Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman and Ira Flatow
A new book explores how one biologist’s work at the North and South Poles changed the way he sees the world and our place in it.
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This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow, and today we're taking a field trip to the coolest places on Earth. Literally, the poles of our planet.
I'm up there looking for fossils, but first I'm stuck trying to survive, staying warm.
A new book illustrates the wonders of Antarctica and the Arctic, and the lengths scientists go to to study such harsh climates before it's too late. It's called Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future. Author Dr. Neil Schubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, joins us now. Neil, welcome back.
Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
You know, when I visited Antarctica, I found it to be life-changing. I don't know about you. I couldn't, I couldn't view the world the same way again.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book. I mean, these places change the way you see the world. They've changed the way I see myself. I mean, having worked in the Arctic and Antarctica for almost four decades now. They change the way you see our species place in nature and on and on and on. They're just so profound.
Even even just the ice itself, I was very surprising to me. And one of my most memorable views of Antarctica, when I first saw the ice is that it even has color. It's blue. Tell me what you find so exciting about the ice.
It's mind blowing, the shapes it can take, the forms it could take, the sounds it makes, the colors, as you mentioned. This is incredible stuff, the ice, because it's an amazingly complicated substance. I mean, we think we all know ice, right? You have, you know, ice in your drinks, we slip on it. But now it's an incredibly complex substance and one that's, you know, we're tethered to it in our past and our future.
And you also write that the poles, I'm going to quote you now, hold our planet's heirlooms. What do you mean by that?
Well, I mean, you think about the ice at the poles, it's come and gone for millennia. In fact, most of the history of our planet is a history of no ice at the poles. But for our species existence, say for the last, say, three million years of our branch of the tree of life, that is, you know, the ice has come and gone during ice ages. And as it forms, it captures pieces of the world. It captures, you know, pieces of the atmosphere, dust, other heirlooms like microbes that were living at the time.
Right.
And they, you know, these things are released as ice melts.
The north and south polar regions are totally different, aren't they? People normally give the North Pole credit that it doesn't deserve for things.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, as we all learn in school, Antarctic is a continent. And what that means is there's land underneath miles of ice and occasionally mountain ranges poke through that ice. But in the Arctic, if you were to remove the ice from the North Pole area, what you'd see is ocean floor. It's pure sea. Now, there are islands that extend up there. But where the North Pole is and much of that region is all ocean. But you know, these places behave differently, right? I mean, the Arctic is colder, drier, and intends to be windier than places in the Arctic. And having worked in both, you can really have to prepare in very different ways.
And the Antarctic really is a desert, isn't it?
Oh yeah, it is super dry. I mean, that's one of the things you really have to deal with there is just how dry it is. I mean, you come prepped for the cold, right? You got all the long underwear, you got all the stuff, right? But it's that dry that really wipes you out. I mean, it really does affect the human body in such a big way. We're fish out of water there.
Well, tell us what it's like to work a day in Antarctica and take me through a day in your life there.
Okay, I want you to imagine you're in a small crew of about six people and you're living on the ice, but at the base of a mountain range that's poking through the ice. So that mountain might go, you know, oh, I don't know, about 8,000 feet high, but the ice is sitting at about 7,000 feet or 6,000 feet. And so you're spending the day hiking up this mountain that's emerging from the ice. And as you walk up, we're looking at the rocks and we're looking for fossils that are emerging in these rocks. Now let me give you this image. You know, we're walking around and looking and sometimes it's subzero temperatures and high winds, looking for small fish fossils and scales and teeth and things like that. But imagine this, you're at the top of a mountain in Antarctica with 1,000 miles of
ice on one side towards the South Pole, several hundred miles of ice towards the, you know, the American base McMurdo Station. It's cold, but inside the rocks is an ancient tropical world. You know, it's rocks formed in ancient rivers and streams with, you know, fossils of ancient sharks and in fact, some fish that are our closest relatives in the fossil record. I'm up there looking for fossils, but first I'm not trying to survive, staying warm. You know, so the first thing to do is when you're climbing these mountains, you don't want to sweat, you know, because if you sweat at, you know, subzero temperatures, that's not a good thing. So you're very mindful of your body. You're working in a team and six people. We go around in groups of two, sometimes three, you know, and we're looking at the surface of the rocks where the fossils are emerging. And if we find a scale or a
tooth or a bone, then we see if that comes from a layer where we can dig in. But we're always mindful of the of the conditions, you know, and as I tell everybody on the crew, the most important thing in working in these places is coming home safely to your loved ones. You know, the science is second, you know, and so I'm always focused on the people. They're focused on me. It's a real buddy system there. It takes a village. And you know, along the way, we're looking for fossils and hopefully finding fossils that change the way we think about the history of life.
To to make sure that you that you do it right, how do you prepare, for example, for a trip to Antarctica?
You have to get in physical shape for it. So you know, my normal bod here doesn't usually work. And yeah, we have to take a field safety course. And part of that is, you know, one of the great risks of working there are cracks in the ice known as crevasses because the ice is always moving and it's cracking. And so, you know, sometimes there are these cracks that are about, I don't know, over 100 feet deep, maybe 200 feet deep, that may be covered by a snow bridge and are hidden. When we're on a snowmobile, you know, I'm always thinking of crevasses. I mean, it's and then in the north, when we're working in Ellesmere Island or in Greenland, I'm thinking of polar bears. In the south, I'm thinking of crevasses. So one part of the training is they lower you into a small crevasse and the team has to pull you out. So we learn how to deal with that. Scientifically,
we prepare by knowing as much as we can about the rocks we're going to be looking at, about the ice that's around those rocks. I'll dig out satellite photos to get a general sense of the topography of the rock and the ice. We'll try to predict what the winds are, what the prevailing winds will be in that place. We'll try to figure out where we could put a camp safely. And, you know, then you have to meet the team, work the team, get everybody on the same page. It's like a sports team. Everybody works together. I find out what everybody likes to eat. So I make sure there's the right food there. That's always important. I mean, little simple creature comforts are hugely important in a place like this. You know, and then we have to think about the logistics. How do you get an airplane or a helicopter in there? You know, fossils are heavy. How do we get them out? You know,
it's all the nitty gritty it takes to be successful. Everything has to be planned.
Let's talk about Ellesmere Island because you made a very interesting, you and your team, a very interesting fossil discovery, one of the first critters to crawl onto land? Tell us about that.
Yeah, this was, you know, we were led to the Arctic in this case, in Ellesmere Island, which is part of Canada, because it held rocks of the right age and the right type, potentially to hold one of the first fish to walk on land. And so we started the hunt for these fossil fish in 1998. We went back over four seasons in six years. And yeah, it took us a while, but we eventually found it. And it's a fish with fins, a fish with scales. But if you crack open the fins, you find bones that correspond to our upper arm, forearm, even parts of our wrist. It has lungs as well as gills. It's a real intermediate between fish and land living creature. And there are so many lessons there about evolution, you know, but we learned a lot of lessons
about ourselves and how to find things. It took us six years to do it. And, you know, the first lesson you learn working in polar regions is be patient. Be patient with the science, be patient with your team, be patient with yourself.
Yeah, yeah. And that's a career making discovery for you, right?
It was a beauty. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think for all of us involved, we were really excited by what it told us about the history of life. But also, it was a very, it's a fossil that comes with a story. It comes with a story of discovery, you know, it just didn't, you know, it just didn't happen on it. We planned a lot of expeditions and we were failures for five years. And there are a lot of lessons in that, you know, and that's kind of what I love to share with my students and folks I'm talking to about it.
Yeah, because science really is based on failure, isn't it?
Yeah, if you're not failing, you're not succeeding. And, you know, you have to take those chances. And you have to learn from those failures. And, you know, the Arctic and the Antarctic, I mean, you're not going to be successful the first time you're down there. It just, this place is, patience is rewarded, is what I tell everybody on the expedition. You just got to believe in what you're doing and you got to learn when you're not doing it right.
And everything is full of surprises, at least for me. One of the surprising things I watched in Antarctica were lakes. There were buried lakes under the ice. Tell me about that. What could be living down there?
People who study ice, glaciologists, were looking at the ice and they found one area around Vostok Station, which is a remote station in the middle of the ice cap in Antarctica, a thousand miles from anything, that had ice that was strangely flat. Not crinkled like the ice around it. And so they did a drilling project and took several decades to get the right drills and make everything work. But under the ice lies a lake the size of Lake Ontario with fresh water with islands. And when they sampled some of the waters, at least some of the waters adjacent to it, they found microbes. And one of those microbes looks like it might be from the gut of a fish. So what you have is hidden freshwater lakes that have been separated from the surface
by oh, millions of years with life inside them. So whole hidden ecosystems. And when people tried to map these things with satellites, they found that there are probably close to about 600 of these lakes under the ice of Antarctica.
Could there be vegetation living in the lakes besides, you know, microbes?
Well, you know, you think about these places, they're lacking sunlight. And so, you know, what you have are creatures that really need to, you know, metabolize chemicals. So it's probably a very specialized ecosystem in many ways, more similar to like what you have at deep sea vents or, you know, at the bottom of the ocean.
You know, one of the things I saw when I was in Antarctica is that they were, they were fishing for what they called Antarctic codfish. And, and the reason that the fish could survive was because the fish had built an antifreeze in its blood.
Yes. It's crazy what the adaptations of these creatures can be to live in these extreme environments. And that's one of the stories I'd love to tell is the discovery of these incredible adaptations. And one of them, as you mentioned, is there are proteins that fish and all kinds of invertebrates make, worms and things like that, that stop ice crystals from forming or stop the ice crystals from destroying the cells as the ice forms and melts. And those are antifreeze proteins and they have come about many times. I mean, some of these stories get really strange. Some worms actually replace all the water in their body with a sugar known as trehalos. And it turns them, when the conditions are horrible, it turns them into a kind of glass where they sit in suspended animation till the conditions get better again.
So these are extreme adaptations we're seeing.
Wow. You know, that's, that's why we, we sometimes think we could find life on other planets because we find life that's adaptable to such extreme conditions, right?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you think about it, you have, you know, life under the ice, two and a half miles under the ice, you have life that can do extraordinary things. So, you know, why not think about other, other frozen bodies in the solar system?
Coming up after the break, how climate change is taking its toll on the poles and could lead to a polar land grab.
One of the largest areas on Earth is being exposed, and it also can be claimed by countries.
Stick around.
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All right, Amelia, we can't talk about the poles without talking about climate change, because the poles are heating up so much faster than other places on Earth. Do we know why that is?
Yes. So if you look at the Arctic, and we can measure the temperatures there by ground stations or by satellites, it turns out the Arctic in places is melting between four and seven times faster than anywhere else on the planet. And that's only accelerating. Because think about this: As it gets warm, ice melts. Well, when ice, but ice can reflect sunlight. So what happens is, as you lose that reflective layer, i.e. the ice and snow, the place warms up even more, because you have darker rocks and darker waters that are exposed that can radiate heat. So the more you lose ice, the faster it heats. So you end up in this sort of amplification loop. We call it Arctic amplification. And they are heating incredibly fast. And so that water is entering the ocean.
We're losing about 280 gigatons of ice per year from Greenland alone. That's up from 40 about 20 years ago. So that, that, that amount of loss is only increasing over time, and it's getting very dramatic.
And so that's, that starts a global chain of events, right? As the poles continue to thaw out, what do we see? Rising sea levels, other things?
Absolutely. I mean, so as that fresh water, remember about 70% of the fresh water of our planet is locked in polar ice. And so when that ice melts, it enters the oceans. And as you said, it raises sea levels. But also that fresh water changes ocean currents. And ocean currents move heat from one place of the world to another. And so many weather patterns, agricultural belts and cities depend on the weather patterns that are based on the ocean currents. So you change sea levels, i.e. coastal real estate and, you know, Pacific Islands can be changed or even disappear. But also you change global, global weather patterns, which can affect us profoundly.
Could there also be ancient microbes locked up in the ice that now suddenly released?
Oh, man, there's no doubt about that. You know, so a team from Canada went up to look at ice is melting out of ice, oh, a few hundred miles south of the North Pole. And they sampled it with modern DNA technology. And they found all kinds of viruses in there. And the sequence of those viruses, the, you know, genetic sequences suggest that they can infect animals and plants that live in the polar regions, as well as elsewhere. Now, some of these viruses have been locked in ice for about 50,000 years. And when a team brought some of this 50,000 year old viruses that have been locked in ice back to the lab, they were able to reanimate it, and it was able to infect cells. So, you know, some of the history that's coming back as we melt the ice are ancient microbes, and who knows what they can do.
Yeah, we might not want to revisit that history. Let's talk about the geopolitical aspects of the poles as they continue to change. What might we see happening geopolitically?
As the ice melts, it's exposing water, it's exposing land. And some of this land is, you know, contains mineral resources, oil and gas resources. Shipping lanes from Pacific to the Atlantic are now open, you know, from part of the year or increasing parts of the year over time. You have fisheries that are now, that are now exposed. You have the ability to mine under the, under the water into the ocean floor. Now, there's, this area is not only heating up temperature wise, but politically. And one thing you're Be reading about in the next five to 10 years is a mountain range runs over 1,000 miles from Siberia to Greenland and Canada underneath the North Pole in the ocean floor. And that mountain range is composed of rocks that have similarities to those in Russia,
those in Greenland, and those in Canada, which means each country can claim through the law of the sea, their continental boundaries extend under the North Pole. So one of the largest areas on earth is being exposed, and it's also can be claimed by countries.
Didn't Russia already plant a flag somewhere in the North Pole seafloor?
Oh, yeah, they had a little, they had a little submarine and it was manned and then they were able to plant a little flag right under the North Pole there. And they made their claim for that whole ocean floor about a decade ago, and it was approved by the UN Committee on Law of the Sea. Denmark and Canada are making their claims as well, and they're likely to be approved on the geological grounds as well. And then it'll be up for the diplomats to try to figure out who owns what up there.
Right. You know, it's obvious that you really love the North and South Poles. And I'm asking you how you're reckoning with these, who knows, upcoming changes in the ones we've already seen.
Yeah, you know, we were up there this past summer in July, looking for new pieces of that fish we talked about before, the fish with arms. And it was, you know, my first time there since COVID. And it was a profound feeling of beauty, of my connection to the landscape, but also the feeling that these landscapes are changing so fast. These are some of the most fragile and vulnerable landscapes on the planet. And we, as a species, are deeply connected to them. The choices, you know, I make in Chicago or others make down south towards the equator really affect these regions, and these regions affect us. We're deeply connected to some of the most remote, beautiful, and fragile landscapes on our planet.
Dr. Neil Shubin is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and author of Ends of the Earth. Neil, thanks for joining me.
Well, thank you so much.
We're going to take a break. And when we come back, your stories about love in the air and in the lab. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. That's about all the time we have for now. A lot of people helped make this show happen.
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I'm Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.
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