 Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chit Chat Across the Pond. This is episode number 772 for June 26th, 2023, and I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. One of the joys of traveling with the University Alumni Program is that your trips include lectures by professors and a variety of interesting subjects. One of my favorite people to learn from on our trip to Antarctica was Professor Jason Briner. He's a professor of geology who studies Arctic environmental change at the University of Buffalo. I am very pleased to introduce Dr. Briner to you today. Welcome to the show, Jason. Hi, Allison, thanks for having me. Hey, we had fun hanging out with penguins, right? Yeah, that was a blast. That was enough penguins, what did they say? 40,000 on one beach? I wasn't gonna stand there and count them, that's for sure. Well, while we were in Antarctica, you gave a fascinating talk about your research work in Greenland, and when we were working on when to schedule this conversation, you said, you know what, I'm about to go again. So I think it'd be even more fun if you talked to me right when I get back. So I'm just gonna open up the doors and let you roll. Why do you go to Greenland and what happens when you get there? Yeah, well, the Greenland ice sheets are pretty important component of the Earth's climate system. Of course, everybody these days is well aware of climate change and global warming and sea level rise. And globally, one of the biggest contributors to sea level change currently that sea level rise is melting of the Greenland ice sheet. So I'm part of a giant fleet of scientists that are studying the Greenland ice sheet and how it's responding to climate change and how it's contributing to sea level. So like there's people who study the ice from space, there's people who study the ice from airplanes, there's people who study the ice from a boat looking at it, cabbing and making glaciers, and there's people who study how it's changing today and there's people who study how it's changed in the past and trying to link them all together. So I'm like, I bring like one kind of science to the big problem of Greenland melt. So explain what a nice sheet is separate from other kinds of ice and you talked about that some on the trip. Yeah, a nice sheet is a type of glacier. So you've heard of a glacier and glaciers can exist in a variety of sizes. They can be small glaciers like the ones you might envision in Alaska. And then our planet has two ice sheets, basically the biggest category of glacier, something that we consider sort of like continent and scale or nearing continent and size. And the two ice sheets we have in the planet are the Antarctic ice sheet which sits on the Antarctic continent. And then in the Northern Hemisphere have the Greenland ice sheet which sits on the island of Greenland which is part of the North American continent in this case. And these glaciers are significant because they form on land in cold areas that receive a lot of snowfall. And then that snowfall doesn't melt off the following summer. And so in polar areas of the planet you have these conditions where the snowfall builds and builds and builds and builds and forms glaciers. And then they like flow downhill or cav off ice birds into the ocean and then they melt. But in any case it's the poles where these things exist and Greenland is the one in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on the island of Greenland. It's three kilometers thick. And if it were all the melt it would raise global sea levels by like 24 feet. Geez, okay. Okay, that gives me scale. I can't picture it in width or length but when you say 24 feet if the entire thing melted. Okay, so we don't want that to happen. We do not. Okay, I'm definitely not 20. I don't think we're 24 feet above sea level. We might be, but that's tough. So yeah, and the thing about that is it's like you don't want it to go away but even like minor oscillations of that ice sheet have a big impact on global sea level change. Like even a foot of course is really significant. And that's just Greenland. So if the planet is doing something crazy enough to get a foot of sea level rise out of Greenland and it's also doing something crazy on the other glaciers, on the Antarctic ice sheet and these other components that also lead to sea level rise. Right, right, okay. So you go to, I've seen photos and I've got a link in the show notes to Jason's galleries about showing his trips to Greenland and to Alaska. And this is not that you go check into a Marriott when you get there. Describe what it's like going there. Right, usually the style of research I do where we want our samples from and the parts of the Arctic that we wanna study the parts of Greenland that we wanna study aren't in like the towns there, there in a remote part of the landscape or on the ice sheet where there's no infrastructure and people don't typically go. So these are areas we've identified that have scientific importance. So I might go with a colleague from another university. I might bring along a couple of graduate students, maybe an undergraduate student. So it's basically like a couple of professors and a few students getting flown in to some remote location in a float plane or a helicopter, maybe a plane on skis and they kick us out into the tundra or on the ice and all our duffel bags. And we basically create our camp, a remote camp on the spot. So we have all the food we need with us for the next whatever weeks. We have tents and we have our scientific equipment that's gonna allow us to conduct our studies or collect our samples. In your talk in Antarctica, you said that you love that first feeling of being completely disconnected. Why is that? Yeah, I think that this noise that we're surrounded by in our daily lives these days with social media and just plugged in digitally, email on my phone, it's really quite amazing to be dropped off in this location. And the last thing you sort of hear sense of civilization is the plane engines cranking up and then like flying away until you can't hear it anymore. And that's like literally the plug unplugging from the outlet is this thing going away. And then you're there and it's quiet and your life becomes quite simple. I also have young kids at home. And so there's all these elements of how life goes from complicated or there's just the number of things you think about in a day is vast to maybe there's three or four things you need to think of. Your life boils down to some few things and few simple things. Wow, when you describe it as being remote, I could kind of picture it, but then when I looked at your photos, oh my gosh, it's remote. I mean, the great white angle shots that you have that just show nothing but white and then these little bitty tents way off in the background of you guys working. So let's get into the research of what is it you're doing when you're there? On this most recent trip, what were you studying? How do you go about it? Okay, so I'm just back from Greenland a couple of weeks ago and I was there for about a month and I was part of a project that we call Green Drill. So this is drilling through the Greenland Ice Sheet and in particular, this kind of drilling or why we wanna drill to the Greenland Ice Sheet relates to trying to get samples of the crust, the Earth's crust, the surface of the Earth, the rocks and stuff that are buried by the ice sheet. And so basically some recent headway in scientific progress has resulted in some really interesting new insights about ice sheet sensitivity to climate change in terms of ice sheet history, like how long have these ice sheets been on the planet? How often do they grow and shrink? We know that if we look to the Earth's past and we look at temperature, temperature changes a lot up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. And this is the Ice Age cycles that you might have heard about. And what we realize is that the Greenland Ice Sheet actually grew and shrank a lot in these Ice Age cycles under natural climate variability in Earth history. That's before we were here. It was happening- Before we were here, yeah, I mean, you know, our ancestors were here, but before modern civilization, the ice sheets are pulsing as climate is naturally pulsing. But we didn't know really how much. And it turns out when we started to analyze, we got this really special sample from the bottom of the Greenland Ice Sheet. It was almost collected by accident. And I was part of a team that made some analysis on these rock samples below three kilometers of ice. And the analysis of those rock samples came way down there. And this is like, this is almost as rare as getting a moon rock. Like there's no other, no one gets a rock from below the middle of an ice sheet. Like it just hardly ever happens. And so this sample was so precious. Like I said, almost collected by accident. So we finally measured it and it told us that that ice sheet, that huge ice sheet that locks away 24 feet of sea level change was gone. Not that long ago, like sometime within the last million years, maybe even more recent than that. And this really shut up. What do you mean it was gone? Well, below it's its thickest part. The rock sample told us it had no ice over it. As recently as sometime in the last million years. So you're saying there's a pocket of something above the earth when you got down there? The ice sheet is covering the sample now. But the chemistry of the sample told us it was exposed to basically daylight. Oh, as in no ice sheet at all? And in order to be exposed to the sky, you can't have the ice sheet there. And that wasn't that long ago? And it wasn't that long ago and the earth was in the middle of this ice age period. And so we're like, why did the whole thing disappear? You know, this recently in the geologic past, the scientific community at that point was like, it probably grew several million years ago when the ice age started and oscillated, it pulsed, but it never went to zero. We wonder now if it actually goes to zero more frequently than we previously thought. So back to the screen drill project. So now this research is now intentionally putting holes in the Greenland ice sheet to stick a needle down and we're taking the biopsy of the bed of the ice sheet. We're trying to drill through the ice and pluck up a piece of rock from below the ice so if we can ask it the same question, when's the last time you saw the sky? And this will give us more information about these oscillations of the ice sheet. Does it really go away periodically? Was it really gone recently? And that's what we're trying to address. So is that to verify the results of the first accidental test? Yes, verify those results. Because your first thing is you've got to assume you either made a mistake or... This is something Andrea just said. You either made a mistake or you've discovered something and you need to know which one it is. Yes. Geology is tough that way. It's not what we call experimental science. It's not necessarily like lab science. You can't just set up another experiment and redo it. Right, right. There's no control variable or control system you set up, yeah. It just doesn't really work like that. So geologists are like Sherlock Holmes' scouring of the earth, trying to sniff up clues and make interpretations about earth history. So in this case, we need to go sniff up more clues. We need more data. And it's not gonna be a yet anyway. It's not gonna be an exact replication of this first accidental finding. But we're trying to build on that to see if we can basically, yeah, confirm, add, grow, build on that study to learn more about the problem. So is it a dumb question to ask? Could it have just been a hole in it there but you take a sample someplace else in this giant ice sheet and you don't find that result? Could they sort of both be true? That there was a hole in it but it wasn't gone? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a dumb question at all. In this, therein lies the problem. This first accidental sample I'm referring to was some rock collected at the bottom of one of the long ice cores, really famous ice cores that tell us a lot about the climate history of the planet. The diameter of the ice core and of the rock that was accidentally collected below the ice core is like as big as a tennis ball. It's like the diameter of a tennis ball that you cut in half. So really is that middle biopsy? It is and you have this entire Greenland ice sheet. Oh, and we have one sample that's only this big. So your question, what we really, how we try to tackle that is with like models, computer models that try to mathematically simulate the Greenland ice sheet. Wow. And those models say that if there was no ice at our little tennis ball location, then probably that means that the ice sheet had to have really, if not completely gone away, like 95% gone away. Okay, okay. Wow, it would be a whole discussion separate from this, but it makes me wanna go, okay, how do you write these models? How did you figure out how to do that? But that's probably a whole another discussion. It's a huge discipline within climate science. It's these same models that predict future sea level rise. Okay. You can't do that without having a whole research lab devoted to running fancy supercomputer models of ice sheets oscillating through time and how they get impacted by climate because in those models, you need to have the physics of how glaciers flow need to understand that when the atmosphere is this temperature, that means this much melt. So this is a discipline in earth science, this kind of like glacier ice sheet modeling. I like learning this stuff from you because my entire view of what a geologist is is the geologist on Big Bang Theory. And I know you said you hadn't seen him, but I mean, he's just this big, slow-moving, boring guy. Like you can't breathe, he's so boring. And it's like, that's what a geologist is. And it's obviously nothing like that, but learning about all these different fields that you could go into as a geologist doing the computer science of it, that's cool too. But I was really struck by some of the photos that it appears to be your part mechanic when you're working on the ice sheet because the drills and stuff, there's some really great photos up close. I'm a mechanical engineer. I can't help myself. I was really excited by looking at the drills and the equipment and described like the process. How do you drill holes in an ice sheet? Yeah, so I'll start with the answer to that question by relating it to what you were talking about the iconic geologist and what my definition of geology is or the way I would characterize it are, it's as a field, geology or earth science is maybe a more modern lingo buzzword to describe it, is by definition interdisciplinary. It's you're integrating physics and math and chemistry, archeology, paleontology, volcano studies. In order to understand a process on earth, you might need to rely on some computer science. You need to go out in the field and do field work. You need to collect data. You need to do data analysis and all these processes, understanding of how it works requires fundamental knowledge in physics and math and chemistry. And now going forward to talking about this drilling. So I might bring a particular expertise to this project but I'm not a mechanical engineer. I don't know how a drill operates. So we partner with, we collaborate with mechanical engineers who are professional drillers and they're the ones who will collect ice cores for climate studies. And the drillers that we hooked up with have expertise in drilling through the ice but they're not interested in the ice. They're interested in then going into the rock below the ice. So it's this program of drillers called the Ice Drilling Program, US IDP, Ice Drilling Program. And they're the group of people that gets the contract from the US National Science Foundation to support scientists like me in their pursuits to get a sample to study. So we partner with this engineering group. Oh, sorry, go ahead. So we partner with this engineering group, the Ice Drilling Program, and they send drillers with us, the scientists. We all go to the remote corner of Greenland and we work together to get our samples. Okay. Now it's intriguing to me that you talk about drilling just down to the earth. When we were on the trip, you talked about doing a core which is you're pulling a cylinder out. Are you not pulling a cylinder out now? You're just going, I'm just going all the way down. So this first sample that I talked about earlier was that was accidental. To get to the bottom of the ice sheet took like three or four drilling seasons. Oh, wow. Because they were collecting ice cores. You can imagine, here we are, society on earth kind of freaking out about some sea level rise. And we want to go build on this first study to try to learn a lot more information about the Greenland ice sheet. We don't have time to sit on the ice sheet and drill for three years before we get our sample. We need to speedily get down to the bottom and get our sample out. And in order to do that, you need to not collect ice cores as you go. You need to just basically auger through, make ice chips and flush those ice chips out to the surface and then keep drilling and try to get to the bed as fast as possible. So this is like two miles though, right? In our case, we use drills that are good at like, let's see, so the site, our main site that we drilled this spring that I just came back from was 500 meters. I'm an ugly American, I'm typing 500 meters. Like, just go for it. 1600 feet. Okay, type 509 meters. 509? Yeah. 1669. Oh, that's only 12 inches. Oh, that's about 1700 feet. Quarter mile or something, 1700 feet. Yeah. So that was the thickness of ice at this site. So the drill technology we're using, we need to fit it into an airplane, actually a lot of different trips on that airplane. And we need to get it out into some remote corner of Greenland and we need to drill through the ice and then we need to get it all back out all in one season. So that limits how thick you can go through. So the kilometers, the ice sheet is three kilometers and it's thickest. We went to a site that's 500 meters or maybe about 1700 feet thick. And so that was our drill site. We went through 1700 feet of ice. Geez, that's still. And we, it took a long time and we drilled, these drillers are so amazing. It's just incredible, the skill set of these drillers. It turns out, my view is that mechanical engineers, you included, you guys are like professional problem solvers. This is everyone, you're all MacGyver's. It's not so much that you know how to use a piece of equipment, that you know how to fix it or you know how to tweak it to do what you want. It goes way beyond just getting a tool and using it. It's every day, almost every hour, problem solving along the way and always making constant improvements or debugging something. So these drillers to get this thing to work the way they did was just absolutely astonishing. I'm picturing Ben Affleck and his team in the movie Armageddon that can drill anything and they can solve all the problems. That's what these guys were. By the way, that's a favorite movie of these rock drillers. Is it really? Quotes from it the whole time, I like it. So you mentioned when we were arranging when we were gonna talk, you said this trip was challenging. So what went wrong? There were quite a few headaches. I would put those in two categories. One is weather. We had really crummy weather. We had a lot of blowing snow, a lot of high winds, a lot of ground blizzard conditions. I was at, we actually did two drill sites. One at 509 meters and one at 97 meters or like 300 feet. And I spent my time at this 300 foot ice sickness site where we were using a drill. And at our camp where I was, we were getting like 60 mile an hour winds. And mind you, we're intense on the surface of a glacier on a downward sloping glacier. And these winds are blasting off the glacier. There's nothing blocking the wind from you at all. There's no trees, there's nothing. Yeah, exactly. So it was, I mean, that's as extreme as it got, but just even like standard 20, 30 mile an hour winds with all that blowing snow means it's not only uncomfortable to work, but the power supply for the drills are generators, gasoline driven generators, and they don't like blowing snow. So if there's blowing snow, you basically clog up the generator and it dies or you can't use it. So at both drill sites, the reliance on generators meant that any time the wind was really blowing, we had to not do operation. So the first of two major challenges this season was the weather. We had a lot of blowing snow. So we could only work maybe like half the days we were there. So that really cut down at the time to get the job done in the time window that we had. The second challenge was more technological. So this drill, that got us through 1700 feet of ice. The previous, it had only been successfully used once before to go through a glacier, that was Antarctica, and it went through about 500 meters of ice. Okay. Not 500 meters, sorry, 500 feet. Okay. So we're basically more than tripled the depth of ice that this drill went through. So in this new territory of these great depths, there's just new problems that arise that the engineers need to like problem solve solutions for. One of the things that you need to do, remember how I said that the drill goes down and it makes ice chips? If you didn't get rid of those ice chips, the hole would just clog with ice chips. Right, right. So you need to remove all the ice that you're drilling, you need to flush it out of the hole and that's done with pressurized drilling fluid. Okay. So you basically have a constant circulation of fluid. You have a pump on top, you're pushing a fluid down the hole, maybe all these rods that go down that they're drill bit is on the bottom of, they're hollow. Oh, okay. So the simple way to think of it is that the fluid goes down the middle of all these rods and then flushes out the bottom of the drill bit and then runs back up the outside of the drill rod pipe up to the surface where the fluid is re-collected. Okay. So there's a simple pressure, pressure at the top drilling fluid circulation. Simple. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Simple in concept, but not in practice. Okay. Now the problem with pressurized fluid down the hole, at some point that pressure could theoretically get high enough that you can hydro fracture the ice. Oh. And if the pressure is so high that you fracture the ice column that you're creating as you go down the borehole, you make a crack in the glacier and away goes your drilling fluid. Oh. And you can no longer drive those chips up to the surface and then you can get clogging. So what makes the pressure go up? Just because of the head? How far down you've gone? Yes, correct. And the amount of pressure you need to flush those ice chips all the way up to the surface of a very, very long hole. Right. So it turned out that we drilled to 370 meters and then the hole got a fracture in it. 370 feet or meter? This was meters. So whatever that is in feet. So remember we're going to fight, we eventually got to 509 meters. Okay. And at 370 meters on our way down before we got there, the hole fracked. And we lost all our drilling fluid or up to a certain level. Can you even get the drill back out at that point? So the drill itself was still bathed in this drilling fluid. Okay. And then water because that would freeze. So it's like a purify kerosene kind of thing. So that's collected in the hole in the glacier and the drilling bit is still bathed in this drilling fluid and it's up higher than it leaked out. Okay. So when that happened, we basically thought the show was over. Yeah. That we would have had all these resources and all this effort out on the glacier and we weren't going to get our sample. Mind you, this is like to put all, this is 60,000 pounds of equipment we had to fly under the ice sheet. Right. We had about 12 people out there. We had this like mini tent city. You can see in this, some of these photographs on my gallery. So it's a pretty sizable encampment. This is a pretty big operation especially relative to what I'm used to which is like a couple of professors and their grad students. This is like a pretty big operation for what a lot this kind of work is. And you're only able to work every other half of the days because of the weather. Half of the days because of the weather and then this thing happens and then this thing happens and it's like, well, we only have like a week and a half left before the planes coming back to start shuttling us off the glacier. So there was one thing that we could try which is to pull everything out of the hole and, okay, maybe I need to back up. The surface of a glacier is snow. And eventually at some depth that snow gets compacted into ice. Okay. That's how like most glaciers are. In the snow part of the glacier, the top part, you can't make a hole and circulate fluid through it. The fluid would just leak into the snow path. Oh, right, right. So the top part of the hole you need to line with hollow metal rods called casing, like really like wide just like a metal pipe, like a picture like a plumbing pipe that's metal like an irrigation pipe in a farm field in California. The top of the hole is lined with this metal piping that we call casing. And the casing comes down that goes both through the snow part of the glacier. And once we get into the ice density range then we can just drill a hole into the glacier ice itself. Makes sense. The junction between the coast part of the hole that where the casing is and the ice part of the hole is the specialized coupler that couples the case part of the hole with the uncased part of the hole called a packer. Okay. And the packer is basically like it's in a long dated intertube. So it's like this long thing that's rubber and you stick it down there and then a little hose goes to the surface and you inflate it and it goes all right. Okay. And it sticks it into place and the casing screws into the top of that. And then below that it opens up to just the ice hole. Yeah. So, okay. So it turned out this packer was about where this fracture took place. So what they thought was that if they pull all this casing run out and the packer out and then re-drill the hole that the casing slides into they re-drill that hole to a deeper level in the glacier column. Put the packer back in. Then the casing gets to go lower or the packer gets to go lower. Yes, exactly. Then you could put the casing lower and cover up that hole. Seal that fracture. So that's what they did and it worked. Oh my God. But it took them like a week to do it because they had to do all this incredible manual labor to pull everything out put everything back in, re-drill it, reset the packer, re-put the casing in. So like a week or something later meanwhile there you can't work a couple of days because there's bad weather. You're looking at your watch. You're like, oh my God, the plane's coming any day. So they put all that infrastructure back in and then after a few more problem solving steps they hit the bed at 509 meters. Wow. Planes come in the next day. Oh geez. Then a storm comes in. No. Planes not coming the next day. Yay. Storm and yay. Storm ends at like 5 p.m. They all go to the drill tent and drill like crazy. So the other thing is once they drill through the ice column and they hit the bed, they need to pull everything up and put a new bit on the bottom. Because you gotta go pick the stuff up. Yes, not only, yes. Because now you're going from not collecting any core to collecting core and you need a new bit that's, the first bit is just remember it's, all that needs to do is chip out ice. Now we need to drill in rock. So we need to change the bits from an ice bit to a rock bit. And we need to put in this particular tube that collects, that is designed to collect the rock as we drill into it. 5 p.m. Storm abates. They all run out to the tent. They work all night long. They collect seven and a half meters. Okay, so like 25 feet. Oh, a lot. Of core material. Like a 25 foot tall core. In increments, they pull it up. And then they sleep like 24 hours and then the plane starts coming and shuttling people off the ice. Oh my gosh. I'm sorry, but I can't stop having the analogies to Armageddon. You know, I'm thinking, no, we've only got 15 more seconds before the nuke blows. You know, here he comes. Here comes the plane. We gotta get it. Wow. It was stressful. Wow. Yeah, yeah. It was tense and these drillers, you know, not only are they professional problem solvers and like they just made this happen, but they have a tremendous amount of pressure on their shoulders, right? Like, all the resources, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's never a given, right? It's never a gimme that you're gonna go out there. You know, it just hasn't been done that often. It's not like some like surgery that's so routine that it's just a no-brainer that it's gonna happen. Like this is really at the cutting edge. Like I said, this is the first time this drill's been used, first time it's ever been used on Greenland. It was used through an ice thickness three times more than the previous time it was used. And so it's really at the leading edge and these drillers need to acknowledge that its success isn't a gimme. Yeah, definitely. Can I ask a really obnoxious question? What are you and your team doing during this? So you guys playing poker while these guys are drilling? What were you doing? This is a great question actually. So like I said, we had two drill camps and I myself was down at the drill camp closer to the edge of the ice sheet where we were getting these windstorms coming down the glacier. And our drill was a smaller drill and it was designed to go through while we went through 300 feet of ice. That actually required all hands on deck because every time we were going into the bed below our 300 feet of ice, it turns out we would get a piece of the core like 10 centimeters in time and pull it up. We eventually from the camp I was at with this 300 foot drill, we got six feet of a rock core. But it came out in like, it came out in like six inch increments. Every time it came out, we had to put rod 300 feet down a hole. So these are like five foot rod sections. They screw together. So you're screwing together a five foot rod to another five foot rod, dropping it down the hole, screwing another one on top, dropping it down the hole, screwing another one on top. Repeat, repeat, repeat until you get to 300 feet. Then you drill and you're like, oh, I think we got six inches and now the drill got stuck. Can't get any more. Okay, pull it up. Five feet, five feet, five feet, five feet, 300 feet, you're pulling it all out and you take your little baby core out and put it in the box and then you go repeat and do that again. So the drill camp I was at, not only were the drillers busy, I was busy, my graduate student was busy. We were all really busy. It was a lot of manual labor. Yeah. Up at the 1700 foot camp, the drill was a bit more mechanized and the drillers there were a little bit more separate from the professor who was there, the graduate student who was there and so on. But it turns out that that's a huge camp that needs to be maintained. And here's one example. I talked about these wind storms. It turns out that if you're on the ice sheet and there's nothing else on the ice sheet and the wind blows really hard, the snow just keeps blowing and the surface of the ice sheet doesn't change from before the storm to after the storm. If you put an obstacle on a flat ice sheet surface and you blow snow against it, you're gonna get a huge carving out on the upwind side, a scour, like an eddy pool. And on the downwind side, you get a huge snow drift, snow drift. Now picture not one obstacle on the surface of a glacier with a lot of wind, but what, 15 different tents and like equipment and barrels of fuel and barrels of gas and generators, the whole camp had these ginormous snow drifts everywhere. Then the next storm, the wind might change direction and the wind comes from another direction. So now he has huge snow drifts in this other direction. So basically it was a full-time job to be constantly digging out the tents after each one of these snow storms. You don't know grad students this stuff beforehand, right? You know, I've purple tunnel from making these connections. And being- And how strong is your back? Exactly. Wow. So there's a lot to do to maintain a camp that even if you're not in the drill tent helping the engineers as the science team, you're maintaining camp. Wow, that is, I'm just baffled at how you get anybody to agree to go do this, but I bet it's an honor to get to go do it. Yeah, you know, the kinds of people that are attracted to this discipline or this kind of science are those folks who are interested in this kind of adventure. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. So the total length of time that you were there this time, you said it was a month? I was there for a month. The team, the whole team, was there for basically two months. There was a week or two, two-ish weeks in the beginning of the field season when we were sorting through all our equipment, staging what's gonna go with what plane load and getting everybody and all the equipment shuttled onto the glacier. That was a couple of week period and there was about a week-ish or more period at the end where things were like shuttling off. So time spent on the ice by anybody was probably like seven or eight weeks. And then various people kind of came and went during that overall period. And I was one of the people that kind of came and went. I came in after everything was put on the ice and then my objective was to work with the subset of the drill team and we got deployed to the second drill site. And then when that job ended and we went back up to the top, that was about when they were really struggling to know if they were gonna get it or not. I shuttled off and came back to not rate that point. And then they did a bunch of problem solving and that's when they later then got that 25 foot long core from the bottom. That's crazy. So as a scientist, what kind of science are you doing while you're there? Or is it really mostly the manual labor of making things go? It's mostly a sample collection mission. So we're collecting, the goal was basically to collect samples. Those samples we analyze back home. Most of the science we do is after the field season when we have these samples back in our labs. Okay, so how important is it to you to be there and experience it as part of what you're doing? Yeah, I mean, there's maybe two reasons why we would go. One is so we can appreciate what was all involved. But the other reason is that there are decisions to be made about how the sampling is going and should we go further to get the sample or not? And these are decisions that are best made in the field when you're part of a team. When the sample's coming out, do you need somebody to catalog it? You need somebody to maybe sort of like log it as it's coming out? It would be important to keep those in order, probably. Keep it all in order, yeah. So when we have this 25 foot long core doesn't all come up in one big, long 25 foot straw. It comes up in chunks. And so we gotta be really systematic how we catalog all that. This is amazing. It's just stuff that I don't know anything about. And I love learning new things that I don't know anything about. And the importance of the work you're doing, obviously there isn't anything more important to the world than what you guys are working on that's really astonishing. Yeah, that's nice of you to say. I think the climate change issue is we know a lot more about it than we did. I think a lot of the challenges we face as a society is on the action side. But certainly there's still some questions on the science side as well. One of the things that really struck me on the trip, everybody on this trip that we were on was from some university somewhere. And one of the things I love about that is anybody you sit down next to no matter where you have anything in common in life with they're interesting and interested. Everybody was talking and telling stories and listening to each other. And it was really great. You did a talk about the core sampling done in Antarctica into the ice sheet there. And you explained how through the core sample they were able to find pockets of air going back. How many, I wanna say 800,000 years? Nice. There you go. Yeah, exactly. I'm really bad at remembering numbers like that especially the scale, I get it wrong all the time. But so they were able to go back 800,000 years and look at the air samples over time and they could measure the CO2 and methane in those pockets of air over time. And that's how we get those nice cyclical graphs you can see where people say, look it's not humans because look it's doing this nice little cycle. You see it happens all the time. But the graph as it goes to when industrialized society starts suddenly the scale of CO2 and methane is off the charts in height. It's nothing like the natural characteristics you saw before that. And I had seen that graph before but I hadn't heard it as well described as the way you described it. The fact that I can repeat it since you explained it really well. But I sat down with somebody at lunch right after hearing you talk. And I said, wow, that was really amazing. I mean, incontrovertible evidence of human created climate change. And the person I was talking to was an engineer and his answer back to me was, yeah, but I'm gonna need to see the data. And I couldn't speak for a minute because I couldn't think of any answer other than that was the data. You just saw the data. The data is what you just saw. That what is wrong with you? And how do you, how can you stand it? Cause I'm sure you get this more than I've ever heard it. How do you even respond to something like that? Yeah, it can be tough. Yeah, the data, I'd like to see the data. Just showed it to you. Do you want to say it again? It's a real shame that something that is 100% scientific, grounded in science, has been hijacked as a political tool to bend people into their political parties. This is what politicians do is they choose a topic, polarize it to try to garner the votes into their camp. And it's a real shame that that happened to climate. And I start by saying that because in some ways, there's some people that you could have a conversation with and you'll get somewhere and there's others that you won't. And I think it's a little bit sad, but in my experience so far, maybe it sounds like a little bad to just say, I've given up, but like there's certain people, no matter what you say, they'll come back with the yabba or the sound bites that they heard somewhere. And it's just, you can tell you're not getting in and you might never get in. What is that phrase about something that ends up annoying the pig and you get all muddy? You don't get anywhere with it. The thing I always think about with a subject like exactly what we're talking about is what possible motivation would anybody have to get everybody all excited about this if it wasn't real? You know, there's no motivation. There's motivation on the other side to say it's not real because we can make a bunch of money drilling oil and burning up dead dinosaurs and ruining the atmosphere. There is motivation on the other side. There's no motivation to creating panic or fear or worry other than we need to fix this. There is no other reason to do it. It's not like a hobby. Yeah, my favorite one is that the professors are in it for the money. Grants and billions of dollars that goes straight into our personal pockets, you know, pass me that. Obviously, yeah. That's what I've always heard professors make just huge amounts of money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's probably the biggest problem in society. Well, I think this has been really, really interesting and I love talking to you about this. Maybe when you learn more about what you found, you could come back and tell us about it. I would love to hear what you found in seven and a half feet of core of the earth from underneath the Iceland ice sheet. That is just fantastic. Yeah, it's definitely something we're really excited that we have these samples. And yeah, I mean, we're just like jumping into our labs right now to try to analyze it. Yeah, go science everything now. Yeah, we got to science the blank out of it. All right, again, you are from the University of Buffalo and we've got a link to your website where everybody can look at these pictures and really appreciate the work that you're doing here. Thank you so much for coming on. This was just such a joy. Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chinchat Across the Pon Light. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. 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