Januari 05, 2017
it's a pleasure to be here today. i'll beheading back to antarctica for my fifteenth expedition and i'll never forget my firstexpedition to antarctica because that was when i first decided that scuba diving inwater that was freezing was worth it if you saw the kind of things that i was seeing underthat ocean. there we go. okay, so antarctica, how did i fall in love with antarctica? well,it would've been in 1982 when i made my first trip and besides the scenery being stunning,i remember dropping through eight feet of sea ice. a little bit claustrophobic as yougo down through the ice hole but when you come out below the ice in antarctica, believeit or not, you can see 1000 feet underwater. this is the clearest water in the world thatyou could possibly dive in and what struck
me more than the clarity was the beautiful,dense assemblage of marine life on the sea floor. there were sponges and soft coralsand starfish and sea urchins. the list went on and on and on.how were these animals adapted to living in this very cold, remote place? how did theyreproduce? what did they feed on? how did they defend themselves from predators? therewere so many unanswered questions; it was almost like being in a candy store for a scientistand i got very excited in this and i was very fortunate to work, for many years, at mcmurdostation which is the largest u.s. station in antarctica and then to later move overto palmer station on the antarctic peninsula. now, i have to tell you that palmer stationis one of the most beautiful places that you
will ever visit. it's on this gorgeous coastof the antarctic peninsula, it's nestled below a beautiful glacier and it's home to 44 ofus. when we go and work at palmer station, there are only 44 beds and about half of themare filled with scientists and the other half are filled with science support people. sothere's a medical doctor, there's cooks, there's carpenters and plumbers, there's people thatoperate the boats and then this group of scientists that are largely doing marine biological studies.so i went to palmer station 15 years ago and one of the things i immediately began to noticeover the years at palmer station was things are changing; they're changing very, veryrapidly because polar ecosystems tend to be very, very sensitive to change, they're thebarometers of global change and certainly,
antarctica is no exception. so that's whati want to talk about with you today, to tell you this story and if you look at this, thisis right out of national geographic magazine and you can see that in 2006, the orange areasof the earth that depict warming were largely centered on the arctic but if you look downat antarctica down here, the region where i'm working and living down here at palmerstation, even in 2006, was definitely on the radar but look at the cover of nature magazinein 2009. this is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world and betweensatellite and ground station temperature data, we know that it's not just the peninsula that'swarming quickly now but also this western portion of the continent. and even over onthe east side of antarctica, there's now information
that the ice shelves, these big, thick layersof ice that are attached to the continent are beginning to melt, even over here on theeastern side. so it's not quite as warm as over here and on the peninsula but even theeastern part of antarctica's beginning to show some signs of warming.so how much warming are we talking about? well, fortunately, 20 miles from where i work,here's my home right here, palmer station on this little island, anvers island, youget there by leaving the tip of argentina and going across the drake passage and arrivinghere at the station. a little station just down the coast from us has been taking mid-winterair temperatures for 60 years and if you look at that compilation of data, you can see anincrease of about 10 degrees fahrenheit in
60 years; 10 degree fahrenheit, that is avery, very large number for warming in a particular region. so what's the effect? well, i cantell you that 15 years ago, about once a week, i would hear a huge crashing sound, i wouldleap up from my computer, i'd run down the hall with all my other friends, we'd openthe door and watch big waves come down the bay from the glacier that had calved behindthe station. it was very exciting. now when i go to palmer station, this is happeningalmost every day, sometimes twice a day. the incidence of calving is increasing andwe have more information than just anecdotal stories like that. we have people like thisscience technician who, once a year puts on a backpack and hikes along the leading edgeof the glacier. he has a gps unit in his backpack
that's talking to a satellite over his headand can mark his position to something like a centimeter's distance of resolution andthen you can plot where the marr glacier, the glacier behind the station has been overtime and when maggie and chuck amsler, my colleagues used to go down here in the late70s, you could open the door at palmer station and almost step onto the glacier and now youhave to hike a half a kilometer to get to the edge. and here's an aerial picture thatdepicts this. here's palmer station, here's where the glacier was in 1975 and look howfar it's receded in 2013. there are other indications of glacial changes. can you imaginea satellite being able to measure the thickness of a glacier from space but this essentiallya satellite data showing that, again, glacial
thinning, mostly on the western and the antarcticpeninsula, not so much on the east and then here's greenland, another area, very rapidforming in glacial melt. this brought some concern to scientists whenthe thwaites glacier on the western side of antarctica was discovered to be retreatingvery rapidly and there's some concern because the antarctic continent is covered with severalmiles deep ice and that ice is flowing seaward. so the western antarctic ice sheet flows outthrough this area where the glacier is and there's some concern that as the glacier dissipatesthat this will accelerate the rate of that movement of ice into the amundsen sea. sowhy are we concerned about these ice sheets because, well, i'll tell you in just a second.they have a number of important roles, if
you will, along the peninsula. this is a mapthat shows recent ice sheet breakouts over the last 30 years and i want to highlightthe larsen b ice shelf and we'll go down and look at the wilkins as well. so over on theeastern side of the peninsula, here's the larsen b ice shelf, a satellite, a nasa satellitetook this image and lo and behold, striations were discovered in the ice sheet. remember,this is 300 or 400 feet deep of ice, so this was on january 31, 2002. about a month later,the satellite image captured the larsen b ice shelf fragmenting and two weeks later,the entire larsen b ice shelf went out to sea.so this is a piece of ice real estate, the size of the state of rhode island. this isa large event. more recently, down here on
the wilkins ice shelf, this was in newspapersaround the world, it was discovered that the wilkins ice shelf was disintegrating and thiswas in 2009 and right now, as i'm speaking, there's pieces of it that are still sort ofhanging to an island but eventually, the entire wilkins ice shelf will go out and this isabout the size of the state of connecticut, so large events. the good news, for all ofus, is that when these massive ice sheets break up and go out to sea and melt, theydo not contribute to sea level rise and it's the same physics as a glass of ice water.when the ice melts, the water doesn't come over the top of the glass. the ice is alreadyin the water. the concerning news is that these ice sheets serve as barriers that preventor slow down the flow of ice off the continent
into the sea and scientists have discoveredin areas where the ice sheets have gone out, the rate of flow can be two or three timesfaster than it was before and that's the ice we're concerned about because as the ice comesoff the land and enters the ocean, it does contribute to sea level rise and that's whyscientists have predicted taking greenland and antarctica into consideration that, bythe end of the century, we're going to have somewhere between about 0.4 and one meterof sea level rise. well, as a marine ecologist, i'm really fascinatedby how the marine life of the antarctic peninsula is responding to such rapid change. changehas always occurred but what's happening now is really unprecedented in terms of the rateof change. so i'm very fortunate to know this
guy here, bill frazier and bill's data isprobably the most poignant story that i can share with you and it's a story of adeliepenguins that go back 45 years, when bill arrived at the station as a graduate studentand when he arrived 45 years ago, he tagged 15,000 breeding pairs of adelie penguins livingon little islands just in front of the station. bill told me last december that the numberof penguins he's going to count this year is probably going to be around 1500. so morethan three-quarters of his penguins have disappeared and sadly, he has not found them in otherrookeries; they are disappearing. so why are the adelie penguins disappearing? let me showyou his data. here's when bill showed up as a graduate student, 15,000 breeding pairsand here is the last estimate he gave me recently,
back in november, 1500 pairs. so this is thatdecline i talked about. here's the adelies; they look like little charlie chaplins. here'sthe gentoo and the chinstrap. now, interestingly, note that the chinstrap penguins showed upin the 70s and now there's about 300 breeding pairs of these beautiful little chinstrapsand there's also about 1,000 breeding pairs of gentoos.the interesting thing is they should not be here. these are sub-antarctic species thatare moving into the area as it's warming and as it gets warmer, they can settle into thearea and begin to establish these breeding colonies that they've established. so whatin the world is going on as it warms, it's causing problems for the adelie. bill hasseveral ideas, let me share them with you.
one of the things is that bill and his colleagueshave noticed that more and more now, ironically, as the air warms, it's becoming more humidand it's snowing more and it's snowing later than it has in the past. so imagine this,you're an adelie penguin, you're genetically hard-wired to show up at the same time, sameweek every year and lay your eggs. now, you lay your eggs and along comes this unseasonablylate snowstorm, buries the colony in snow and you end up having that snow melt and drowningthe eggs. and you can lose an entire generation of adelies in one of these storm events andthese are happening more and more commonly. that's one pressure on the adelie. the otheris that the ecology of the adelie penguin is intimately tied to the annual sea ice andthat's this ice that forms here; it's very
thin, maybe about three feet deep, it coversor surrounds the antarctic continent every winter, doubles the size of the continentand guess what? in the last 30 years, about 40 percent of that annual sea ice is gonefrom the antarctic peninsula as it warms and because the adelie penguin uses that ice asa platform to toboggan across and get out to the edge where it feeds on krill, patchesof these shrimp-like krill, the adelies are now having to swim much further offshore toget to their food source than they used to and bill believes they are on such a tightenergy budget when they raise their chicks that that additional swimming to get to theirfood is critical and that could be another pressure. the other thing that's happening,as we've discovered, that when krill are teenagers,
they live underneath the annual sea ice feedingon diatoms, the little plant cells that grow underneath the ice. so as the annual sea iceis disappearing, so are the krill populations dropping. so this puts an additional thirdpressure on the adelies. any of the organisms that are intimately involvedin their ecology with the sea ice have a potential problem as that sea ice disappears. one ofmy favorite seals in antarctica is the weddell seal and there's a wonderful story of evolutionhere. when the female weddell seal is ready to give birth, she swims up under the annualsea ice until she finds a little weak spot in the ice and she chips away at it with herunique ice chipping teeth and then she can work it until it's large enough that she canclimb right up through the hole and lay next
to the hole and give birth. and the beautyof that is that the predators, the leopard seals, the killer whales that could causeharm are over at the ice edge. they can't get to her and her pups and it's all becauseof dentition; it's all because of these unique ice-chipping teeth that she has and the maledoes not have. so is the weddell seal going to disappear as the ice disappears? i don'tthink so. i think the weddell seal will follow the ice south as it moves south with warming.what about the leopard seal? now how would you like to run into one of these when you'rescuba diving? you know what we do when we run into one when we're scuba diving? we getout of the water. very quickly. and if you're up in the boat and the divers are down andthe seal comes, we have a special leopard
seal recall device. we haven't patented itbut we drop it in the water, we turn it on, siren goes off, the divers hear the sirenunderwater, they come together back-to-back and they work their way up very quickly, getin the boat and we leave the area and the leopard seal behind 'cause we don't want totake a chance with these guys. now these guys, they're about 10 feet long, 1,000 pounds,they will lay around on the sea ice to digest a meal. the question will be, when the seaice is gone, are they going to come ashore to digest a meal or will they just, sort of,follow the ice? and nobody knows the answer yet. what about the small things like plankton,phytoplankton, zooplankton? how are they responding to these rapid changes in temperature, thewarming that's going on?
well, fortunately, we have this guy, hughducklow. hugh ducklow is the director of the national science foundation's long-term ecologicalresearch program at palmer station. thirty years plus of data looking at plankton upand down the peninsula. this is long before we even knew that climate change was goingto have such a dramatic effect. so we've got some wonderful information to look at andhugh and his colleagues, there's about 20 scientists involved in this program have runthese transects, these are ship transects up and down the peninsula for many, many yearsand if you look at these transects, this is the transects that were done in the 70s and80s and the 90s and 2000s and they stopped at these stations along the transects andmeasured everything. the phytoplankton, the
zooplankton, the temperature, the salinity,it goes on and on and on. so they have a pretty good record and what they're finding is thatup here, at the tip of the peninsula, if you compare the 70s and 80s with the 90s and 2000s,the weather's changed. it's gotten much cloudier, it's gotten considerably windier. we're movingto a more warm, humid type of climate. what's happening with the wind is it's churningup the top of the ocean and it's pushing the nice, juicy diatoms the krill-like to feedon and the diatoms and the krill, there's less phytoplankton, less krill and unfortunately,salps are moving in. evil salps. salps are these little gelatinous organisms the sizeof a walnut. they're tunicates, technically. they're oceanic, typically, but they're movingin along the coast so we're replacing krill,
think steak with salps, think lettuce. that'snot a good trade-off so that's a problem. so far, further down the peninsula, the grouphas found that the weather's beginning to change a little bit but nothing like they'veseen up in this region so we don't have the negative effects, there's still enough phytoplanktonand diatoms and krill as you move further south. but hugh ducklow believes that overtime and not too much time, the whole peninsula's going to be looking very similar. what otherthings might happen as it warms? well one thing you probably don't realize is that underneaththe ocean, in antarctica, there are forests. did you know antarctica had forests? you justhave to put on a dry suit, go to the western antarctic peninsula, jump off a little boatinto the water and you are swimming in a forest.
the algae will be maybe 15 to 20 feet aboveyour head. there's 150 species of algae growing, it's a wonderful area. there's enough light,there's enough nutrients. what's going to happen, i think, is these forests are goingto be very happy. as it warms, the sea ice is going to retreat, the forest will havemore light, they'll grow deeper, they'll further move their range down the coast. but we'rea little bit concerned as chemical ecologists because we know that these forests are producingchemical defenses and they're using energy to make those defenses. and what's going tohappen when you alter the energy regime and how that's going to effect the productionof these defenses, who eats who and you could really alter the community in this sense.it might be in a good way, it might not. what
about marine invertebrate larvae and warming?well when i was doing work as a post-doc in antarctica, one of the things that we studiedwas the larvae of echinoderms. you probably don't realize that you're looking at a babystarfish in this picture. this will metamorphose much like a caterpillar metamorphoses intoa butterfly. it's a dramatic reorganization of the organism but most marine invertebrates,sponges and corals and starfish and sea urchins produce larvae and we brought a variety oflarvae into the lab and we raised the temperature a tiny bit, two degrees.now remember, these animals are living at a very constant temperature of about -1.8degrees. when we raise the temperature two degrees, the larvae develop twice as fastas they normally do. it didn't take 'em two
months to develop, it took 'em one month.well that might be a good thing, here in the water for a shorter time, things can't eatyou, perhaps, you settle before you get eaten. on the other hand, many of these larvae feedon phytoplankton and these phytoplankton have blooms and what happens if the bloom was tooccur later than you were ready to start eating. so you show up at the cafeteria and the dooris locked. this is something that climate scientists are very concerned about that wewill offset predator and prey with the warming that's happening. this is just a quick littlegraph to show you these are antarctic species and temperate and tropical species and ifyou look at the antarctic embryos, you change that temperate a tiny bit and you have a hugeeffect on the rate of development. this seems
to be a very basic function of their physiologyand development. all right, so i already mentioned two speciesthat have shown up at my station that haven't been there in the past, remember, the gentoopenguin and the chinstrap. well, i can tell you that 15 years ago when i showed up atpalmer, the chances of my opening the door of the station and tripping over a 2000 poundmale bull elephant seal was really, really low. and now there are times of year whenyou open the door of the station and not only do you see a dozen elephant seals loungingaround in the middle of the station but these things are incredibly smelly. i mean thisis odiferous. so we have been invaded by elephant seals, they have now established a breedingcolony across on our little island, you can
hear the pups and the barking and the battlingand then these guys showed up recently, the antarctic fur seal. again, a sub-antarcticspecies moving in as it's becoming warmer and warmer. and they have just began to establishbreeding colonies too. now probably the most poignant story i can tell you about what iwould call a range extension of a species in antarctica or maybe be so sort of braveas they say - invasion - is something i'm going to set the stage with, with this photograph.so imagine this: 35 million years ago antarctica separated from south america on its way toits position at the south pole area. when it pulled free of south america, it allowedthe establishment of the antarctic circumpolar current, the world's largest current. it essentiallylocked the continent into a freezer, an icebox.
those species that were able to survive did,those that couldn't evolve to live at the very low temperatures perished. but thereare some very interesting things that you don't find in antarctic waters that tie backto this sort of scenario. there are no sharks in antarctica, there are very few skates,there are no fish that have strong crushing jaws, they're called durophagous fish. allthe fish in antarctica are wimps. they feed on little crustaceans, they have weak littlejaws, they do not sound like a parrotfish crunching coral on a reef, there's nothinglike that. there's nothing in antarctica with a claw. there's no crabs, there's no lobsters.so my point is that the marine invertebrates that coat the sea floor in antarctica havenever had to deal with a crushing predator.
if i was to hand betsy a clam from antarctica,she could take her two fingers and she could crush the shell as easy as could be.they're very weakly calcified, they're not like the shells you find here on the beachesof florida, some of those things look like they're designed to be hit with a sledgehammerand still survive. in antarctica, you can crush these shells and i believe it's in part,because they've never had to deal with crushing predators so you can imagine the shock ofmy colleague, sven thatje who, on january 25, 2007 was 1123 meters above where thisphotograph was taken, he was flying a remote-operated vehicle along the sea floor of the slope ofantarctica and he came across 13 big king crabs that were marching up the slope. sothis is interesting because we thought that
king crabs couldn't handle the cold. crabsdon't do well with cold. they have a hard time regulating magnesium ions and their bodyfluids, they act like they're drunk, they fall over, they can't feed. so what mightbe happening now is at that antarctic circumpolar current is beginning to warm, we might beopening the physiological curtain to allow king crabs that have lived for many, manythousands of years surrounding antarctica in the deep, they may be moving up the slopeand we actually have some research going on in my group looking at this.this was another group of scientists that happened on a million and a half of thesecrabs in a deep canyon near the station and we have had the good fortune of the nationalscience foundation funding us now for about
five years and every year we take this researchvessel to antarctica, we take a submarine and we tow it up the antarctic slope and ontothe shelf, taking images of the sea floor every five seconds for a number of these transectsand then we engage graduate students to go through tens of thousands of images to countthe numbers of crabs and whether they're feeding on the starfish and the brittle stars, howare they impacting the environment, and in fact, we are finding that they are havingan impact. so this is an important potential invasion of a predator into an ecosystem thathasn't seen this kind of predator for many millions of years. the last thing i want totalk about in terms of impacts, ocean acidification. perhaps the lonely stepchild to climate warming.you don't hear as much about ocean acidification
but this is very important. what happens whenwe put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, about 30 percent of what we put up there goesinto the ocean. and that causes a chemical reaction that makes the seawater more acidic.antarctica is the canary in the coalmine for ocean acidification, that's because the water'svery cold and carbon dioxide tends to dissolve in colder water more readily. it's becausei've already told you they don't really have very thick shells to begin with so the acidificationdissolves the shell, there's not much there to begin with. and some other reasons as well.it's harder to build the shell in antarctic waters and i won't go into the chemistry mineralogyof that but it's true. so you can go to antarctica today, you can take a net and you can dipup a little sea butterfly. these little sea
butterflies are snails that have evolved wingsand they swim in the water. they're about a millimeter, just a tenth of an inch acrossand they're as common as the stars in our sky. they are so abundant that they contributeto the global carbon flow on this planet. and you know what? today, there are certainareas of antarctic waters where you can see the shell dissolving under a microscope. thereare already etches in the shell from acidification so this is happening now and it could havean effect -- ocean acidification could affect krill, it could affect amphipods that arecarrying a sea butterfly to defend themselves from predators, 'cause the sea butterfly tastesterrible. it's got a chemical in it. you take the sea butterfly off the back of this littleamphipod, it'll get eaten every time by a
fish. you leave the little living sea butterflyon its back, the fish will take it in its mouth, taste it and spit it right back outagain, that little shrimp will swim away happy as a clam and it's all because it abductedanother species and carried it around on its back like a backpack. do you love that story?i think it's so cool. so i have a couple of grad students that arefinishing up a lot of work on ocean acidification at my home away from home, palmer stationand these two young ladies are now going off to jobs and post-docs but they're publishingsome of the first work that's starting to look at how antarctic organisms may respondto ocean acidification. so this is a list of what i've been talking about, the glacialrecession, the ice sheet break up, the annual
sea ice retreating, how organisms that areassociated with the sea ice are impacted like the adelie and the weddell and krill, phytoplanktoncommunities that are changing, potential effects on these macroalgal forests and larval development,things showing up like elephant seals, fur seals, maybe king crabs and ocean acidification.so it's really remarkable how much is happening so quickly. so this is what the communityof the western antarctic peninsula has looked like for millennia. you have, every year,the annual sea ice platform, you have a very robust population of adelies, lots of krill,a few salps, happy diatoms, you've got this sea floor community and the forest and thisis all being fed by these very nutrient-rich antarctic circumpolar current waters.now here's what's coming. probably by the
end of the century, maybe sooner, the annualsea ice will no longer be here, the adelie will be gone, replaced with the gentoo andthe chinstrap. the krill will be largely depleted and lots and lots of salps; we may have kingcrabs in this ecosystem, the forest will have extended its range and again, all being fedby these very nutrient-rich waters. so this is a community shift, a very dramatic effectand it's not that communities don't change, of course they always change but what's happeninghere is happening over a few decades instead of hundreds, probably thousands of years.so that's the difference. so why should we care? why should we care about climate changein antarctica? antarctica's a long way from harbor branch. so let me give you one quickstory about why i think it's important and
that is related to my own research programin chemical ecology. so imagine this: the sea floor of antarctic is very old. i mean,it's 35 million years of evolution that's taken place in these organisms. those organismsthat defend themselves with toxic chemicals have had a long time to make quite a libraryof nasty chemicals and guess what those nasty chemicals can do? they can fight cancer andaids and cystic fibrosis and bacterial infections. we have a drugstore on the seafloor in antarctica.so when we go out and we're doing our chemical ecology work, we're also collecting specimensto look at their natural products chemistry either by diving off these boats or underthe ice. and i'm just going to tell you two quick stories. one of them is a compound thatwe discovered in a little tunicate called
the synoicum. it's about the size of a grapefruitand if you take the chemistry, the toxic chemical out, this is what it looks like; we calledit palmerolide you get to name the chemical when you discover it so we named it afterthe station, palmerolide. so then we sent it off to the national cancer institute whichwe do with hundreds of chemicals and extracts and guess what? they called us up and theysaid, "you know, we ran this stuff against 25 different cell lines of cancer. it's notactive against 24, but it's extremely active against one line of cancer." and that's reallyneat because we like compounds that are very, very specific in their activity. so they said,"can we work on this compound?" and when the national cancer institute asks you if theycan work on their compound you say "yes".
so they did and they tested it and they madeit in the lab and they put it in mice and it's really kind of cool. it's very, veryactive against melanoma, skin cancer. and there have been interests from developersthat might take that to a drug. wouldn't that be neat to have another drug to fight skincancer and melanoma from antarctica. here's a red alga from antarctica that hasa protein in it that's very active against the h1n1 flu virus. another example of howantarctic sea floor animals and plants, algae, might hold promise for our future. so i givea lot of lectures around the country, indeed, around the world, on climate change and iused to get asked this question: "is it really warming?" i don't think i've been asked thisquestion for five years now, i really haven't.
you can go online and google 'global warming'and you can find lots of evidence for global warming but i want to show you what convincedme without a doubt that global warming is real. now nobody in their right mind can takethese data to hand. i mean nobody. these are proof positive. so what i get asked aboutnow is: "okay, so it's warming, do we have anything to with that or is this just a naturalcycle that happens every so many years and we really don't have much of an impact onit ourselves?" so i want to show you the data that convinced me. i'm a scientist, i'm veryobjective, i have to be convinced with data and these are the data. now this is actuallyquite simple. what you're looking at here is in antarctica.it's a core; it's a core of ice that goes
3600 meters down through the ice sheet thatcovers the continent of antarctica, 3600 meters. it's a core of ice that's going through historybecause trapped in that core of ice are little air bubbles and when those air bubbles wereformed at depth, they represented the atmosphere of the earth at that time. and we're goingback here 430,000 years. so this is the time axis. in the red line you're looking at carbondioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, right? in the blue line, you're looking at temperature,which is derived by using some oxygen isotope ratios but i want you to focus on the carbondioxide, the greenhouse gas. i drew a black line right here because you never see, inour past history, and this has been extended back now to a million years with the samepattern. you never see this red line get above
300 parts per million carbon dioxide. lookswhat happens over here at the onset of the industrial revolution and i've blown thatup. here you go, the red line shoots up and up and up and up and now recently, it's hit400 parts per million and that's, what, 25 percent increase in co2 since the onset ofthe industrial revolution. and nobody argues about co2 being a greenhouse gas, it's a verypotent greenhouse gas. so to me, personally, that was a very strongindication that we have a significant role in the warming that we're experiencing, howmuch? nobody can really say exactly but i think most all scientists would agree thatit's significant. so i know you were dying to know why there's this 100,000 year cyclein carbon dioxide on our planet. and the way
that it's explained, it actually has a name,the milankovitch cycle, it's a 100,000-year cycle of the earth in an elliptical orbitaround the sun. this happens over 100,000 years and this drives that warming, cooling,that increase in co2, the decrease in co2 that you saw. so. gloom and doom. but i don'twant to leave you with that because i'm too much of an optimist, kind of glass half-fullscientist. so i want to leave you this really neat story and it happened just 20 miles fromwhere i work in antarctica. so imagine this: it's 1985 and you're a technician, you'resitting at your desk at the station 20 miles from where i work - it's a ukrainian stationnow, it used to be british - and you look at the data set and you go, "i just don'twant to send this back to the boss in great
britain, he's not going to believe it." sothey send it back to their boss in great britain and he doesn't believe it. he says, "okay,i'm going to send you back to antarctica next year, i'm giving you a new spectrophotometer,you're going to make all the measurements over again and then you can tell me what youfind." so they did, they went back the next year.lo and behold, they got the same dataset, they told their boss and he said, "how inthe world could the world have missed this story?" and he published, with some of hiscolleagues, probably one of the most important papers, essentially, of the 20th century,reporting a massive hole over the entire continent of antarctica - and remember antarctica'sthe size of china and india combined - and
so large that at times it extended over thenew zealand continent: the hole in the ozone. now ozone is a very important part of ouratmosphere because it protects us from ultraviolet radiation. and when i was living in new zealand10 years ago on sabbatical with my family, i would read the paper in the morning withmy coffee and there would be an spf factor in the weather area. what level of sunscreenwas i to put on that day in new zealand, based on where this hole in the ozone was? and whenit was over new zealand, that number was big. and new zealand has the largest incidenceor the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world. so that atmosphere, that ozone,that layer of the atmosphere is very, very critical. so it wasn't so amazing to me thateverybody had missed this amazing story but
what happened next? in 1987, over 20 countriessat down around a table in montreal, canada and ratified the montreal protocol, whichregulated the chlorofluorocarbons, the refrigerants that were discovered to be the cause of thehole in the ozone. it's really quite amazing. today, there are 192 signatories to the montrealprotocol. it's probably the most successful global treaty of all time and when susan solomoncame to visit my university a few years ago, the woman who discovered the basis of thehole in the ozone, a very famous american scientist, chemist, i asked her on the wayto the way to the airport, i said, "susan, what's going on with the hole in the ozone?"and she said, "it's good news. it stopped growing and there's now predictions that bythe end of the century, it's going to close
and maybe sooner." so this is just a wonderfulexample of how countries can come together and come to an agreement to regulate somethingthat was having a global impact on earth. so i just want to segue quickly 'cause i knowi just have a minute to tell you about some things that happened to me because of thebooks that i've published recently. so i've got two books, as you know and i've just goneinto becoming an author for the general public. i had no idea that books could open doors.one of the things that happened when my first book came out is e.o. wilson, a very famousscientist put me on his board of advisors. everybody had a nobel prize on that boardexcept me; it was embarrassing. but i got this phone call from the directorof the e.o. wilson foundation, she said, "jim
we love your chapter in your book on the adeliepenguin. we would like to make a two minute video that's going to go across america inthe zoos, in the aquariums about the adelie penguin and we think your prose is wonderful,we want to just have it read." i said i'd be so honored to read my prose and she said,"no, we'll have harrison do it." and i said, "harrison who?" and she said, "harrison ford."she said, "you didn't know he was on the board with you?" i said, "no, i thought everybodyhad a nobel prize." so you can go to youtube and you can hear harrison reading my prose:ghost rookeries. the other thing i didn't realize was that i would meet this guy. soi was minding my own business one day at the station and i happened to be the eldest scientistor whatever, i was the chief scientist by,
sort of, default and the station manager said,"we have somebody coming tomorrow, would you please host the visit?" i said "sure, whois it?" they said, "we can't tell you." i said, "what? security? in antarctica? you'vegotta be kidding me." so the next day bill jr. and his dad, bill sr. showed up and sodoes bill jr.'s stepmother and bill jr.'s son, rory. so i had all four of 'em for theday, had a wonderful visit, got to know them over lunch, showed 'em the station labs.well, after lunch, the thing to do was to take bill and his father up to see the nationalscience foundation video. so it's a big screen, i put two big chairs in the front of the roomfor them, bill, bill and then i'm sitting behind them. well imagine this, in comes theit guy and he cannot get microsoft to boot
up. two minutes went by. do you know how longtwo minutes is in computer time? and his father finally looked at him and went, "you reallyneed to do something about this, bill." and i thought, "that is a microsoft moment." allright. so let me end by telling you that i lead cruises to antarctica now; a scientistleading cruises to antarctica, imagine that. well, once a year now, abercrombie & kentask me to come along and lead this philanthropic cruise to antarctica. we go to the peninsulafor 10 days. it's wonderful, it's educational. we visit the station where i work and if anybody'sinterested in that, i'll let you know, give you a card or something like that but thisparticular cruise in january 2017 is already full, they're taking a waitlist but i'll doin '18, i'll do it in '19, i will do it until
i literally can't walk. to go to antarcticaevery time is so special. so with that, i'd be happy to take any questions.
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