 Okay, there we go. So we are recording and I would like to officially welcome everybody to our Meet the Experts program today. My name is Tiffany and I'm a science educator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. And I'm with my colleague, Alice, who's a scientist at NCAR. I'm gonna share her work with us today. And obviously we're coming to you from our own homes as I'm sure most of you are coming to us from your home or elsewhere on your computers, but we're all still doing our work and that's why we get excited to share it with you every other week. And that's what happens every other Thursday, we meet with somebody who works at NCAR and we learn about what they do in their jobs and answer questions from those of you who are participating. One really cool part that I always like to point out about a place like NCAR and working at a place like NCAR is that there are so many different types of jobs. So you don't have to be a scientist, although you can and Alice is gonna tell us today how cool that is, but you can also be an engineer, you can be an electrician, a computer programmer, a safety expert, a machinist. We have people working in all those jobs at NCAR and all of those jobs help to support the scientific research that happens. So we do happen to have a scientist today and I'm gonna turn it over to her to Alice to tell you a little bit more. Please feel free to enter any questions that you have in the chat as we go and I will share those questions with Alice as we go or wait until the end. All right. All right, let me share some pictures here. All right. So hi everyone, thanks for coming today to listen to me talk about what I do at NCAR. What I'm talking to you about today is ice, sea ice. And with this picture you see right here is one that someone I know very well took from a ship in the Antarctic. And so this is an idea of what sea ice looks like and we're mainly gonna be talking about sea ice specifically. So my official title is I'm a project scientist and I do polar climate modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And in the chat I saw that most people were in Colorado so here's Colorado in the United States and here's NCAR, I'm kind of assuming many people have seen it. And then my pre-COVID office was up here in the top of one of these towers. But this is what my office looks like now. I have two kids and we have a pod with one other child and so at any moment there could be people kind of walking in and out but hopefully not during this presentation. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was some of my formative experiences. So this means experiences I had as a kid growing up. So I grew up here in Colorado and my family had lots of outside time. So here I am in an old fashioned hiking backpack and here I am with my mom hiking when I was really little. And then when I was older we did lots of family hikes. This is my little brother and I did some science museum type exploration. Like here you can see my hair standing up at a vandagraph generator. And so I've always been really interested in the natural world. I didn't necessarily know from a young age that I wanted to be a scientist. I was interested in lots of things. I really like history and stuff as well. But when I was in college I ended up majoring in physics and I minored in history. And during that time I tried lots of different research because it's important to figure out what you're not interested in as it is to also figure out what you are interested in. So I did some research here. You can see me in a lab working one summer doing stuff with lasers. I did paleo climate research which means I studied the climate from the distant past and what that meant was looking at lots of these little teeny tiny organisms that live in the ocean. They still live in the ocean but we looked at ones from a long time ago. And so this is not me. This is a picture I found on the internet but it's indicative of what I did. I counted them using a very fine tip paint brush and a microscope. I also tried some geophysics research. So I'm measuring some of the information about these rocks here. I did some astronomy research and then I did some applied math research as well. And so all of these things were really useful in helping me understand what I was or wasn't interested in while I was in college. And I also realized that I really liked working with scientists in training. And so the title of this talk, Ice Is Nice is from this Cat in the Hat book that we have and that I read to my daughters. It's about the North and the South Poles and that's kind of what I study. These are them exploring the natural world but in college I also did outreach like here. I was bicycling and this bike is attached to a generator so I was trying to get this light turned on and I will say that it was really difficult. So that gives you an idea of how hard it actually, how much energy it actually takes to light up all the light bulbs in our house. And here I was working with some other kids on a different day where we were testing some airplanes and stuff like that. So I really like working with kids as well as doing my own research and learning about the earth and what's happening in our earth. And so what I do now is polar climate modeling and I'll describe what that means more. But first I wanted to just kind of get us all on the same page and pause and talk a minute about what I mean when I say the poles. So this picture right here shows the sun which is really far away. This is obviously not to scale but the sun's light comes and hits the earth. And when I talk about the poles, what I mean is the Arctic or the North Pole area. So you can see right here, basically the top of the earth and this is where polar bears live. And then the South Pole or the Antarctic is down here at the other side of the globe and this is where penguins live. And so one thing I just wanted to get out of the way I don't study them but polar bears and penguins do not interact at all and if they did the polar bears would probably really enjoy eating penguins but lots of books and stuff show them together. So I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that polar bears are in the North Pole and penguins are down in the South Pole or the Arctic in the North and the Antarctic in the South. And one thing that scientists often do is we think about looking at earth from different angles. So I wanna talk about this for a minute. If you were in a satellite up here above earth and you looked at this picture of the earth so this is a satellite image a composite of many satellite images I believe and you look up here at the North Pole just think about what you're seeing and to orient ourselves, this is North America right here in the center of this image. So Colorado is like right here along the mountains. So if you look, if you were here in the satellite and you were looking down at the North Pole you would see a lot of white and some of this white is ice that's on land and some of it is ice that's on the ocean. And so I wanna just give everybody a moment here. I believe there will be a pole but which image is showing the Arctic as you would see it from space. So we're talking about the North Pole. Tiffany are you able to put up the... I am so I am going to I believe launch a pole about poles. Wait, that's, sorry, that's the wrong one. Okay, so I'm going to launch this pole and everybody can answer the question that Alice asked. All right, so which image shows the Arctic from space? The image on the left or the image on the right? And remember that the Arctic is the North Pole or where a pole is located. So I'm going to go ahead and show you what I'm going to show you. So I'm going to go ahead and show you what I'm going to show you. So I'm going to go ahead and show you what I'm going to show you. North Pole or where polar bears live. I guess when people have answered Tiffany, let me know and then I can go forward. Well, we've got almost all of our answers. I'm going to give it just one more second. Anybody else wants to? Okay, I'm going to end that and I'll share it and we'll see what everybody thought. Okay, so many people said the image on the right, which is correct. The Arctic is the image here on the right. So I have the polar bear here just to remind you. This pole is to show kind of where the North Pole is. And then on the left, we have the Antarctic where penguins live and we have a pole to show where the South Pole is. So one thing I want to emphasize that's different between the two poles is that the Antarctic here is land, this darker white is land that's covered in ice. This ice is really thick. It's more than a mile thick over land and it's glacial ice, which means it doesn't have salt in it. And that's just one differentiation between glacier ice and sea ice. And what I study mainly is sea ice. In contrast, the Arctic is an ocean that's surrounded mostly by land. So not entirely, because obviously the ocean's open right here. And at the North Pole, instead of glacial ice that's more than a mile thick, we have relatively thin ice. So a few feet to a few yards thick over a deep ocean and it's sea ice, which means there's a little bit of salt in it. Sea ice is freezing sea water. And you don't need to know why glacial ice and sea ice are different other than the salt makes them behave a little bit differently. And so it is important for scientists to understand what type of ice we're working with. So what do I do? On a typical day as a computer modeler, I use my laptop at home. This image is from Ali Brosch and I really like it. So I'm working at home and then connected through the internet. I work and run simulations on the NCAR Supercomputer. So this is a picture of Cheyenne, the main NCAR Supercomputer. And here are some people next to it right here for scale. So you get an idea of how big it is. But for my computer, what you would see is basically something like this image here. So there are pictures here of the Antarctic. I'm doing analysis on some simulations that I ran. And then I'm working on a computer code or something like that. And then eventually I share my research either through articles or presentations and stuff like that, really both. So that's kind of my day-to-day what I usually do. I also have had the chance to join a few field experiences. This is not my normal day-to-day and it's pretty much no scientist's normal day-to-day. Most people spend a lot of time at the computer doing analysis, but it's really a good experience to be able to actually go out into the field and see the kind of substance you're working with. So I was able to attend a sea ice summer camp, so to speak, with collaborators in Alaska. So this is me on sea ice drilling a core so that we could look at the different layers of sea ice and information about it. And these are some whale bones from up in Alaska from the people who live up there still hunt whales as part of their subsistence living. It's part of their culture and really important to actually feed the whole village. So that's what these bones are from. And then I also was able to go to Antarctica and help install and fix weather stations. So here I am in a helicopter, going to a weather station. This is me climbing one of the little towers that has a weather station above it. And so what we wanna do is set up weather stations that measure the temperature and the wind all around Antarctica without people needing to be there. So they're automatic weather stations, but they do need fixing because it's such an extreme climate. At this one, we had to take this plane to go get to it, you can see it here. And then while I was there, I was able to also see some of the wildlife, which in this case is penguin. So this is an emperor penguin and it's a little fluffy because it was molting, which means it's changing its feathers. And so they don't spend time in the water when that's the case. And then I also wanted to let you know that when you go to Antarctica, hopefully people can see this, they give you this nice service medal. So it's hard to see because of zoom. So I'll hold it closer to me. So this is a service medal. If I was in the military, I guess they could wear it on my uniform, but I'm not so I just have it on the little piece of paper. But for your service in Antarctica, you get this nice little medal. And then they also give you the patch that you wear on your jacket when you're there. You can see I'm here in my big red, you call this big red, but you have to wear cold weather gear on any of the planes or helicopters you go just in case there's an incident and you get stuck out on the ice sheet. But everything, like there's a patch just like this on one of the breast pockets of it. So those are kind of the things you get if you go to Antarctica, they've been a really cool experience. But as I mentioned, that's not really my day to day. So what I usually do in my day to day is I look at computer simulations. So this is here an animation of a computer simulation that we have run in car. And the white that you're seeing here is Arctic sea ice on the left. And the white that you're seeing here is Antarctic sea ice on the right. And I'm gonna replay this one more time. But I wanna point out that you can see that the ice is moving around. Sometimes it's growing in area, sometimes it's shrinking in area. And this is all totally normal. So I'm gonna restart this image, this movie. And it's gonna start at January which is Northern Hemisphere winter, Southern Hemisphere summer. And so I wanna point out that in the Northern Hemisphere the ice extends over a large part of the Arctic Ocean. And in the Southern Hemisphere, because it's summer, there is relatively little sea ice. And then as you'll see as time progresses, so it's still January, now it's February. And so it's becoming fall for the Antarctic and we're starting to get ice to grow. Oops, no, where did that go? Sorry, everyone. So as we get into February and March, you'll see that the ice starts to grow in the Antarctic. And then it shrinks in the Arctic as we get into Northern Hemisphere summer. So in like July and August. So we're in May now, you can see the Antarctic ice is growing, the Arctic ice is shrinking. It's all moving around all the time because it moves with the ocean currents. And now we're in September. And so it's fall, the Arctic ice will grow again and Antarctic ice will start to shrink. And one thing that I wanted to point out with the fact that the ice moves all the time is as I've talked about with my younger daughter in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Pole is right here. So it's sea ice in that location. So Santa's magic is the only reason that Santa could actually stay at the North Pole. But we think he probably actually lives maybe here in Northern Canada or Northern Alaska where his house wouldn't be moving around all the time. All right. So one of the things I wanna talk to you about is how Arctic sea ice specifically is changing. So this is showing us Arctic sea ice from above. You can see that it covers this Arctic ocean area. So you imagine if you look down and you took a picture of how much area it covered and we could measure that. And what this is showing is that over time the area that that covers has been decreasing. So a long time ago before I was even born it was relatively big and it's just getting smaller and smaller over time. And this is what you'd see from a satellite. And then if you looked at the Arctic sea ice from below so now if you were in a submarine looking at it from below you would also see that over time so we're starting here in the 1980s again before I was born and we're going forward to be closer to present time that this ice is getting thinner and thinner over time. So the ice is changing in two key ways. It's getting smaller in the spatial area what you see from a satellite and it's also getting thinner which is the measurement you get from a submarine from below. And so this results in the shrinking and the thinning of the sea ice means that we're gonna end up with more open Arctic more open water in the Arctic in the future. And so what you're seeing here in the year 2000 anywhere that's white would be areas that have no open water in the entire year or very less than a month of open water. And then in 2050 there are very few areas that are white and by 2100 many places in the Arctic Ocean are now kind of dark blue which means they would be open almost the entire year. The only area that we're expecting that will retain ice even through part of the year would be here along the Northern Canadian coast. So this is a really dramatic change in what's gonna happen in the Arctic and it's gonna have large effects on people, animals and the planet. And so I have one more experiment to show you here. In this case we're not gonna have a poll. We want you to write into the chat what you think will happen. But the question is, do you think melting sea ice causes sea level to change? And so I wanted to mention sea ice again is floating on the ocean and glacial ice is on land. And so that's one of the big differences between the two. And so go ahead and write your thoughts into the chat and I will start this movie and we'll see what happens. So there's ice on land here. This is a glacier and you can see the initial sea level. And then here I put ice in the ocean. So to speak in there's the initial sea level and we'll just let this play out and see what happens. Anybody feel free to enter your guess into the chat? Do you think it's going to cause sea level to change when the sea ice melts? We're getting a couple of no's and a yes so far. No, we have more guesses of no. Okay, we're about a half way through this video I made. So you can see there's still some ice on this glacier substitute I put together. There's still a little bit of sea ice here. All right, so I think we're almost done. I want to point out that the ice is almost melted on both. And you can see that here where the sea ice melted the sea level didn't change at all. Where is it going to go? Sorry. We're going to share with you. We did get a comment. I didn't mean to interrupt, but we did get a comment saying something similar saying I do not think it will cause the sea level to change because ice does not change the level of water. That's right. So when the glacial ice melted it was already on land and then when it melts it goes into the ocean and adds to the total amount of water in the ocean. But sea ice since it's already floating on the ocean it doesn't actually change the level of the ocean at all. So when it melts it's not going to cause sea level to rise on its own. Glaciers melt on the other hand. So Greenland or Antarctic glaciers that are on land they do cause sea level to increase. Another example of this is if you go to a restaurant when there's not a pandemic and you get a glass full of ice water when the ice melts the water doesn't overflow in your glass, right? It stays at the same level after that ice melts. All right. So if sea level isn't one of the major impacts of the melting sea ice I just wanted to talk about what some of the main impacts are. So one of the biggest impacts is that the melting sea ice is really changing ecosystem. So here's a polar bear. They need sea ice to hunt from. And polar bears aren't the only creatures that will be impacted. So walrus needs sea ice to rest on. The ice cover and availability affects fish and it also affects phytoplankton the tiny little basically plants that live in the water and how much light is available to them. And so it'll have cascading effects on the whole ecosystem and food chain. And it also affects people who need the ice to move around especially in winter. And there've been a number of cases of people actually falling through the ice in recent years as the ice gets thinner and less safe to be on. One of the other big impacts on people is that when there's less sea ice you get bigger ocean waves during storms and this causes erosion along the coasts. And so you can see these people are studying this coastal erosion here. But some of this coastal erosion happens where there are settlements, especially in Alaska. And so there are houses that can actually fall into the ocean or be lost from the erosion. And the people living in these settlements have to decide how to plan for these changes. It changes the ocean. So in terms of understanding our whole planet you can see oceans are dark and that means the sun shines on them. Most of the light is absorbed by the ocean and the ocean will heat up. Whereas when we have sea ice here that surface is very bright. And so sunlight that shines on the sea ice a lot of it is reflected away. And so it changes the ocean circulation and how much heat is in the ocean. And it's also gonna change industry. So this is a picture of a container ship that is going through ice covered waters. It would be faster to send ships through the Arctic than it would be to go through the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. And there also were likely to be more cruise ships and stuff like that in the area as well. So those are some of the major changes that we are expect to happen. And what I do is basically try to understand how the ice is gonna change and why. And so at this point I'm done with my part of this conversation, but I'm happy to take any questions that anybody has. I'm gonna stop sharing this so that I can see the chat more, but thank you so much for listening and I welcome any questions you have. Great. Let's see, we've been getting some questions coming in for sure. So someone a little bit earlier asked, have you ever seen a polar bear? I have seen a polar bear. When I did the sea ice summer camp, we were out on the ice and there were polar bears. The native people had harvested a whale in the past month or something. And so there are parts of the whale they take and there are parts that they don't they leave out on the ice and eventually it melts and falls into the water. But before that the polar bears come and eat a lot of the whale. So we didn't get close to the whale, but we could see them from afar. And if you're up in the Arctic and you're doing any field work, you're required to have a bear guard with you. So someone whose job it is to look out for polar bears because they blend in with the ice and it can be hard to see them. So you always wanna have someone with you whose job it is to keep the team safe and is keeping an eye out for polar bears because nobody really wants to have a confrontation with a polar bear. They would happily eat people or penguins or whatever, but they're really beautiful to look at from afar. Okay. There are a couple of questions about the temperature and how cold it is in these places that you have traveled to. So I'll share them all together. How cold is it in the North and the South Pole and what's the coldest temperature that you've experienced? So both of these places, both poles have a pretty big range in how warm or cold they can get. But it's always pretty cold, at least compared to Colorado or most of the US where anybody's tuning in from. So when I was in Antarctica, that's probably when I had the coldest temperatures and it was probably like minus, I was there in the Antarctic summer. So it wasn't as cold as it can get. But I probably experienced like minus 15, minus 20 and it was windy at the same time. So Antarctica's the driest, coldest, windiest continent and when it's cold, when it's windy, it feels really, really cold. So that felt really, really cold. We were fixing a weather station and we needed to get out of there as soon as possible because the storm was coming in. But, and it was fine. We got out of there. They always want you to be safe most of the time, but so in Antarctica, in general though, I would say it was right around freezing most of the time. So what it's like outside in Colorado, most many people are from Colorado. It's kind of like our winter there during their summer. So the sun is out 24 hours a day. You don't get any darkness, which is a little weird. But during that time, it never really gets above freezing. I mean, the warmest it would get is maybe like, I think one day it was like 34. So two degrees above freezing. But when you're out in the sun, it doesn't feel kind of like in Colorado. It's a dry place. It doesn't feel too bad. You just wear, you know, your coat and your long pants and you're okay. In the Arctic, it also, in the wintertime, like right now, they're not getting any sunlight. And so it's really, really cold up there. In the summer, if you're on the Arctic Ocean, it stays right around freezing as well, but it can get a little bit warmer. There have been some instances in the past couple of years where there's been warm air coming from like the North Atlantic Ocean or Europe that gets up to the North Pole and it's like, you know, up in the 40s or 50s. So really warm. And when that happens, a lot of sea ice will melt all at once. Great, thank you. There's another really interesting question sort of relating to the work that you're doing and what you're studying. And somebody's wondering, is your job kind of related to the Bering Land Bridge? Yes and no. I don't study the Bering Land Bridge myself, but the Bering Land Bridge, so for people who don't know, the Bering Land Bridge was land that was exposed between Siberia and Alaska back tens of thousands of years ago and that's the way that people first came from Asia into North America. And the reason it was exposed back then is we were in the middle of an ice age and so there was lots and lots of ice, incontinental ice sheets and so sea level decreased and it exposed that land that people could walk over. And so what we're seeing now is almost the opposite of that where the ice sheets are melting and so sea level is increasing and something that maybe would be a land bridge would be go underwater at this point. So in that sense, it's kind of similar. I don't study paleoclimate anymore and I haven't done much of paleoclimate in meaning climates in the past in the Arctic, but I think that's a really interesting conversation. There are collaborators I work with at NCAR who do look at glacial periods with our climate models and try to understand things that are different. So I've worked with them peripherally but I don't do that a lot of the time. That's a really interesting connection to make. So somebody asked for a little bit more clarification about why does the ice not change the sea level when it melts? So basically when you have ice that's floating in water, it's already displacing enough water to cause the water to go up just a little bit. So you can imagine if you have a drinking glass, you can try this whoever this is at home. Just fill it with water and then add ice to it. And when you add the ice to it, you'll see the water level goes up a little bit but then once that ice melts, the water level won't change because the ice had already displaced the amount of water that it was taking up once you got it floating in there. And so sea ice is like that. It's already floating in the water. It's already, by existing in the water, it's already caused the sea level to be at what it is. So you're not actually adding like mass to the system or you're not adding water to the system. It's just ocean water that's already frozen whereas when you have like the glacial ice sheets and Greenland and those melt, then you actually are adding water to the ocean and that will cause the level to rise. So it's like you're adding tap water to your cup of water. That makes sense. Thank you. I should mention one more thing. I did, this was about the temperatures too but I also saw this in the chat. I should mention that the South Pole, not only is it land that's surrounded by ocean, the South Pole itself is also really high in the atmosphere. So at the South Pole itself, it gets really, really cold because it's high in the atmosphere. It's high elevation, kind of like Colorado and it doesn't get light. Whereas the North Pole is at sea level. And so just because when you go up, if you go up in the mountains in the summer, it's colder. That's one reason that the South Pole itself is colder than the North Pole. Okay. There's one more question about the picture of the whale bones that you had. What bones were those? Those were its jaw bones. So it was like a baleen type whale. I don't know what type of whale it was off the top of my head except that I know that they harvest baleen whales. Those are the kind to eat. And so that would have been the big jaw bones in the front. Wow. Wow. That's so cool. Yeah. I don't think we have, I think we've gone through all of the questions unless anybody else has any, then we can wrap it up. And Alice, that's been, it's been so interesting to explore some of your work. Kind of makes me wanna do that too. Thank you for sharing all of this about your work today. Yeah. Thanks for everything for coming. Yeah, thanks for coming everybody. And just as a reminder, we do this every other Thursday. So our next session will be on December 17th. And I'm going to post a quick link if I can into the chat where you can find information on what's coming up as well as you can find links to the recordings of all of our past Meet the Expert sessions, which is kind of fun to explore as well. And just one other thing I'll say is we can wrap it up from here. And thanks again, Alice for joining us. And if any of you are in grades five through 12, I'm gonna post one more link. This is the link to the survey that I mentioned at the beginning of our presentation. And we would just really appreciate it if, nope, that's not the right one. If you wouldn't mind taking a couple of minutes to fill out this survey, that really helps us to understand what you're learning from these sessions. So I'm gonna post that there. It's not working. I'm gonna try it one more time. It is not giving the actual, for some reason it's not pasting correctly. So I'm gonna try one more thing. Thank you for bearing with me. Let's try that. Third time's a charm. So I'm just gonna leave that there for a couple of minutes for anybody to copy that link and the link for the survey. And otherwise, thanks again for joining us. And we hope to see you again in our next session. And thanks, Alice. Thank you everyone. Have a good day. Have a great day.