The Snow Show: Making Snowflakes with Peter Veals and Twila Moon

How do you make snow? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn some cold, hard facts about snow and ice with atmospheric scientist and snow maker Peter Veals, PhD and glacial scientist Twila Moon, PhD.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today's topic is all about snow. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Why? Because this year is the Winter Olympics. And snow has become kind of a commodity lately. There's been less of it in some places, more of it in others. And we're going to devote an entire program on just that topic. I got Gary O'Reilly. Gary, always good to have you there, man. Hey Neil. Bring professional authenticity to the sports edition version of StarTalk, being ex-football pro over in the UK. And of course Chuck Nice, Chuck.

• 0:56Chuck Nice?

  Hey, that's right, Chuck Nice, your chocolate snowman, that's right.

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  Not allowed to say that, not allowed to say that.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only you can say it.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly, it's like, oh my god.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so here we go. We've got ski slopes in the world that should have had snow by now. We're recording this in January. And they don't, or there's not much snow, there's a little bit of it. They have these snow machines and sometimes it's icy and it doesn't ski the way real snow would. And so, and climate change is affecting this, of course. That's the 900-pound gorilla behind the curtains. And so, so, so something is disrupting our expectations of how, when and where we would get snow. And my wife is from Alaska. We, I get sort of news from her friends and relatives who are still there. And I learned that Alaska has recorded its highest temperature ever

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the month of December. And was it a Kodiak island, had 67 degrees? Something is messed up! So, or is a new world order that we're not ready to embrace. So, since none of the three of us have any expertise at all in this, we have to bring in someone who does. And that is Professor Peter Veals. Peter, welcome to StarTalk, dude. Thanks Neil, huge pleasure to be here.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  The real snowman.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The real snowman, okay? And notice Chuck, he's white.

• 2:21Chuck Nice?

  The way it should be.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  If your snowman is black, you live it in a very polluted area.

• 2:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, I'm just, I will be canceled by the end of this show.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, if they don't cancel you, we will.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Peter, you're assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah. Utah cares a lot about their snow. And in fact, if I remember correctly, you, don't you, on your license plates, you, don't you have a mountain ranges at Colorado or both of you?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  A mountain range and the state tourism board or whatever trademarked the slogan, the greatest snow on earth. And they have it on the license plates here, too. Yeah, this is, this is a place that cares a lot about snow.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and you're in the right place because you are co-founder of a startup company called Quantum Snow. That's producing fake powder snow, or maybe it's real snow, but artificially produced. We'll get to that in the second segment. But we want to totally learn about how you got into that and why and what's different about it. So let me just, let's just start out, all three of us are overrun with questions for you. So let me just start out by saying, what's going on?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the world.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  How about this? How about, you know, I guess we can talk about what's going on in the world, too. But also maybe I can explain a few, you know, kind of fun things about snow and that might.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do that.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  That might kind of focus, focus the question, too, because I know what you mean. It's a big atmosphere out there and there's a lot going on. You, we've got the processes in clouds, we've got snow, we've got, and then the climate change component of it, too. Which of course, we definitely have to talk about with snow making. But yeah, so, you know, snow, when we talk about, you know, these snowflakes, those like perfect star shapes that you cut out in, you know, elementary school or whatever. You know, those, those six sided crystals, those form in clouds. That's the start of a snowflake and those actually form via deposition. So the phase change directly from gas to solid.

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  I thought you, I thought you meant that a lawyer actually talked to. The snow.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, talk, talk to the.

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  Talk to the, to the gas.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moisture.

• 4:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, no, and talk to the water vapor and said.

• 4:45Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 4:47Chuck Nice?

  Where were you on the night of the fifth?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  They say can and will be used.

• 4:50Chuck Nice?

  Where were you on the night of the fifth? And then the water vapor goes, oh, I've been, the gig is up.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  That's a very boring deposition. No, this deposition is more fun, for sure.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just remind me, Peter, a deposition is the chemical opposite of, of sublimation.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that, is that correct?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like CO2, dry ice goes right from solid to gas.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now you're talking about going directly from gas to a solid state. Okay. So we're with you now.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, because if you just, if you just froze, uh, water, you know, if you just started with liquid and then froze it, you know, it's.

• 5:27Chuck Nice?

  Like, you got ice now.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Went from liquid to, to solid. Yeah, you just have a ball of ice. Right. That's what'll happen. So to grow these crystals, they actually grow via deposition. And so then what happens in the cloud is they fall through. And then the really cool thing about most snow clouds is you actually have all three phases of water coexisting at the same time. So you start, so you're growing via, via deposition, you're growing a solid flake, then it's falling through and you have super cool liquid droplets.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, just to be clear, something you didn't mention. So we are high enough in the atmosphere, away from Earth's surface, that the temperature has dropped below freezing for any of this to happen.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yes, or below zero C, because technically, and this is why this can all happen, technically the freezing point for pure distilled water is closer to minus 40 Celsius. It's not zero Celsius. So you could call it, yeah, the freezing point of, you know, in, in pure water or, or, um, I believe the word is heterogeneous, um, freezing point, but.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where, where every molecule in it is water, is the water molecule.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With nothing else in it. Got it.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  So, yeah, to, to get water to freeze, um, you know, above minus 40, minus 38 C, you need a seed or a, a condensation nucleus, um, to start the process of freezing. But, so that's why, so you have in these clouds, you know, you have liquid droplets.

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I did this once. I did this once. Okay? So we had. Um, not distilled, but purified, triple purified water in a plastic water bottle in the freezer. Okay. And it just sort of was taking a long time and it wasn't, it wasn't freezing. So I pulled it out in anticipation of this. Okay. And I slammed it in the ground, opened the lid, allowing impurities again, and the whole thing froze instantly.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Nice, nice.

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instantly. It was a beaut-, it was a, it was a most beautiful thing. It was like, it looked like a, like a wave, a freeze wave going through from top to bottom. That was fun.

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. But then the only problem with that is you gotta wait a day to drink your water.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I gotta, that's right. I just swatted my need for water there, right?

• 7:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, yeah. So it's too pure to freeze?

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was too pure, yeah. It was triple filtered, yeah, it was too pure. Okay, go on, Peter.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can, you can do the same. There's, if you shake that too, something about it, if you jostle it just enough, one of the, you know, billions of molecules gets into a hexagonal configuration and that'll start the freezing too. Like jostling the water somehow can seed the, uh, the crystallization process too.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, now, now, not to change the subject or to extend the subject, but it seems to me that can happen on the other end as well. I've had water in the microwave and I said, well, that's not boiling yet. All right? And then I touch something to its surface and then the whole thing rapidly starts boiling.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's super he-, that would be superheated water. Cause yeah, we call supercooled water, water that's liquid below zero C but is still liquid. So that would be super cool. Yeah.

• 8:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's not Neil and his superpower. Doctor, the, the, snow doesn't come in just one standard form. You've got all different types of snow. So what is, what is going on to kind of? Make those differences.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question, Gary. So it's how all of those things, you know, interplay in the clouds. So, you know, you have your, your solid crystal growing, but then as it's falling through, you know, those super cool drops, those will, will freeze instantly onto the solid flake. And so you'll start getting, if you look, you know, you'll start getting, it looks like kind of fuzz on those. If you, if you look at, next time it snows, if you look at a, a snowflake really closely, you'll see, so that's called rhyming. And eventually, if you get enough of those on there, it just turns into a ball. And that's where like, you see those kind of dip and dots falling sometimes during a storm. That's called grapple. That's where the whole thing has been covered in those, those bits of rhyme. So that's how

• 9:37Speaker 02

  you get sort of this whole spectrum of everything from your. But you say it's called a brothel? But what did you, what did you say it was called?

• 9:44Chuck Nice?

  That's kind of snow out with.

• 9:47Chuck Nice?

  Just saying.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm not familiar with that study, with that area of study. No, what did you call, what did you call it? Grapple.

• 9:56Chuck Nice?

  Grapple?

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, with a.

• 9:57Chuck Nice?

  Like grapple with an O, grapple?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Grapple, okay. Yeah. So if you wanna, if you wanna get weird looks, next time it's snowing outside on the street, you know, collect some on your sleeve and take a look and you'll kind of see the, the, anywhere from a perfect crystal to a perfect crystal covered in fuzz to a perfect, you know, to a dip and dot kind of.

• 10:18Chuck Nice?

  And now what, what's you, you, I think you, you said it, but once again, the big giant fluffy flakes that fall, and they, I mean, they're huge, that, what would those be?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Those are a bunch of, of crystals then that aggregate together. So an individual ice crystal, you know, isn't more than a quarter inch across. So if you get those big, you know, like quarter size, half dollar size flakes falling, you look at those, there's probably hundreds of individual ice crystals in there that have kind of stuck together.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's kind of cool, man.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's, I get made fun of a lot because I, whenever it's snowing, I collect them on my sleeve and I look at them. But, you know, you get used to that kind of thing in science.

• 10:58Gary O'Reilly?

  You have been able to produce powder snow, correct?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah.

• 11:02Gary O'Reilly?

  And, and you, so.

• 11:04Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you something, I'm sorry, Doc, but, uh, I too was able to produce powder snow and it got me five to eight.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  I had to do it, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

• 11:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Anyone else not surprised that happened?

• 11:19Chuck Nice?

  That's my one and only snow joke, and I was holding back. When you said powdered snow, I couldn't help it, Gary.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, so Chuck, we'll give you credit for having held back this long.

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. All right, go ahead.

• 11:32Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So you've made powdered snow. And that is, if I'm right, thank you, if I'm not, correct me please, that's 5% density. So if we did, so that's downhill skiing, say, snowboarding or cross-country skiing. Is it, are you going to be using the same sort of 5% density snow for those events? Like ski jumping?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  That's a great question.

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  That's cool.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or does each event have its own unique snow quality that you could possibly dial up if you're bringing it in from the outside?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  So.

• 12:05Gary O'Reilly?

  What I said, but only better.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  No, this is perfect. So this is right where now, since we're technically sports and science, this is where the snow intersects the sports. So our, so the snow that we've been able to produce, yeah, it's 5% density, it's light, it's fluffy. The snow that's produced by traditional snowmaking is just blowing water droplets out of a hose, getting them as small as possible, and then those freeze in sort of miniature tiny BBs and stack up. And that's, you know, sufficient for skiing. In fact, that's actually for the Olympics, for particularly ski racing events, they actually want, you know, that icy dense snow that's produced by traditional snowmaking. In fact, they'll actually...

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are they like ball bearings? Because you're just, you're rolling on the spherical frozen bits of snow?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Well, it's actually, yeah, I mean, sort of. So the way that I understand it, the way that skis work with snow, I think it's the same with ice skates, is that... When you're applying pressure on the surface, you are locally lowering the melting point, such that you have a thin film of liquid water that you're allowed to glide on with.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  And that's what you're really gliding on is the water.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but skiing is-

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's even better than the ball bearings, yeah.

• 13:18Chuck Nice?

  Skiing is nothing but surfing on land.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go.

• 13:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's really the idea. Yeah, but you know, when you talked about the small droplets freezing and then being the surface on which to ski, if you're downhill skiing, the good thing about that is the icy element of what you just described, little balls of ice, allows you to cut into it when you're turning. So they want that kind of, you know, more dense, somewhat icy, because you need almost like a blade on the inside of the ski to grip, and that allows you to do the slalom.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is the only show ever in the history of the universe where a black man is giving skiing advice.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that caught me by surprise. Neil, you got me.

• 14:14Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I got that. I'm gonna let that comment settle.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Gary and I aren't touching that.

• 14:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so.

• 14:22Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so. So Doc, here we go. Our, our audience are gonna wanna know this. Is A, every snowflake unique in its shape? And in the snow that you make, are you making unique crystals? Or are you just producing clones?

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clones, ooh. Ooh, that's a dig right there.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  No, that's a great question, Gary. I believe every snowflake is unique just because, you know, the way these individual molecules are attached-

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chuck, Chuck, you heard that. He says, "I believe."

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Peter, I didn't know it was a religion, right?

• 15:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I believe.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  When I say I believe, that's for, that's science for, I'm like gathering things that I know and hoping that I'm saying the right thing here. And one of my colleagues might comment on this podcast and say that I, you know, I was wrong and they can be, you know, identical. But in nature, I think because, you know, you're stacking these molecules according to these conditions and the conditions are varying, you know, so, so much throughout your, you know, at a molecular level, you're not going to stack these molecules in the same form. And, and crystallization is chaotic too, you know, small changes produce these nonlinear, you know, feedbacks.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  And so, um, yes, our crystals, because they're formed by, by deposition, by that solid or that vapor to solid transformation, and in nature, all of those are forming uniquely because of this non-linearity of crystallization.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Peter, I did a calculation once. I computed how many total snowflakes have ever fallen in the history of the world.

• 16:08Chuck Nice?

  Holy crap.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? And, well, you can estimate, it's, you can, there are ways to estimate that.

• 16:12Chuck Nice?

  Wait, here's how I end this story. And that's how I spent my entire teenage years.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so that gives you a base number and you can ask, how many molecules are there of water in a crystal of water, in a single snowflake? And the number of molecules in a snowflake exceeds the total number of snowflakes that has ever fallen. Oh, so, sorry, not, not just the number, but...

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Try to wrap my head around that whole...

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ways that they can configure. And so you're looking at the, at a, at a, it's a, probabilistically, you can look at how many total outcomes are there among the molecules as Peter was describing. Compare that to the total number of snowflakes that has ever fallen and one number vastly exceeds the other. So you can say with good confidence that no two snowflakes are alike, even though you've actually never checked it. That's all I'm saying. We got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more with Professor Peter Veals, who's one of the world's experts on not only what snow is, but on how to make snow. And we're going to find out more about that and what that has to do with the future of snow sports, especially the Olympics, when StarTalk returns.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We're talking about snow, and where it comes from, and why, and where it's going, and why, and where has it been, and shouldn't it be there? And how come? There's a lot of, like, issues we have today with regard to snow. For example, Gary, did you, one who told me that in Vancouver, for the Vancouver Olympics, what happened there?

• 18:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so 2010 Vancouver was snowpaw. So they had to airlift snow in, they had to truck snow in, because it wasn't falling out of the sky for free. So this, so this, this made us think. So we got the StarTalk lens out, and we just look through it the way we do at Winter Olympics and, you know, snow-stressed events. And if you look at the Winter Olympics coming up in 22, in Beijing in China, we might have issues. But let's ask the doctor, really, what he feels.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Peter Veals, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Utah. So, so Peter, what's, it sounds like there's a huge sort of industry of people putting snow where it needs to be. And can snow be treated like sand? For example, there are beaches that have lost sand and others that gain it. And so they just sort of bust the sand from one beach to another to even that out again, and it gets sold, and it's a commodity, really. So is that what snow is today?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in some sense, although, you know, the way snow is made, has been made traditionally, you know, for the last like 50 years, is you set up this vast infrastructure on the mountain of high-pressure hoses, you know, they're set up along a run strategically, and then you have compressed air and water running into those, and you're blowing these droplets out. And so... You know, you can.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, they rely on the air being below freezing in order to freeze, correct?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Somewhat, yeah. So it's, it's, there's two things that the compressed air does. One, it helps fracture the water into the tiniest possible droplets, which will, you know, freeze more readily before they hit the ground and provide a better skiing surface. And then also, as the, the pressure drop coming out of the hose leads to a rapid temperature drop, which also helps freeze those, those drops.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how refrigerators work. That's very good. Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Right, right. Exactly.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a refrigerator, you have the coolant, which is compressed by the compressor. And as it comes out the other side, the rapid expansion cools it well below freezing. And then you extract that very cool region of the, is it the coils? Then sucks the heat out of the refrigerator. It changes the state of the coolant again. And then you got to go back and compress it. So this is basically a bit of technology borrowed from your refrigerator.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Right, right. Although, you know, that's, so that's what traditional snowmaking does. Our, our snowmaking method, you know, that I, I developed through my, my processing company actually uses actual refrigeration. So there's, there's similar to, to refrigeration. And then there's actual refrigeration too.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this something that you, you know, you get on a bat phone and they call, you know, Professor Veals, and then he, he shows up with this, with a machine? Or is this something that they can embed permanently in snowbanks? I mean, on, on ski slopes?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, this will require our, the method that, that we developed at Quantum Snow will require similar infrastructure to, you know, what's set up on these mountains, you know, where you have, you know, air and, or you have, you know, water and, and power lines and mounts, you know, steel mounts and all these.

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why's, why's your method better? Why do we need you?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  So.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  This is where, you know, it's, we.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  We differ from the Olympic kind of requirements here. So for the Olympics, like I was saying, you know, you want, they often want very dense icy snow because it allows you to ski fast and to dig those sharp steel edges into the snow. But for recreational skiing, people want that really light fluffy snow. You float nicely on top when you're skiing down. It feels really cool. You know, it feels almost like flying, to be honest. I know it sounds cheesy, but just, you know, you can be going 40 miles an hour and feeling almost weightless and you can turn and, you know, swoop however, however you want to. And so people pay huge money to ski snow like that, to ski fresh snow.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:21Chuck Nice?

  It's all about the fresh powder. It's like, because everybody wants to be in the YouTube video where the guy drops out of the helicopter, skis down the side of a mountain and is leaving a trail of what looks like smoke because that's how light and fluffy the powder is.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And people pay huge money for that.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  Everybody except me, who wants to just be at the bottom of the mountain, inside, drinking scotch at the fireplace.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the log cabin fireplace.

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  Right, with a brandy snifter in my hand and going, "How, how was your ski?"

• 22:58Gary O'Reilly?

  So Doug, can you produce snow and, and leave a carbon neutral footprint, just like it would if it fell out of the snow?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yes, you can. You just have to have, you know, the, the power, the electricity that is required for snowmaking, you have to have it come from renewable sources, you know?

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  And that's similar, you know, I've, I've heard a lot of questions about, you know, the ethics of snowmaking.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  And, you know, if you think about it, it's not really...

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I've never heard the word ethics and snow in the same sentence, right? There's like the ethics of, you know, crime and punishment and snow, okay?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:40Chuck Nice?

  I actually get what you're saying when you say the ethics of snow and I'll just give you a quick aside, there's a commercial running right now, I will not say the car company, but the person lives in California clearly, and they pull up to their driveway and they have a snow maker for the kids and the kids step out of the car in their sandals and they're stepping on snow and of course because they're raised in California, they don't know, oh my god, this stuff, and the first thing I thought was, so you guys actually used up all this dirty electricity? And you're towing an electric car? So like, it's that kind of juxtaposition?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, exactly, and there's the thought, you know, with climate change, you're like, well, it's getting warmer and nature's taking this thing away, and then you're using electricity, which is, you know, if it's not coming from a renewable source, which is contributing to the climate change problem, you know, you could, you could see that, you know, being questionable, but the trick is like anything, you know, it has to come from a renewable source, and there are gazillion things that humans do recreationally that are, you know, irresponsible from an energy perspective, you know, just the existence of Las Vegas or Dubai in July is irresponsible, you know? If people like, geez, I mean, we don't have that much to enjoy these days.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can see it now, right? God is making earth, it's like, okay, this is desert, no one will want to live here, let's just make it desert, okay? Bam, Vegas.

• 25:16Gary O'Reilly?

  You know, you know they have an indoor ski slope in Dubai?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  And they not only...

• 25:22Gary O'Reilly?

  In the Kapinski Hotel.

• 25:23Chuck Nice?

  Ski slope here in Jersey.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  Seriously, about, about 15 minutes from my home, it's a big giant...

• 25:30Gary O'Reilly?

  But Jersey isn't in a desert.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, which makes it even worse.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let's get back to, let's get back to what is the ethics of snow?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so you think about, yes, you are using energy to produce a thing that people enjoy, but like, geez, if we can't use any energy to produce anything that people enjoy, that's, that's air travel, that's like going to the movie theater.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's everything.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Driving someone, you know, like... At some level, the human existence requires energy, you know, for food, but also recreation. And so the trick is to just power everything with renewables.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  So it's all about, once again, changing the source. If you change the source, then you solve the problem.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, when I first drove the Tesla Roadster, this is early on, not even many models had existed. There was one at a power plant, and it was plugged in to one of their ports that actually generated energy through solar panels.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so when I test drove it in that moment, I said, this just feels really like I feel good.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because it's end to end.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least not in the construction of the vehicle, but in the power used to drive it. I just, I had an extra feeling of goodness about that. But let's get back to why your process is different.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  So it goes.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you make snow.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it goes just right to the molecular level. We grow snow via deposition. And traditional snow making is just grown via freezing of liquid to.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How, okay, it takes time. I know I learned from my eighth grade chemistry class, it takes time to grow crystals.

• 27:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, much more time than it takes to freeze something.

• 27:22Chuck Nice?

  And you also need a low pressure system moving in from the north.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Chuck, you got a future in TV.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good, Chuck. Chuck, that was good. Chuck has an A plus on that one. So how do you do this fast enough to be functionally useful on a ski slope?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  So without giving away sort of the trade secrets of quantum snow, we just had to develop a way to do it that was as fast as possible per unit area, you know, or per unit volume. And then you scale that up to a large enough machine to produce it.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if you're not going to give away the trade secrets, let me just ask you. How long does it take you to drop an inch of snow over some section?

• 28:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  So this is, yeah, that's a perfect kind of startup.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, how long does it take you to drop a centimeter of snow?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  That's a perfect startup and scaling question because right now, our first prototype is this little, you know, glorified mini fridge that I built partly in my garage and partly in the lab here at the university. And, I mean, it would, it would drop a centimeter of snow in that chamber. I mean, it would take like an hour because that was our demonstration, proof of concept prototype. So, you know, with startups, every step, you're scaling up, right? You're faster, you're larger volume, you're cheaper, more economical. So what we're working on right now is our next prototype, which actually works outside. You know, it runs up and down a short little slope so someone could actually turn once or twice in it.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  And the spec that we have for that, that I'm working with, we have some awesome engineers that, that came on board and that we're working with is about an inch an hour that we'd be laying down the snow.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so they do this overnight then? They do this overnight?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Right, right. But even if we, yeah.

• 29:15Chuck Nice?

  An inch an hour is a lot of snow. If you have a storm that moves into your area and it's dropping an inch an hour, that's a, that's a blizzard.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a real storm. Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a very good analogy there, Chuck.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Chuck's got some random great weather knowledge that he just pulls out.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he knows way too much about.

• 29:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck's got random knowledge.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Totally right. An inch an hour is a jumping snow.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He knows way too much about skiing for my comfort there.

• 29:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So, so Doc, what sort of, what size equipment, what size equipment do you need to produce an inch of snow?

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, that's 2.54 centimeters of snow, precisely. Okay, let's keep it metric here.

• 29:51Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm, I'm, I'm English and I'm in America, so it's, so it's not, you're not, you're not like Ghostbusters. You're not turning up and just producing this off a backpack. You, you know, you could, if you're gonna do scale, you're gonna need large equipment and that's just, you're dragging it up a mountain.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. Although, I mean, the equipment that's used now for snowmaking, the great thing is we don't have, the bar is pretty low for our competition because, you know, a lot of these mountains, these big ski resorts, they have an entire like warehouse-sized room that's all giant compressors. It's a giant like compressor factory and they run these compressed airlines all up over the mountain. They spend a million dollars worth on power bills and, you know, they use like.

• 30:34Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Billions of gallons of water, millions of gallons of water. You know, I don't know the scale on that, but.

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billions feels a little high there, but yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Maybe million, we'll say millions, yeah.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially since an inch of water makes 10 inches of snow, so.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billion is.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Well, of ours, of the snow that, you know, quantum snow is trying to make, the current snow making, you know, where you're blowing these droplets out of the hose, that's going to pack much more densely. That's like a 50% density versus ours is like a 5% density.

• 31:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yours is much closer to authentic snowflakes, is what you're saying.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:05Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's great.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, how about this, how about this? If one of your snowflakes fell on my shirt and a real snowflake fell, would I be able to tell the difference?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Uh, you would not, as long as the other snowflakes, so when they fall, they'll often, you know, snowflakes are really delicate, they'll hit and they might break in half or something. Ours resemble like a half of this six-sided crystal.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  Wow, you guys are like the, like the diamond growers of snow. Cause that's exactly what they do when they're, when they grow diamonds, you know?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Right, exactly, yeah. And there's a lot of cool, like, you can really geek out on crystal growing processes, you know? Like, when they make jet engine turbines, they want the whole thing, they don't want any seeds for any crystals. They want the whole thing to be one crystal, cause I guess it's less prone to shatter. Like when you're cooling the metal, yeah, there's all kinds of, like, this process of seeding or not seeding a crystal as like something turns into a solid is like a really cool branch of chemistry that I didn't really ever think I'd be into.

• 32:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we've got, we've got the Beijing Olympics, for the Winter Olympics, and are we going to find ourselves sort of returning to the Vancouver 2010 scenario? And this being a snow-poor tournament?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  So, yeah, that's a great question, Gary. You're gonna be shocked, I think all of us are gonna be shocked, when we see the mountain range northwest of Beijing, at how little snow there is. Like, some of these places, the nearest climate sites, get like a few inches of snow the whole winter. This is like an extremely cold and dry mountain range. But the trick is that it's cold, so it's a perfect place for them to make this artificial snow. But it'll just look kind of bleak because you'll have like potentially bare ground or maybe an inch or two of natural snow alongside.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the camera zooms back.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it zooms out.

• 33:00Chuck Nice?

  Instead of a snow capped mountain, you have a snow striped mountain.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. They call that the white ribbon of death in the skiing world. You don't want to fly off the side because you're just going to have rocks on the side.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's it's it's mountain pattern baldness.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so so let me just ask before we we close this out. Some places are getting higher than normal average amounts of snow. So is this just a redistribution of snow in the world? Or is there any net total change from climate change effects on the world?

• 33:37Speaker 02

  So I that's a great question. In fact, um.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Gary, what's that place you mentioned in in you found in the notes?

• 33:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, see, I'm in Chicago, right? End of 21, Chicago had no snow in the latter half of the year until December 28. They got their first dusting of snow. So they went through a snow drought, whereas Lake Tahoe got a 50 year record high of 16 foot of snow in December. So you've got this big snow dump in one place and a snow drought in another.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does how does that reconcile with our thinking about what the global warming?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  So yeah, often, you know, the general, the general pattern is going to be, yes, more extremes, right, of of drought and, you know, plenty of pluvial with the snow, you know, large snowfalls. But then, of course, when you talk about the average, you know, places that are very cold are typically very dry. And so actually, as you warm those places, as long as you're not warming them above freezing, warmer often means more moisture in the atmosphere. So a lot of the very cold places on earth are actually going to get more snow as the climate warms.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And then that's on average, of course. But then these places, you know, with more marginal snow climates are going to get less snow on average.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now this also affects the water tables, right? Because the snow collected over the winter on mountain slopes melts and goes back down into the valleys. And so there's a whole hydrology equation that civilization depends on, right? That's gonna get disrupted as well, right?

• 35:13Chuck Nice?

  And that's, that's what's most important because it's a snowpack and the way that it melts, it melts over time as opposed to rain, which just all comes at once.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. Yeah, and, you know, I think, I think that's a great tie-in too with snow making because that's part of the ethics of snow making also is you want to use less water because if you're in a place that's getting less water, you know, from natural snow, you are using that also to make snow. But, yeah, in, you know, in all of these, these mountain ranges of the world, that's gonna be a big question. You know, and it's interesting, we're dealing with this very cold, very dry set of mountain ranges northwest of Beijing, because those are potentially one of the few kind of climates of the world that could benefit from a warming climate. The key is few, you know, the vast majority, right, of these mountain ranges are, are not

• 36:08Speaker 02

  in for great things as the climate warms. But, um, yeah, you really, it's, it's a big deal for all, all of humanity to have mountain ranges getting less snow and snowpacks that are melting sooner.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's the note we're gonna end on. Peter, this has been a delight to speak with you. We love this kind of obscure expertise.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Thanks, yep.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's cool.

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  Anytime you can make snow interesting.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On a molecular level, we good.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  You're doing something great, man.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We good. So Peter, how can we find you? Are you on social media?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so, um, I'm on Twitter at P Veals and then Quantum Snow is on Instagram at Quantum underscore Snow.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, nice. So when you guys go public, give us a call.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got a lot of skill.

• 37:00Chuck Nice?

  I know you're not supposed to, but do us a favor before you go public.

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  That's why I want to roll.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be shy, drop a dime. Oh, thanks, guys. This has been really fun. I appreciate you having me. Guys, we've got to take a quick break, but when we return, we're going to have Professor Twila Moon as our guest, and she's one of the world's experts on glaciers. Big hunks of ice made by snow. So, Peter, we're going to say goodbye to you here. It was great to have you on, and stay with us. We'll be right back.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. That's our running theme. And we've got with us for this segment, Dr. Twila Moon. Did I pronounce your first name correctly there?

• 37:58Speaker 04

  You sure did.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. I love your last name, by the way.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  I see what you did there.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just biased about that.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  I see what you did there, Neil.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what I did there?

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, I just, I can't let that go. I can't let that go. Um, and, and you could tell people I'm going through a phase, you know, this is how. Oh, no.

• 38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, I, I got this, this, this, this brief bio here is just stunning that anyone in the world has this expertise. And it's like, if no one did, you'd have to invent that person because she's from National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Deputy Lead Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, of course, it's a Boulder, a TED Talker at TEDx Big Sky. But you're an expert in ice dynamics, glacial sea ice interactions, glacial hydrology, and all things glacial.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I love it because glaciers are this, are this otherworldly thing that we don't think about here in the, in the lower 48. My wife is from Alaska. She thinks about glaciers, and so I'm delighted to have you on StarTalk.

• 39:11Chuck Nice?

  And don't forget to mention, you know, that she's an expert on the cryosphere. And then I'd like to ask, what the hell is the cryosphere?

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. All of you are thinking about putting in for your your future lives in a hundred years of being frozen. But no, the cryosphere is all things frozen in the Earth's system. So we've got sea ice, we've got land ice, which is glaciers, Greenland ice sheet, Antarctic ice sheet, snow, frozen ground, which is also known as permafrost. So there are a lot of icy bits or cryo pieces in the Earth's system, and we call them all together the cryosphere.

• 39:54Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 39:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Gary and Chuck, what's really going on here is if global warming completely plays out, she's out of a job because there's nothing left frozen in the world.

• 40:03Chuck Nice?

  There's nothing left of, there's nothing left of us anyway, so it's a good time to be out of work.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  I'm gonna be setting sail. That's what I'm gonna be doing.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there it is. So, so Twilight, tell me, the, remind us all what a glacier is. Because you walk by it, it looks like there's chunks of ice. So when we think of ice, we think if you take water and freeze it. But a glacier is not exactly that. It's something else. So just remind us what a glacier is.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, and actually, another thing that sometimes gets confusing is sea ice. So people talk about the ice cap in the north, and often, actually, what they mean is sea ice, ice that has formed from freezing ocean water and sits on the top of the ocean. But what we have with glaciers and that broad category of land ice.

• 40:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just before you leave that subject, of course, Santa Claus's entire workshop is on sea ice, if he's on the North Pole. And no one ever, I tweeted at one point, I said, how come every time I see Santa Claus in his workshop, there are trees and mountains in the background? This sucker's on the frigging North Pole, and that's a, that's a, an ocean, the Arctic Ocean. And if he's on anything, any surface at all, it's ice.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, you are absolutely right there. Santa and the North Pole should be hanging out on ice. I did see NORAD tracked him taking off from an airport in northern Greenland this year. So, you know, probably just to keep some of that transportation on land rather than a mobile CI.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. Okay, so tell me, so what's, what is a glacier?

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is formed from snow. So, the whole point of building a glacier is that you have to have enough snow falling in winter that it's gonna stick around the following summer and then get more snow piled on top of it. And so you get layer of snow, layer of snow, layer of snow, and over hundreds and then thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, all those layers start to compress and they become more dense and they become glacial ice. And glacial ice is, uh, has more water bub, more air bubbles than like the ice in your freezer. And those air bubbles we use for cool science too. So glaciers and the world's ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica,

• 42:22Speaker 04

  they are all formed from year after year of snow building up. And one of the cool things-

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying snow under pressure that becomes solid looks different from an ice cube I just made in the freezer? That's what you're telling me?

• 42:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Because as that snow is getting compacted, it tends to keep some of those little air bubbles in it. And so actually, after a couple years, as that snow becomes more dense, it becomes something that, um, glaciologists call firn, F-I-R-N. And then it takes a bit longer for it to become even more compacted, and then it becomes glacial ice. And that glacial ice is gonna have lots of little, uh, bits of air in it and big ice crystals which help to give it that color.

• 43:07Chuck Nice?

  This is how when you see the scientists drilling down and taking out those super long cores, they, at that point, they can actually find air, if you wanna call it that, from like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And then they could tell how much carbon was in the atmosphere by those little bubbles that are all the way down at the bottom of those cores.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So this is how we know 800,000 years of climate history, thanks to ice.

• 43:36Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That, that, wait a minute, let me do it, guys. I gotta do it.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go on.

• 43:41Chuck Nice?

  Damn, that's cool.

• 43:45Gary O'Reilly?

  You happy now?

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Are you happy now?

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That off the chest.

• 43:48Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry guys.

• 43:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Have you scratched? Have you scratched that itch?

• 43:51Chuck Nice?

  I know, I know. It was terrible, but I had to.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we done?

• 43:55Gary O'Reilly?

  I know. It was the ice cream in the freezer. You had to have it. So, okay, so let's think just in the last 10 years, Doctor.

• 44:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Snowfall patterns seem like they've changed. I mean, we've got the remnants of Hurricane Larry in September 2021, drifting up towards Greenland and depositing snow in September. Are we seeing a lot of changing patterns now in Greenland's ice and snowfall? And therefore, this sort of continuation of snowfall to produce glaciers, has that been affected dramatically?

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. We've seen really big changes. Not just in snowfall, but actually more in temperature. And the Arctic, where Greenland sits, is warming faster than any other part of the globe. And some of that big warming is in winter. Fortunately, it's still cold enough there in winter that we're getting snow in winter. But now, more and more in summer, we have long, warm melt seasons. And that means that now, every year since 1998, we've been losing ice from the Greenland ice sheet. And that has been transforming that.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just to be clear, when it is announced that the temperature of the Earth has risen by whatever fraction of a degree, that's an average, right?

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so the, and an average would have numbers below it and numbers above it. The numbers that are significantly above it, if I remember correctly, are all polar. So the biggest temperature shifts are in the poles. And that, you don't even think about that because you're, they only report the average. Is that correct?

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's absolutely right. Warming is actually stronger on land than over the ocean, and warming is stronger in the Arctic than in other places around the planet.

• 45:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, that's just...

• 45:42Chuck Nice?

  Bad news.

• 45:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Is Greenland getting a positive mass balance in terms of its ice sheet and the replenishment of snow?

• 45:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I like you use this phrase mass balance and that is sometimes confusing as we measure kind of starting in fall as the ice sheet's starting to get snow and then through all the way through the next summer, how much mass of ice is it getting in winter? And then how much mass of ice is it losing in summer? So that's the mass balance. And because we're losing ice overall, it's a negative mass balance. And that has now been true for more than a couple of decades for the Greenland ice sheet. So the coast and the shape of the Greenland ice sheet's been totally transformed. And then, of course, that's also transforming our coastlines in places very far from the Greenland ice sheet.

• 46:30Chuck Nice?

  All right, so let me ask this. You talk about land ice, what you just mentioned, and I don't want to mess this up, so I'm gonna let you guys take this. Neil and I did a thing where we were talking about sea ice and the melting of sea ice, but the volume of ice when water freezes, I don't know if it's the same for when ice has salt in it or saline, but it becomes bigger. So when ice melts in liquid, it actually has less volume. And so what does that do for the rising of sea levels? If I ask that question correctly? If not, then please explain, because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get an A minus.

• 47:13Chuck Nice?

  I get an A minus? Okay, I'll take an A minus.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, so when we think about melting and formation of sea ice, the biggest impact factors there are not sea level, because we're freezing ocean water and then we're melting that ice that was formed from ocean water. And so there are some little changes in sea level, right? But that's not what you're writing home about. But when it comes to losing ice from glaciers or from the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, because that ice is sitting on land, it's all of the water that we lose as that ice melts is getting newly added to the ocean. And so we're really increasing the volume of the ocean in a way that we just aren't when we are melting sea ice.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're not just turning on a spigot here, because the water is, the oceans are saling, but glaciers are pure.

• 48:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's pure-

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Fresh water.

• 48:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fresh, what's the word? It's pure fresh water. So you're actually diluting the ocean with fresh water for doing so. Is that, is that-

• 48:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that can't be, that can't be good.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it makes changes to ecosystems. I mean, in Greenland, the, one of the biggest industries there is fishing. And what those ecosystems look like as far as ocean temperatures and also salinity and fresh water are changing. But it also can impact some of the big ocean circulation systems we see as we add fresh water to those. So, yeah, it's not just the volume of losing this ice and adding it to the ocean, but it's also that it's fresh water instead of saline.

• 48:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me, let me show off in front of you. I, I, I would try to use this word in a sentence. So does that disrupt the thermohaline circulation?

• 49:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes.

• 49:03Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is that the world going bald? The thermohaline, the thermohaline circulation? Is that the world just going bald?

• 49:13Speaker 04

  I'm telling you, the world's worried about it, so.

• 49:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but of course, we know about ocean currents moving horizontally, but there's also ocean currents going top to bottom, right? And so, and there are fishes that need or require that. So do you care about fishes at all? Do you have colleagues who you collaborate on with?

• 49:34Speaker 04

  I have colleagues who I collaborate on that. So I'm, I'm not out there collecting fish on, in my research directly, but it's all a connected ecosystem. So we have to be talking with each other, the people who are studying the fish and the big marine mammals and the ice and what's happening with snow and the atmosphere. So it's, it's all connected.

• 49:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Doctor, how fast do glaciers move? And if-

• 50:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, why, wait, wait, but why do they move at all? You're telling me it's ice? I'm fine with ice. Now you're gonna tell me it's a river? So I don't get it.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  And actually, that's one of the primary requirements for ice to be a glacier is that it is moving. Um, because ice is still mobile and when you have so much of it built up, you start to create deformation in that ice. And so it does move like a really slow river. And then sometimes depending on the interface between the ice and the ground underneath it, it might also slide on that surface. So.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the lubrication down there.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you can have kind of a wet surface between the ice and the and the land underneath it. And so glaciers do move. It's absolutely necessary for us to call them a glacier. And um, there are a wide variety of speeds in which glaciers move. There's around the Greenland ice sheet, you can kind of imagine it like a big reservoir of ice. And then it's got all these what we call outlet glaciers, kind of like if you had an outlet stream, you know, draining water from a lake. But we have hundreds of these outlet glaciers all around the edge of Greenland. And some of the fastest ones move fifteen, sixteen kilometers per year. So they are really driving that ice from the interior of the ice sheet out into the ocean.

• 51:23Chuck Nice?

  By the way, I'm sorry, I went to uh, I went to public school here in America. What is fifteen kilometers in way I can understand?

• 51:32Speaker 04

  Well, that's gonna be somewhere around ten miles. Nine, yeah. Per year. So that's pretty impressive.

• 51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can see the cartoon now, a cartoon where somebody's running and the glacier is chasing him, you know, down the valley, you know.

• 51:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the Fred, the Freddy Krueger of glaciers.

• 51:50Gary O'Reilly?

  So if if Greenland's glaciers are responsible for, I believe, something close to an inch in the rise in sea levels over the last fifteen years. Is there a possible way to slow them down? Because there's something called geoengineering, is there not?

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 52:06Gary O'Reilly?

  That does things that slows things down or can push back or you tell me because you are the expert.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  So geoengineering is a word that creates a really big umbrella. And there are lots of things that count as geoengineering. There are some things that are already things we're really hoping will work, like capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it away in the earth in rocks or something like that. We really want that technology to work because that is part of our plan for keeping global warming under check.

• 52:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Brilliant.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  But there are other parts of geoengineering that I personally don't think are a very good idea. And they tend to be things that are like, oh, let's build something really monstrous to hold back the ice over here. But we're sort of forgetting about the scale of ice. So the Greenland ice sheet covers the world's largest island. The Antarctic ice sheet is a whole continent. And I don't see a space where the construction and the finances of trying to to change these ice sheet behavior is going to work out for us. But there are.

• 53:15Chuck Nice?

  The Chinese built a three thousand mile wall fifteen hundred thousand years ago.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Right? They didn't have to go build it in Antarctica where we can hardly get research ships to go. And it's really expensive. And how do you build at the bottom of the ocean?

• 53:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Construction's going to have a a local impact and on on ecosystems. The thing is, doctor, is is it not effective to do something at the source rather than try then, when the water levels have risen so high, to build seawalls around the world's global coastal cities?

• 53:47Speaker 04

  So.

• 53:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Which will cost trillions and trillions of dollars.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  One hundred percent, we should be doing something at the source. But you know what the source is in this case? The source is climate change.

• 53:57Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  And the source of that is greenhouse gas, polluting gas emissions.

• 54:03Chuck Nice?

  And that, by the way, is manmade. Let's let's just please, please, because there are many people who, once you say that greenhouse gas, they're like, well, you know, water vapor is the most, and I'm like, shut up, it's us, we're doing it.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Manmade.

• 54:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck's bedside manner, right? Trying to convert people.

• 54:24Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. All right, Doctor, how? Let's pick on Florida.

• 54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, we gotta begin to land the plane. So we wanna get.

• 54:31Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so let's pick on Florida before we get to the airport. And so what would it take to flood the coastal cities in Florida? Therefore, give Chuck a big smile on his face because that means Tom Brady can't play football anymore.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know if any of you have visited coastal Florida recently, but they are already dealing with a lot more flooding than they used to. So I think that's kind of a question that's like already in the past. We're already seeing increased flooding all along the coast, the Gulf Coast of the US especially hard hit. And when we look at the future, we're sort of at this little point here and those futures diverge. All of them, seas continues to rise. But in some of them, those seas rise way faster and way more. And that difference, that is human action.

• 55:22Chuck Nice?

  That's terrible. So anyway, with respect to the coastal areas of Florida, those areas are beautiful and good. Is there any way that we could skip over them and flood the interior where all the crazy people live?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Well, I'm just gonna tell you that actually, I'm guessing you were hoping that would just be a joke. But I'm telling you, when you raise sea levels, that also influences groundwater and you can actually get interior flooding that is a result of sea level rise. But climate change is also changing precipitation and we got lots of flooding due to different rain events as well.

• 56:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 56:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I haven't thought about this. So, so of course, if the ocean levels rise, then all levels of water that are inland will be influenced by this. And so the ground. Might have had a certain absorbency to accommodate a rainfall that it won't any longer because the water table's higher. And so you'll flood sooner than you would have, you'll flood more often than you ever did. Is that, is that a fair assessment?

• 56:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that can, that absolutely can happen in places. And also that, um, what you were bringing up earlier, fresh water versus salt water. Suddenly we have this salty ocean water getting into this groundwater table and working away at the coast and we can run into problems with our fresh drinking water, too.

• 56:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh my, yeah, that's wow.

• 56:50Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, before we, before we get to, to land, doctor, one more question from me. How does not eating a burger a week help save the ice?

• 57:00Speaker 04

  Well, one of the things, as we were discussing, the source of ice loss is man-made climate change. And there are a lot of things we can be doing to address man-made climate change, and it will require systemic change. So we can't just look to ourselves to do all the best things, but every one of us is part of this system. So, hey, if I'm gonna be a part of this system, I'm gonna start to do some more climate-friendly practices and I'm gonna tell my friends about it and my neighbors and my colleagues and all the people I work with. And that's how we create this movement. So we get individual action and systemic change and we actually move towards this

• 57:44Speaker 04

  future where the air is cleaner, the water's cleaner, and everything's not melting into the ocean.

• 57:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God. Oh God, thank you so much. Oh, I'm just, you know, for the longest time, scientists who work like you, they were, because we need to move policy and we need to move corporations. What they were saying was, individual action can't really make a difference here. You're the first one to articulate it in such a way where it's not necessarily a dependent upon us, but we all have a role to play. And thank you for saying that.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely, because that's how we create movements and social movements, social tipping points are a huge part of making climate action, something that we're not even thinking about. Like, I go to get a car, I want a big Silberado truck, and the thing I get is an electric, because that's what you drive. So, there's a big part of creating a system change that is made up of all of us as individuals, working together, making our ideas ripple, getting things started locally.

• 59:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta end it there. Twila, thanks for this. It's really fun information. We've all heard of glaciers, we know rudimentary things about them, but how often are we in arms' reach of an expert, and who's devoted their life and career to it? So, thanks for being on this, and we should do one day a Cosmic Queries with her.

• 59:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we'd get our fans to write in. We could totally fill a show with what we know will be people's questions about on this topic. Gary, always good to have you, man. Pleasure, my friend. All right, Chuck. Yes, sir. All right, and Twila, how can we find you on social media? What's your presence there?

• 59:37Speaker 04

  You can find me on Twitter, at @TwylaMoon, and also at ChangingIce.com.

• 59:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right, there it is. This has been another installment of StarTalk, the Ice Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always. Keep looking out.