 Welcome to Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and thanks for joining us here on Likeable Science. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Kirsten Carlson. Welcome, Kirsten. Welcome back, I should say. Kirsten's been on the show before. Kirsten is a multi-talented individual. She's a scientific illustrator, undersea artist and explorer, children's book author, illustrator at Fathomint Studios, and she's also the site art communications manager at Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology. So, your life is busy. I wear a lot of hats, I wear a lot of hats. That's great, that's great. You were on before talking, this was a year and a half ago or something, I think, talking about an upcoming expedition you were getting ready to do to Antarctica. And now you've done it, right? I have. And so, that's gonna be one of the things we'll talk about. We're also gonna talk about an exhibit that you've helped curate and play on and put stuff into, right? That sounds awesome, yeah. Wonderful. But, so, maybe you could help the audience just a little bit, how did you get sort of involved in the science illustration game? So, for me, what happened is I was busy going to grad school to become a scientist. And during that time, back when I was a grad student, I got the opportunity to go to Antarctica. So, as a scientist, I dove in Antarctica doing some research. I was supposed to do my thesis there. And because of the experience, and because of the people I met, because of my background always being creative, but also very curious, I came back from that trip realizing being a researcher or being an academic wasn't gonna do what was really important to me, and that is to convey the beauty and wonder of nature to others through the lens of science and art. It wasn't until that trip that I realized how strong that drive was. So, when I got back, I dropped out of grad school at the Marine Lab that I was at, which was in California. I love it. It's a place called Moss Landing Marine Labs. And then I transferred up to UC Santa Cruz and went into the science communication program. It's a one-year program. It's now at Cal State University Monterey Bay if you wanna become a scientific illustrator. And if you wanna be a writer, it's still at UC Santa Cruz. And then straight out of there, I got a job at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Wonderful place, wonderful place. Yeah, I enjoyed my visits there. Excellent. And so, I guess it was in 2017, you did go on this expedition. And so, tell us a little bit maybe about that. How long was it? How big a ship? How many people? What all did you do? Sure, sure. If you guys could bring up the image of the map of Antarctica so I can orient everybody that's tuning in. So, when I went to Antarctica both in 1992 and in 2017, I was headed to one of our bases that's the southernmost accessible, diveable ocean on the planet and that is at McMurdo Station, which is down at the bottom end of your screen. Palmer Station, you reach by boat and it is a little further, it is also accessible to diving. But I was very interested to go back to the place in 2017 that I was as a grad student and that was McMurdo. So, to get there, you fly directly south from New Zealand on military transport. So, if you'll give me the next slide. In 1992, when I went down, I was supposed to study icebergs and how they hit bottom and what they do to the benthic communities, i.e. the animals that live in and on the bottom, when the iceberg hits. And then if you go to the next image and one more image, sorry, I'm gonna skip that for now. This is the military transport that took us down to Antarctica, both similar in 1992 and then in 2017, this is 2017. So, we fly for about, I think that flight was about six hours and we are on the Ross ice shelf there. We landed on the ice shelf and if you go ahead and bring up the next image, you'll see that is me in a parka that we get issued to us when we go to Antarctica to keep us nice and warm. What you brought along, right? I did bring along. So, if you'll just amuse us for a second, we're gonna show you what this parka looks like. Amazing, amazing. We all have name tags that you remove so we know, cause they all look alike when you're hanging them on the hooks for lunch. And it is the best equipment on the planet to keep you warm in Antarctica. And your other bits and pieces that go with it? Yeah, that's great. I will show you the other really important piece because I was out on the sea ice a lot. We were issued these fantastic boots that are lovingly called bunny boots. And bunny boots are military issue and the reason why they're so important is this part of the boot here. I feel like I'm in a shoe commercial. This part is insulated with felt and foam and air to protect you from the six feet of sea ice that you're walking on. Otherwise, your feet would get really cold, really fast. And this little dial right here, if you look from the side, it's a little more obvious. This is a valve that you open and close so when you're in the warmth of a building, you keep it open, the air flows in, and then when you go out in the ice, you go ahead and close it. Also, when you're up in a plane, you want to have it open because these will explode, which I've not had done. So these are the boots we wore. And those two pieces were what I wore both in 1992 and in 2017, and they worked fabulously, yeah. Oh, you do need that special stuff when you're in that extreme condition, right? You do, yeah. Your temperatures were down at, what? So Antarctica in the summer, so I was there October, November, and in the summertime, it's really not so bad. It's similar to a winter on the mainland. And if you visit my blog, you'll see that I actually took an image of the first thing I saw every morning for the seven weeks I was down there. It's a view of Observation Hill, which is a significant landmark in McMurdo Station, and the sun never sets. It's set for about three days when we first got there and then it was up 24 or seven. And so you can see the weather change and it was variable between zero and about 20-something degrees, not so bad, colder than Hawaii. Right, a little bit, a little bit. And yeah, I'm being on an ice substrate though. I mean, that adds a certain chill to the whole thing, I'm sure. And the wind is key. When it was windy and it often was, that's what brought the chill to that place, yeah. So what did you sort of, what were you doing on this journey? So the important thing to know about my first trip and my second trip, the first trip I went down as a scientist, the second trip I went down as a science communicator with the added hat of being a scientific illustrator. So my goal was to dive and collect data, much like a scientist that I could use as an artist. So what that means is I went down to get underwater, to see the sea life, to see the habitats, to collect as much information as possible so that when I got back after the seven weeks, I could use it as reference. So we have some more images. If you'll bring up the, yeah, that one is a great one to start with. That is me underwater with all my accoutrements. And this is ice above you, that's what this sort of dark shadows or? Yes, so the thing about Antarctica underwater, which is really different than above water is that it's very dark because the layer of sea ice is about six feet thick. And there's a layer usually of snow that comes and goes on top of it. And it makes everything kind of twilighty murky, not murky clear, but twilighty. So I had a light on just about every dive. And what you're seeing in that image is me with my camera and my dive slate. So I draw underwater with underwater paper that's plastic and a pencil. I take color notes and then I will show you in a little bit, I developed something where I would come back to the warmth of the cubicle with a nice hot cocoa and augment the drawings. So in this picture, you're seeing the sea ice above me, a crack, which is right in front of me above me. So that's where a pressure ridge is, where two pieces of ice are meeting and are crushing into each other. And then in the foreground, there's these little platelets of ice that kind of look like snow. And if this were a video, you would see that they are actually going up rather than down like snowflakes, because they're ice. And all that stuff in front of me is anchor ice. Anchor ice is a major feature in the shallows in Antarctica. And it causes a lot of problems for the sea life. If they can't get out of the way or if they're not moving out of the zone, they can get encased in ice and lifted up to the under ice surface, which is not a good place to be when you're a benthic animal. Right, exactly. Cool, excellent. So that strikes me as being very challenging drawing underwater, because you're floating around, you're orienting in different ways. Your subjects may be moving or floating or sinking, whatever. Your medium that you're in is more dense than air. And the kinds of things you're wearing on your hands makes a difference. So this is, so in Antarctica, you wear a dry suit, which we will see an image of shortly. This is a glove that is attached to the dry suit, which looks like I can wash dishes in it, but it's not. Inside are three, two inserts. We've got the thin one. I'll go, I'll hold it off to the side so you can see it. And then we have this one, which is thicker, very visible, and the most important layer, which keeps my hand dry. And in 1992, as a grad student, I was given wet gloves to wear, and it's much different when you wear dry gloves. My return to Antarctica on my first dive was me squealing underwater at minute 22, because my hands had not yet gone numb, which was typical when I was a 24-year-old down there diving, so I was so happy. And it is the cold that stops you. I very rarely ran out of a tank of air. It's always, I'm getting a little cold, I need to be safe, I need to be warm again, so I'll go back to the surface. Right, yeah, because I'd imagine hypothermia must be a real constant threat there. If I didn't have the equipment, absolutely that would set in lickety-split, but because of all the gear, I was pretty... But still, after some time, it's gonna be, yeah. Yeah, it can be a problem. Yeah, okay, great. Excellent, excellent. So maybe we'll go to more images because they're illustrating what you're talking about, right? Yeah, so let's bring up the dry suit. That's perfect. So this image of my dry suit is a watercolor sketch I did before going down, and it is my ode to my dry suit, why I love my dry suit because I am not a penguin. And in Antarctica, the ocean temperatures are 28 degrees Fahrenheit or minus two degrees Celsius, so if you have a glass of ice water in front of you, it's actually colder than that glass of ice water. It's salt water. It's salt water, yeah. So it's colder without freezing. Yeah. But that penguin there is wearing his own dry suit, right? He is, he or she is, for sure. So my dry suit was custom-made for me in my favorite color, which happens to be blue. When I was down there as a graduate student the first time I had to hand me down that leaked. This dry suit seals me in from neck and with the gloves attached to toe, and the only part of my face exposed is right around my mouth where the regulator goes. It never leaked on me, and I just, I love it still to this day. So the third thing on there is I can pretend to be a penguin while diving in it, but I do have to say that above water I do feel like the Staypuff Marshmallow Man. And when you're diving in Antarctica, there's so much equipment that you have to have an assistant help you don it and doff it. And also the dive is usually shorter than the time it takes to prep and get your tank together and everything. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I'll imagine, yeah. Oh, sounds like an exciting life, very different. So what was a normal day like there when you were down there? So a normal day was one or two dives were planned depending on the conditions and scheduling and everything as long as the weather was good. So the weather rules all down there. And there were days because of weather that we couldn't go out or we needed to wait and to see if it cleared. And then we would go have breakfast which has it's a dining facility. So you don't have to cook your own. You just show up. It's pretty cushy, pretty good food. And then you would go to the dive locker if it was a morning dive, probably a little bit of time to get a coffee or to check email. And we'd go get our gear together and we'd go out on the ice in a vehicle. We didn't have to walk out on the ice and we put all our gear in the vehicle and then go to the hut which is on the ice with a hole in it. And then we would do our dive. And then usually if we were close to McMurdo station we would go ahead and come back for lunch. And if we had an afternoon dive we'd do it after lunch. It was eat, sleep, dive, eat, sleep, dive is great. And then if we were further out, if we were traveling in the transports on the sea ice for longer than an hour we'd do back to back dives with a break in between what's called the surface interval. And we'd usually try to do two dives at location and it was fantastic because we'd bring our lunch with us and get to hang out on the ice and look around and warm up. It was fantastic. I did a total of 33 dives while I was there this time. Wonderful, wonderful. That sounds super, sounds super. So we're probably gonna explore a little more in your, the details of your dive and what you did and what you produced there and all that kind of stuff. I believe we have to take a little break right now. So we'll be back in one minute. Kirsten Carlson is with me here in the ThinkTech studios and we're talking about science, art, beauty and nature. We'll be back in one minute. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Hey, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech, Hawaii and they won't let me do political commentary so I'm stuck doing energy stuff but I really like energy stuff so I'm gonna keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're gonna talk about everything energy especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're gonna definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energyman. Aloha. And welcome back to likeable science here on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Kirsten Carlson, scientific illustrator, undersea explorer, artist, book author, sci art communications manager, all these multiple hat shoe heirs. And we were talking earlier about your trip to Antarctica that you did in 2017 and the dives you did there under the ice and illustrations you were making. And it just sounds like a really fantastic experience. Wonderful blending, seeing your illustrating and sharing some of the beauty that is very inaccessible to most people, right? Underwater in Antarctica. But you also saw other things around on the surface, penguins and stuff like that. I think we have an illustration show some selection of your art. Yeah. So I'm gonna share this with you today because it shows you how my first trip to Antarctica inspired me in many, many ways and why the second trip is the perfect partner to that first trip. So bear with me, I will just run you through with little verbal captions of what you're seeing on screen right now. So in the upper left is a field sketch of an emperor penguin and it's the largest and for the south dwelling penguin on earth. This penguin is one that I saw on my first trip to Antarctica and second trip. Their site where they raised their young is right around the corner from McMurdo Station we didn't visit, but I waved as we flew over. The emperor penguins, the penguins are something we see on the surface, not underwater while we're diving because they usually hang out near the sea ice and all my diving took place well within the sea ice edge and it was in areas they wouldn't dive, they liked being near the open ocean. So the middle one is where the land and sea meet which is an interactive activity book that highlights different intertidal zones around the world including Antarctica and I worked with scientists because of my science background and my marine science background in particular I did the design work and the illustration work for this book it's available through Alaska Sea Grant and it highlights all the animals you can see in the intertidal. Wonderful, wonderful. The third one over is Sea Secrets that's another nonfiction book done with scientists for the public for children and it's a great book that talks about two long-term ecological research projects that our government is funding through the National Science Foundation the same people who funded my trip in 2017 to Antarctica. Yay for NSF. Yay for NSF and Sea Secrets ties together these two long-term ecological research trips sorry projects in California and Antarctica with their the krill which I don't have an image of I'm sorry but it is on that cover and how the animals pictured in there feed off the krill and how interdependent all those ecosystems are and what's happening as time passes to those relationships. The krill in some sense are sort of the basis of a lot of the food chains in the ocean right? Absolutely, absolutely. I don't find them tasty but and then we're gonna continue clockwise so down in the middle there is a children's type illustration of a not real thing that I wish could happen is in a deli penguin making a snow angel that trail though by his flipper is a toboggan trail and they do actually make those and I saw that for the first time in 1992 and was blown away by just watching them skid over the sea ice in a very speedy motion on their bellies. The lower right is my logo which I think we showed at the beginning the middle one is what else seals and the reason I wanna spend a second on them is they are the furthest south marine mammal on the planet. They do dive where we're diving they are the only marine mammal that really can overwinter underwater and Antarctica and what's fascinating about them is that they make these amazing calls if you do a search online and do Waddell seal audio you will hear their very sci-fi like calls and we may not see them every dive but we definitely hear them every dive. The sound travels very well in the water. Yes, yes. And then in the bottom left hand corner that is a pycnogonid which is commonly called a sea spider though not a true spider. And they are very large down in Antarctica they can get as big as your hand everywhere else on the planet like around here in Hawaii they would be the size of your fingernail on your pinky probably. So that's my mitten hand from 1992 which is a wet glove and a sea spider on top. The middle is a logo so I'm a graphic designer and illustrator and the science background of mine all has resulted in all these projects. Wonderful, wonderful, great, great. Nice sample reservoir there. Wonderful, so what did you sort of take away from this? What did you get out of it? So what I got out of it is an amazing amount of inspiration that will last a lifetime. And in 92 when I went the first time I really came back with the idea that Antarctica helped reveal to me my true calling which is this foot in science and foot in art. So I'm going to spend the rest of my life along with all the other creative projects I'm pursuing and the hats I'm wearing sharing this inaccessible underwater environment with people through the lens of science and art. Excellent, excellent. So you've created illustrations of various sorts types and varieties. Yeah. I think we have some more of those. We do, so if you'll bring up what is that one you are awesome. So the underwater field sketch here, this is a sample of some of the quote unquote raw data I collected while I was underwater. So this is something you would have drawn basically the main parts at least. This is a finished augmented drawing. So the writing for sure was done above water without a glove on. The color is watercolor and it also was added as I was sipping cocoa in my cubicle. But the drawings, about three of the drawings on the page are done underwater and then I would come back up and the habit was to come back up and then add notes. So I would remember if you look in the upper right-hand corner you'll see that the dive is actually listed. This was a dive at a place called the Jetty which was very near McMurdo Station. It happened to be our primary dive site. It was done on October 27th, which was a Friday and this was a afternoon dive it looks like. I can't quite read that but you viewers at home can see it. It was a 55 foot dive for 40 minutes which was a little shallower and a little bit longer than my average dive. My average dive was about 70 feet and my time was probably around 36, 37 minutes. And then this was dive number three. So this was very early in the process and it wasn't until about, this was a seven week trip and it wasn't until about week four that I decided that I needed to start augmenting my drawings because my drawings underwater were pretty primitive. But the reason you draw underwater or the reason you really sketch at all is not always to make a pretty picture it's to understand in a deep-seated way what you're seeing. So, Gerta said, you don't really understand a plant until you draw it. So for me it's vital for me if I wanna understand a sea star to draw it first there's many things I become aware of as I'm processing it and drawing it. So that was the goal. I came away with 26 underwater sketches and I didn't bring samples of them with me today. I'm really sorry I have to come back and show you. Yes, indeed. But the other thing that I got was hours of footage and many photographs. And I think we have a couple of those. If you'll bring up the one that looks like icicles underwater, maybe. Yeah. So I was very interested because of my science background at looking at different habitats and this is one of the shallow habitats. What you're looking at is the anchor ice like you saw in a previous image at the start of the program. But this is a very different kind of anchor ice. You notice they're kind of like little bouquets underwater. You can see the subsurface, you can see the actual sediment. And then the things that look like stalactites or chandeliers hanging from the under ice surface are brine channels. And those happen as the fresh water sinks, melts and sinks through the cracks in the ice. And as it hits the saltwater it freezes out. And they actually flow almost like upside down volcanoes. So in the picture if you look really closely and squint you'll see some spots up in the under ice surface. Maybe up in the upper very left hand corner. There is a whole ecology that lives attached to the sea ice and that sea ice goes out every year. So they have to move for summer and they come back. Then if you look, I think this is not the greatest image to notice it but there are sea creatures that have gotten lifted up by the anchor ice and attached to the under ice surface. And every once in a while they find a long dead sea creature that comes up through the ice in another part of Antarctica that could have started on the sea floor, not here because the sea ice goes out every year but it's a very interesting thing that happens. There might be, is there one more image waiting for us to look at? Yeah, thank you. This is a typical view underwater. There are two more images I think left. This is the view, sort of a long shot of the typical habitat and the things I really want to point out to everyone that's tuning in today is that it is super clear underwater in Antarctica. Beautiful clear water. It is like diving in space. I have made that analogy many times. I am in the foreground in the blue custom made dry suit and I am busily distracted by something on the sea floor while a Waddell seal looks on. Remember I told you they come pretty much are on every dive and then in the background if you look up at the sea ice surface there's a couple things there I would like you to notice that are really cool. One is that there is something that looks like a full moon, a circle. That is our dive hole. It's really important to keep your eye on that at all times but it's really easy to see. You can see how the surrounding ice surface is kind of dark so it glows like the moon and that bright patch to the left of that round full moon hole is our breathing hitting the under ice surface and what's interesting about that I mentioned that there's a whole ecology attached to the sea ice there are diatoms that grow on the under ice surface and as the sun approaches 24 hours a day those diatoms start going crazy and it's an algae so it's kind of a brown color and they start growing on the under ice surface so when we do our safety stop and stay in one place and our bubbles hit the under ice surface we make these clear spots so that's what you're seeing in that image. And I wish we had time to go further but I'm told we are out of time here. You're fantastic. Kirsten, thank you so much for coming back here and sharing your wonderful beautiful art with us and I hope you can get back another time too. Yes. We'll dig even deeper into this and I hope you will come back and join us next time on Likeable Science here on McDeck Hawaii. Until then.