcel of water and track it around the world's oceans. We generally like to start it out in the North Atlantic where extremely heavy water, it's salty, so it's heavier denser, gets cooled very rapidly in the North Atlantic. It sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It flows southward to Antarctica, goes around the continents, comes back into the Pacific. And that process takes about a thousand years. It's really cool. It's technically called thermohaline circulation and it's all density based. It's according to the different densities of the water. And so, lighter things float, heavier things sink. And so the ocean is not just one density. It is very heterogeneous. So it's not the same. So with the loss of ice in places like the North Pole or the Arctic specifically, the sea ice is critical to the formation of that really cold North Atlantic bottom water. And so, as ice changes and changes the weather systems that cool that water, there's a lot of concern about what are the physical oceanographic processes that we're used to seeing over the last 50, 100 years really. We've been sampling that region. And if you suddenly disrupt all those, you know, relatively steady state systems and processes, what will that mean for thermohaline circulation in the future? Because that kind of circulation is important for absorbing carbon. And it also has implications for large current systems like the Gulf Stream. And so, will the Gulf Stream weaken? And if the Gulf Stream weakens, that's less heat being transported to Europe. So these are the really big science questions that have been broken up into many, many, many tiny little questions that thousands of researchers are currently working on to try to understand and piece together this puzzle that we're trying to understand better. And we're ultimately trying to understand it better so we can make better policy decisions, better education and better economic decisions. Awesome, thank you so much, Billy. And with all this information, I wanted to take a minute to ask about your background. What's your journey been like? How did all this information come to? Tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure, so I studied oceanography at the Naval Academy for my undergraduate degree. And then I got a degree, my master's in acoustics at the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey. And then I was a submarine officer and the Navy for a number of years. And it was on the submarine driving through the ocean. You know, you study things in school like the ocean and you know, I study the ocean because I just, I love being around the ocean. It's just this incredible unexplored space that it just captures the attention and the imagination. And to be on a submarine and actually get to drive through these natural phenomena that you studied and learned about in school and to see the physics and the biology and the chemistry, all these, you know, kind of boring topics come to life in front of you and to be able to observe it and you couldn't reach out and touch it because you're underwater in a submarine that would be bad for everybody. But that's really where I fell in love with wanting to learn more about these systems and these processes and work to study them better. And yeah, so it was really the experience of submerging, immersing myself in the ocean that was very fascinating. And you know, I'm in my late 30s and I feel like a kid still. My, you know, my imagination is just running free with research ideas and imagining, you know, how we can do, you know, find better solutions to measuring the ocean. So it's a wonderful place to do science and also be creative. Here we are sitting out here in the middle of the Pacific, the largest ocean in the world. And in a sense, because we're closer to the equator, we're relatively safe, but that's not really true because we're so isolated that we really need to take, pay attention and do the things that we need to do and we need to do it now. It's way, way, way past responding really seriously. And thank you so much for having, you know, talked to us about that. That was really valuable. Thank you for having me today. Pleasure to talk with you. This is Inventing Our Future on Tinkta, Kauai. Thank you so much, Dr. Jenkins, for joining us and thank you to you, our viewers, for watching. If you wanna get our email advisories to see a complete listing of all of our shows, you can sign up for them on tinkta.kauai.com. We'll be back in two weeks, please tune in to deep dive into our J invention. Until then, I'm Brittany Zimmerman. And I'm Richard Hollis.