Adventures In Science At The Icy ‘Ends Of The Earth’

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow.

Next up, a field trip to the coolest places on Earth, literally. The poles of our planet.

As Earth’s ice boxes, they help cool the planet, store fresh water, influence weather patterns, and more. But they are also the fastest-warming places on Earth. 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 Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, joins us now.

Neil, welcome back.

NEIL SHUBIN: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

IRA FLATOW: 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.

NEIL SHUBIN: 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.

IRA FLATOW: Even just the ice itself, it 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.

NEIL SHUBIN: It’s mind-blowing. The shapes it can take, the forms it can 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 ice in your drinks, we slip on it. But no, it’s an incredibly complex substance, and one that’s– we’re tethered to it, in our past and our future.

IRA FLATOW: 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?

NEIL SHUBIN: 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, 3 million years of our branch of the tree of life, that is, the ice has come and gone during ice ages.

And as it forms, it captures pieces of the world. It captures pieces of the atmosphere, dust, other heirlooms, like microbes that were living at the time.

IRA FLATOW: Right.

NEIL SHUBIN: And these things are released as ice melts.

IRA FLATOW: The North and South polar regions are totally different, aren’t they? People normally give the North Pole credit that doesn’t deserve for things.

NEIL SHUBIN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, as we all learn in school, Antarctica 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 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 these places behave differently, right? I mean, the Antarctic is colder, drier, and tends to be windier than places in the Arctic. And having worked in both, you really have to prepare in very different ways.

IRA FLATOW: And the Antarctic really is a desert, isn’t it?

NEIL SHUBIN: 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.

IRA FLATOW: Well, tell us what a day– what it’s like to work a day in Antarctica. Take me through a day in your life there.

NEIL SHUBIN: OK. 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, oh, I don’t know, about 8,000 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. 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 American base, McMurdo Station. It’s cold, but inside the rocks is an ancient tropical world. It’s rocks formed in ancient rivers and streams with 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 trying to survive, staying warm. So the first thing to do is when you’re climbing these mountains, you don’t want to sweat, because if you sweat it, subzero temperatures, that’s not a good thing. So you’re very mindful of your body.

You’re working in a team in six people. We go around in groups of two, sometimes three. 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 conditions. 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. The science is second.

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 along the way, we’re looking for fossils, and hopefully finding fossils that change the way we think about the history of life.

IRA FLATOW: To make sure that you do it right, how do you prepare, for example, for a trip to Antarctica?

NEIL SHUBIN: You have to get in physical shape for it. So my normal bod here doesn’t usually work.

And yeah, we have to take a field safety course. And part of that is– 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 sometimes, there are these cracks that are about, I don’t know, over hundred feet deep, maybe 200 feet deep that might be covered by a snow bridge and are hidden.

When we’re on a snowmobile, 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 then you have to meet the team and 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. Little, simple creature comforts are hugely important in a place like this.

And then we have to think about the logistics. How do you get an airplane or a helicopter in there?

Fossils are heavy. How do we get them out?

It’s all the nitty gritty it takes to be successful. Everything has to be planned.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about Ellesmere Island, because you made a very interesting– you and you team– a very interesting fossil discovery. One of the first critters to crawl onto land? Tell us about that.

NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah. This was– 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 and 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. But we learned a lot of lessons about ourselves, and how to find things. It took us six years to do it.

And 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.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a career-making discovery for you, right?

NEIL SHUBIN: 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 very– it’s a fossil that comes with a story. It comes with a story of discovery.

It just didn’t– we 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, and that’s what I love to share with my students and folks I’m talking to about it.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, because science really is based on failure, isn’t it?

NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah. If you’re not failing, you’re not succeeding. And you have to take those chances, and you have to learn from those failures.

And 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.

IRA FLATOW: 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?

NEIL SHUBIN: 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, 1,000 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 freshwater, 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. It’s a 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.

IRA FLATOW: Could there be vegetation living in the lakes, besides microbes?

NEIL SHUBIN: Well, you think about these places, they’re lacking sunlight. And so, what you have are creatures that really need to metabolize chemicals, so it’s probably a very specialized ecosystem in many ways. More similar to what you have at deep sea vents or at the bottom of the ocean.

IRA FLATOW: One of the things I saw when I was in Antarctica is that they were fishing for what they called Antarctic codfish. And the reason that the fish could survive was because the fish had built-in antifreeze in its blood.

NEIL SHUBIN: 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 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 trehalose, and it turns them, when the conditions are horrible, it turns them into a kind of glass, where they sit in suspended animation until the conditions get better again. So these are extreme adaptations we’re seeing.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. That’s why we sometimes think we could find life on other planets, because we find life that’s adaptable to such stream conditions, right?

NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you think about it. You have life under the ice, 2 and 1/2 miles under the ice. You have life that can do extraordinary things. So, why not think about other frozen bodies in the solar system?

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I’m talking with evolutionary biologist Dr. Neil Shubin about research in the poles of our planet.

All right, Neil, 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?

NEIL SHUBIN: 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 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 amount of loss is only increasing over time, and it’s getting very dramatic.

IRA FLATOW: And so that starts a global chain of events, right? As the poles continue to thaw out, what do we see? Rising sea levels? Other things?

NEIL SHUBIN: Absolutely. I mean, so as that freshwater– remember about 70% of the freshwater 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 freshwater 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 Pacific Islands can be changed, or even disappear, but also you change global weather patterns, which can affect us profoundly.

IRA FLATOW: Could there also be ancient microbes locked up in the ice that now is suddenly released?

NEIL SHUBIN: Oh, man, there’s no doubt about that. So a team from Canada went up to look at ice that’s 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 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 had been locked in ice back to the lab, they were able to reanimate it, and it was able to infect cells. So some of the history that’s coming back as we melt the ice are ancient microbes, and who knows what they can do?

IRA FLATOW: 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?

NEIL SHUBIN: As the ice melts, it’s exposing water, it’s exposing land, and some of this land contains mineral resources, oil and gas resources. Shipping lanes from the Pacific to the Atlantic are now open from part of the year and 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 water into the ocean floor.

Now, there’s– this area is not only heating up temperature-wise, but politically. And one thing you’re going to be reading about in the next 5 to 10 years is a mountain range that 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 also can be claimed by countries.

IRA FLATOW: Didn’t Russia already plant a flag somewhere in the North Pole sea floor?

NEIL SHUBIN: 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.

IRA FLATOW: Right. 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?

NEIL SHUBIN: Yeah. 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 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Neil Shubin is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and author of Ends of the Earth. Neil, thanks for joining me.

NEIL SHUBIN: Well, thank you so much.