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In four weeks, the typical Noom user can expect to

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lose one to two pounds per week. Individual results may

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vary. Imagine

1:45

that you've just made the most exciting

1:47

discovery of your career, but

1:49

at the same time, you wish it

1:51

had never happened. Well, that's what it

1:53

feels like for some scientists discovering rare

1:55

Ice Age bones in the melting permafrost.

1:58

Produced at the SETI Institute, this

2:00

is big picture science. I'm Seth

2:03

Czostak. I'm Molly Bentley. Scientists are

2:05

making incredible discoveries in the Arctic, pulling

2:07

a menagerie of animals from the ice

2:09

that haven't walked the world in 30

2:11

or 40,000 years. I

2:15

was just really struck by this sense

2:17

of, on the one hand, complete and

2:19

total magic and wonder at having walked

2:21

into this glittering ice age time machine

2:24

and seeing just bones poking out of the

2:26

frozen soil all around me. It was incredible,

2:28

just everywhere you look to different animals.

2:31

And then coming out into the reality

2:33

of a warming world and

2:36

realizing I was listening to climate change, I

2:38

was watching climate change unfold right in front

2:40

of my eyes. The world's

2:43

thawing permafrost could reveal more than

2:45

the lost beast of the Pleistocene.

2:47

It could revive dangerous microorganisms locked

2:49

away for thousands of years. We

2:52

are certain of one thing, though.

2:54

Permafrost holds large reservoirs of carbon

2:56

and that is a ticking time

2:59

bomb. So will thawing

3:01

of the permafrost gravely worsen climate

3:03

change? In this episode, what

3:05

happens when the Earth warms and

3:07

frozen ground thaws? This episode of

3:10

Big Picture Science is, De-Permafrosting. Now

3:27

usually when scientists unearth a species from

3:29

the paleo era, they consider themselves successful

3:32

if they find a few bones or

3:34

maybe a tuft of hair. That's

3:36

why a cat named Sparta has

3:39

got everyone's tongue. An extinct

3:41

cave lion cub related to the

3:43

extinct American lion and to our

3:45

modern species of lion, her family

3:47

roamed what is now Siberia around

3:49

30,000 years ago. Well,

3:51

that's all very impressive, but not why

3:53

her appearance is making our hair stand

3:56

on end. Sparta's body was so

3:58

well preserved by the Siberian permafrost.

4:00

She still had fur, tissues,

4:02

and organs. Scientists say she's

4:04

nearly perfect. While

4:07

melting permafrost and erosion can

4:09

expose ancient beasts to paleontologists,

4:12

Sparta was actually discovered by

4:14

Russian mammoth tusk collectors. The

4:17

collectors work by zeroing in on permafrost

4:19

stream banks, where they see a piece

4:22

of bone jutting out. Then they blast

4:24

a stream of water into the sediment

4:26

and ice, dislodging it and carving out

4:28

a cavern in the process. The

4:31

slumping permafrost, of course, makes their digging

4:33

easier. Now these collectors

4:35

operate in the gray area, between

4:37

okay to do it if you

4:39

have a license to black market

4:41

smuggling. But those who are above

4:43

board have arranged to share their

4:45

finds with scientists. And the scientists

4:47

who have been alerted to these ice

4:49

age discoveries say that the news is

4:51

bittersweet. The permafrost that holds

4:53

these treasures is under threat. The Arctic's

4:55

warming, and it warms three times faster

4:57

than the rest of the globe. And

5:00

it's turning its once frozen ground into

5:02

slush. So I was

5:04

out at the permafrost caves where Sparta

5:06

was found, and we had

5:08

to go in with a permafrost expert who

5:11

was constantly monitoring the conditions, making sure we

5:13

weren't going to be killed in a cave-in,

5:15

which happens sometimes. There have been slumps in

5:17

cave-ins, just like the one that probably killed

5:19

Sparta, right? My name is

5:21

Jacqueline Gill, and I'm an associate professor

5:23

of paleoecology at the University of Maine.

5:26

And yet, Dr. Gill and other

5:28

scientists cannot help but feel excited

5:31

by the insights and supplies to

5:33

see in ecosystems that these ice

5:35

age specimens, like the near perfect

5:37

lion cub Sparta, provide. It

5:40

was really striking to me

5:42

just how perfect she was. She

5:44

looked like a sleeping kitten, right? So

5:46

she's about the size of an average

5:49

house cat, and her fur

5:51

was still soft, her claws were still sharp.

5:53

She had all of her little whiskers. Her

5:56

eyes were closed, her mouth was open, kind

5:58

of pulled back as the tissue use

6:00

kind of dry out after an animal dies, it's really common

6:02

for the mouth to be open. And

6:04

it's just amazing to me just

6:07

how, you know, it

6:09

looked like an animal that maybe died just a

6:11

couple of days ago and not 30,000 years ago.

6:14

And is it more than just scientifically

6:16

exciting? I mean, it does also have

6:18

scientific import. Are you learning something about

6:21

that time or about those animals? Absolutely.

6:24

So these specimens, we call them mummies because they're,

6:27

you know, more than just a set of bones,

6:30

right? And they're not even really fossilized, they're

6:32

still soft. So these mummies

6:34

are, they're a treasure trove

6:36

of information. Every whisker records

6:38

the lifespan of that animal. What

6:40

it ate, what season it died,

6:42

its stomach contents can tell us

6:44

about its diet, all

6:47

of these soft tissues, the fur,

6:49

all of that, it contains forensic

6:51

information. It's just amazing that that

6:53

DNA or any of the

6:55

other evidence is preserved for tens

6:58

of thousands of years. Can

7:00

you say more about how Sparta was preserved?

7:02

Because it would have had to occur pretty

7:04

quickly, right? Yeah. So

7:06

this animal would have to have been buried

7:09

really quickly after she died. And it's a

7:11

little bit of a mystery how these permafrost

7:13

deposits are able to protect

7:15

and preserve these animals so fast.

7:18

It's possible if you've ever seen a

7:20

permafrost landscape today, the soil as it

7:22

freezes and thaws in the active layer

7:24

close to the surface forms these really

7:27

large cracks. And those cracks can fill

7:29

up with water. So one possibility is

7:31

that, you know, if these animals are

7:33

maybe falling into these pits full of

7:35

water, perhaps they're

7:37

getting buried in a den of some kind. So

7:39

that's the thinking here with Sparta and potentially some of

7:41

the other cubs that have been found in the

7:43

past. Perhaps, you know, as

7:46

this permafrost, the surface is thawing, maybe

7:48

there are landslides or slumps during, you

7:50

know, warm seasons that might have

7:52

covered that body up really quickly. And

7:54

as soon as that soil refrows around

7:56

her, that was it in terms of preservation.

7:58

She was good to go for tens of... Thousands of years?

8:01

We don't know for sure, but that's

8:03

what we think. Well, no discussion of

8:05

animals revealed by melting permafrost would be

8:07

complete without bringing in the woolly mammoth

8:10

and the woolly rhinoceros's and they get

8:12

a lot of attention. They can even

8:14

steal the show. But of course they

8:17

are the animals that you study These

8:19

these pleistocene megafauna I jacqueline. Can you

8:21

give us an overview of the kind

8:23

of big animals that were finding a

8:26

that you're finding? Yeah, so the bees

8:28

is you say they steal. The show

8:30

and I I think the know often

8:32

for good reason. They're very charismatic. their

8:35

their the bread and butter of our

8:37

labs research to and but they're also

8:39

really important keystone species. And if you

8:41

look at the same region in fact

8:43

the same area where Sparta was found

8:46

we're finding woolly mammoth remains, willie rhino

8:48

remains. They're also ice by sin forces.

8:50

There were arctic camels nearby. One of

8:52

the things we're also working on in

8:55

our lab is actually not just the

8:57

animals themselves but the dung that they

8:59

leave behind. Especially the herbivores because that

9:01

dung is a treasure trove of information

9:03

about the diet's and the habitats that

9:05

those animals were living in. So you're

9:07

finding the animals, but you're also finding

9:09

their frozen dung. Yeah, we've got about

9:11

sixty a age poops in the lab

9:13

that were working on right now from

9:15

the same exact area ends. I've got

9:17

a graduate student who is and so

9:19

several hundred had actually who are actively

9:21

pulling plant material and Paul and I

9:23

and other things out of that done

9:25

to try to understand the diet of

9:27

these animals little bit better so we

9:29

can. Piece together not just you

9:31

know the ecosystems that they lived

9:34

in, but how they impacted as

9:36

ecosystems. So this frozen poop you

9:38

could call it a popsicle to

9:40

see if we and we and

9:42

we often. Do you ever do

9:45

okay as that original of Jacqueline,

9:47

how do you figure out which

9:49

animals made which pile of dung

9:51

legacy for connect the dung to

9:53

the animal? That's a great question.

9:55

So there's two ways. We're hoping

9:58

that by actually scanning them. and

10:00

getting a sense of the shape of the dung,

10:02

we can link the

10:04

shape with the animal. Of

10:06

course, to do that, we need some

10:09

corroborating evidence. And so we're actually hoping

10:11

that the DNA of the pooper is

10:13

preserved in the dung. And if you

10:15

wanna get really technical, these

10:17

are all sub-fossils, right? They haven't been mineralized

10:19

in the way that we often think of

10:21

fossils as being. So these are

10:23

actual poops and they smell like poop and they look

10:25

like poop. Wait, wait, wait, they smell like poop? They're

10:28

30,000 years old and they smell? Yeah,

10:31

oh yeah. You get them in the

10:33

lab and if you start putting chemicals on them

10:35

and warming them up, they smell like poop. I

10:38

mean, they smell like horse poop or cow poop,

10:40

right, where it's not, it's often really grassy and

10:42

kind of earthy, but yeah, they can definitely smell

10:44

like poop. Well, so you would get a sense

10:46

of what it might've been like to walk through

10:48

a field where these animals

10:51

had been. So it's not the visual.

10:53

Oh, that's fascinating. Sometimes you actually

10:56

get, this is gonna sound really

10:58

gross, but you get the dung, when

11:00

you have these really amazingly well-preserved ice age

11:02

animals, you have their stomach contents still preserved. So

11:04

we actually have some bison stomach contents. And then

11:06

if you go further down in the digestive tract,

11:09

you find the poop that hasn't been pooped yet

11:11

and that can kind of give you a little

11:13

bit of a sense of what that should look

11:15

like. And sometimes it's actually found near the animal

11:17

too. So no pun intended this

11:19

time, but it really is like having a

11:22

snapshot of life frozen in

11:25

time. I mean of the

11:27

animal mid digestion. And

11:29

I wonder if you could share with us, what are

11:31

you learning about the diet of some of these

11:33

animals or anything that you're learning about these

11:35

animals, but also the whole ecosystem is probably

11:37

coming into relief as well. We're

11:39

learning that they had a much

11:41

more diverse diet than we previously

11:43

thought. One of the main

11:45

hypotheses for why these animals went extinct

11:47

is that they ran out of food,

11:49

right? The environment changed, the environment changed,

11:51

the plants changed, and they basically starved

11:54

to death. What we're finding is that

11:56

there's a lot more flexibility in the diet of some

11:58

of these animals. They were much more resilient. to

12:00

these climate changes than we previously

12:02

assumed. And that gives

12:04

us important information about what the possible causes

12:06

of their extinction might have been. So

12:09

if it's not that climate changed and then

12:11

the plants changed and then they ran out

12:13

of food, then that kind of narrows down

12:15

the list of potential suspects and starts to

12:17

point the finger at people a little bit

12:19

more. And so information like

12:21

that is useful. We're also

12:24

learning too, these kinds of big

12:26

herbivores might actually have helped to

12:28

buffer the impacts of climate change

12:30

on their ecosystems. And so the

12:32

changes in vegetation that we see, the plants rearranging

12:35

themselves as we warm coming out

12:37

of the last ice age, those

12:40

plant communities might have actually been less

12:42

resilient to that climate change because

12:45

the animals were gone. And if

12:47

you look at places where we still have

12:49

big herbivores left in the Arctic, things like

12:51

muskox, there's some good modern

12:53

research that also supports that large

12:56

herbivores might actually help promote

12:58

resilience in the communities that

13:00

they live in by kind of buffering the

13:02

impacts of climate change. Can you say more

13:05

about how they provided a buffer against climate

13:07

change? Yeah, so the way it seems to

13:09

work or the way we think it works

13:11

is that these animals

13:13

have preferences and so by eating some

13:15

plants, they allow other plants to thrive.

13:17

So you actually get a more diverse

13:20

plant community when you have large herbivores.

13:22

That's something that we see often in

13:24

modern ecosystems too. Like if you look

13:26

at places where people are studying the

13:28

impacts of bison on grasslands, oftentimes

13:31

without grazers or

13:33

even browsers, you tend to have less

13:35

diversity in your plant communities. And there's

13:38

another body of research that shows that

13:40

when a plant community has lots of

13:42

diversity, it's like having a Jenga

13:45

tower that has lots of blocks, right? You

13:47

have a lot of plants that are doing

13:49

kind of similar things. And so if you

13:51

pull one block out, the tower is pretty

13:53

stable still. You pull another block out, the

13:55

tower is pretty stable. In this case, the

13:57

blocks are the species, right? So maybe you...

13:59

lose a species here, you lose a species

14:02

there, the environment's changing, you know, maybe your

14:05

little brother comes along and like bounces on the

14:07

table, right, but your tower is pretty stable. But

14:10

when you remove more of those blocks or

14:12

more of those components of that ecosystem, then

14:15

the tower becomes much more vulnerable, more

14:17

fragile. And that's the mechanism that we

14:19

think these animals are playing, that by

14:21

eating certain kinds of plants instead of

14:23

others, by dispersing seeds, by trampling the

14:26

soil and or even wallowing

14:28

like bison, you know, we kind

14:30

of roll around on the ground and create these little

14:32

wetlands. There's all kinds of things

14:34

that these animals do. They poop, right, they

14:36

move nutrients around. That's

14:38

contributing to a more diverse plant

14:41

community. Now we can take

14:43

that information and we can say, okay, well,

14:46

maybe we need to be creating better

14:48

habitat for big animals to thrive today.

14:50

Maybe we could be reintroducing some of

14:52

those large animals into the Arctic so

14:55

that we have a more robust

14:57

ecosystem. And as we change the

14:59

planet into the future with climate

15:01

change and other global changes, maybe

15:04

large herbivores can be a key towards

15:06

helping to make those ecosystems more resilient to

15:08

the other things that we're doing. And

15:11

final question is, it went by pretty quickly.

15:13

But you said if you eliminate

15:15

like the loss of food for some

15:18

of these megafauna, the culprit now is

15:20

more likely humans. And do you mean

15:22

over hunting? That seems to be it.

15:25

So the animals were almost certainly stressed

15:27

by changing climates. But it's important

15:29

to remember that they made it through like dozen or

15:32

so cycles of ice age interglacial cycles

15:34

that we've been through. And

15:36

they made it through every single one until

15:38

the last one. And that's when people start to

15:41

move across the globe. And

15:43

so it's really hard to imagine a climate only

15:45

scenario. And people have tried to model this using

15:48

different approaches. And

15:51

while extinction is rarely caused

15:53

by one thing, we often talk about the one-two

15:55

punch, right? You knock a population down and then

15:58

there's that bad luck of something else happening. happening.

16:00

So the fact that people start spreading really

16:02

across the globe during a period

16:05

of environmental upheaval of climate change as we came

16:07

out of the last ice age probably did not

16:09

help. And the mechanisms are thought to be over

16:11

hunting, maybe some other things like

16:14

burning or other ways in which we changed

16:16

the land. But people have modeled this and

16:18

it turns out you actually don't have to

16:20

kill very many animals when they're

16:22

already threatened by predators and sort of kept in

16:24

balance. Just hunting a few kind

16:26

of triggers this cascade with the rest

16:28

of the population and then potentially even

16:30

onto sort of lower levels of the ecosystem. Jacqueline

16:34

Gill, thank you so much for talking to us. Thank

16:37

you so much for having me. Jacqueline

16:39

Gill is an associate professor of

16:41

paleoecology at the University of Maine.

16:45

Well this is really exciting because I mean

16:47

I could picture what it would be like

16:49

in that cave and you know seeing a

16:52

perfectly preserved cat from 30,000 years ago. You

16:54

know I've been to the science museums where

16:56

they have a brontosaurus or something but it's

16:58

just bones. It's not the same thing as

17:00

seeing it lying in front of you undisturbed

17:02

from the time of its death. The

17:05

other thing that really struck me Molly was when

17:07

she talked about well you asked her did

17:10

these megafauna from the last ice age

17:12

you know they all disappeared after that

17:14

and was that due to hunting by

17:16

humans? And she made an

17:19

important point that I had thought of. You know there

17:22

have been like 17, 15, 10 whatever

17:24

previous ice ages and these megafauna made

17:26

it through all those ice ages. It

17:28

was only the last one where they

17:30

disappeared which happens to coincide with the

17:32

presence of our ancient ancestors. Seth,

17:35

did you know that there is an

17:37

ongoing experiment to test the theory that

17:40

she outlined with us about megafauna being

17:42

a buffer against climate change? I did not

17:44

know that. It's called

17:46

Pleistocene Park and

17:49

it is a nature reserve. It's in

17:51

Russia. It's in northeastern

17:53

Siberia I believe and what

17:55

it's doing is recreating that

17:57

northern sub-arctic grassland.

18:00

plan with large herbivores to test

18:02

exactly what she said to see

18:04

what it's like when you reintroduce

18:06

large animals to an ecosystem and

18:09

see if they provide some of those balancing mechanisms

18:11

to the whole ecosystem. It's going on now. No,

18:14

but they're repopulating them with current

18:16

animals, right? They're not going to bring back

18:19

the woolly mammoth? No, no. They're

18:21

not reanimating the extinction. There is a

18:23

de-extinction movement, but that's not the one

18:25

that's happening in Pleistocene Park. Of

18:49

course, not every organism in the ice

18:51

is nice. A science fiction scenario about

18:54

a pandemic triggered by the release of

18:56

a deadly pathogen from an icy prison

18:58

no longer seems so fanciful. We talk

19:00

with the author next. We are

19:03

discussing what happens when the planet undergoes

19:05

de-perma-frosting on big picture

19:07

science. Tools

19:21

and Weapons is a podcast exploring

19:23

the promise and the peril of

19:26

the digital age hosted by Microsoft's

19:28

vice chair and president, Brad Smith.

19:30

His latest guest is Bayer CEO,

19:32

Bill Anderson. Although many of

19:35

us know Bayer for its pharmaceuticals, they're

19:37

also focused on crop science with the

19:39

goal of making sure no one on

19:41

planet earth goes hungry. On

19:43

Tools and Weapons, Brad and

19:45

Bill discuss how the German

19:47

company is using artificial intelligence

19:49

paired with CRISPR technology to

19:52

increase food production without

19:54

fertilizers. Their efforts put

19:56

AI and digital tools in the hands

19:58

of farmers to get the most out

20:00

of every acre on a hotter, more

20:03

crowded planet. The veteran biotech executive also

20:05

shares his thoughts on how to keep

20:07

things innovative at a company that's been

20:09

around since the 1860s. It's

20:13

the latest conversation in a series that

20:15

invites listeners to pull up a front

20:17

row seat to some of the most

20:20

important developments in technology today. You

20:22

can find this episode and many

20:24

more of Tools and Weapons with

20:26

Brad Smith wherever you get your

20:28

podcasts. As

20:39

in Siberia, permafrost blankets Greenland too. And

20:42

in fact, almost a quarter of the

20:44

land in the most northern part of

20:46

the globe is permafrost. While

20:48

the ground above permafrost can thaw and refreeze

20:50

every year, permafrost, which extends

20:52

from maybe a foot down to as

20:55

deep as a mile down, is

20:57

defined as ground that remains frozen for

20:59

two or more years. Of

21:01

course, we're discovering that it's not permanent

21:03

after all. American geologist

21:05

S.W. Muller, who coined the term

21:08

in 1947 as a contraction of

21:10

the term permanent frost, probably

21:12

didn't anticipate the rise in average global

21:14

temperatures over the next 70 years. Ice

21:18

age megafauna may not be the only

21:20

creatures released from icy tombs to greet

21:22

the modern world and some

21:24

of these newly freed organisms may not

21:26

be benign. So what happens

21:28

when a deadly ancient microbe becomes

21:31

airborne? That's the plotline for a

21:33

new pandemic novel, Phase Six by

21:36

Jim Shepherd. Written before

21:38

the COVID-19 pandemic, but not released until

21:40

2021, the suspenseful story

21:43

begins in Greenland. In a small

21:45

town bordering Disco Bay on the

21:47

west coast of Greenland called Illamonoc,

21:49

an international mining company has taken

21:52

advantage of softening Greenland permafrost to

21:54

dig up rare earth metals. But

21:57

these substances are not the only things

21:59

they're machinery. re-extracts. Mr.

22:01

Shepard reads a passage that describes

22:03

the moment when 12-year-old Alec and

22:05

his friend Malik, while trespassing in

22:08

the mining pit, inspect a beautiful

22:10

rock that's been dislodged and whose

22:12

underside has been cracked by miners'

22:14

drills. Alec

22:16

showed Malik a rock he'd unearthed,

22:18

glassy smooth on one side from

22:21

the polish ice-age glaciers had given it

22:23

11,000 years

22:25

earlier. Two days earlier,

22:27

the drill bits' relentless pounding on the

22:29

rock had finally broken the

22:31

chemical bonds holding it to its ledge,

22:33

and when that seam had cracked, then

22:35

the stress boundaries had separated a cluster

22:38

of molecules that had previously

22:40

flied in the respiratory tract of an

22:42

early variant of the barren goose and

22:44

that had been trapped with some float tissue

22:46

in the crystalline framework during the Holocene glaciation

22:49

had been reintroduced to the air and

22:51

the warming sun. The

22:54

goose microbe sickens one boy who

22:56

infects others in town. Mr.

22:58

Shepard, who's a professor in the English

23:01

department at Williams College, says his tale

23:03

grew from news reports and the expertise

23:05

of scientists. Now, if you had read

23:07

this prior to our own pandemic era,

23:10

phase six may have simply been an

23:12

unsettling story, but now it doesn't really

23:14

read like science fiction. About

23:17

five years ago, I was jolted

23:19

by a story out of Siberia

23:21

concerning a 12-year-old boy who'd apparently

23:23

been killed by anthrax with 20

23:25

others in his village infected, and

23:27

the Russians were panicked since anthrax hadn't been

23:30

recorded in Siberia in over 75 years. And

23:34

then investigators were stunned to discover

23:36

that long, dormant spores of the

23:38

bacteria, frozen in the reindeer carcass,

23:40

had rejuvenated themselves to infect the

23:42

boy. I remember that

23:44

case, and the carcass of

23:46

a reindeer was exposed because of the melting

23:49

permafrost. Did the investigators ever determine how

23:51

long those spores had been dormant? No,

23:54

but since then, of course, we've learned

23:56

that these spores can be dormant for

23:58

thousands and thousands of years. years and

24:00

still come back to life. They're essentially protected

24:03

by the fact that they are able

24:06

to sporulate. So whereas viruses

24:08

can survive in the permafrost but

24:10

have to be actively revived, bacteria

24:14

can actually revive themselves. And

24:17

that was what inspired phase six. And

24:19

so the young boy, his name is

24:21

Alec and he has a close friend,

24:24

Malik, and they're living in a small

24:26

town in a very isolated

24:28

part of Greenland on the western edge. Can

24:30

you just give us an overview of that

24:32

town? And that's a real town, isn't it?

24:34

That's a real town and it's a

24:37

town I visited and it turns out

24:39

that pretty much everywhere in Greenland is

24:41

isolated. But Illemonoc is particularly isolated. It's

24:43

way, way out in the sort of

24:46

middle of the western coast. And

24:48

it's a very, very small town. It's

24:50

only about 80 people. And I wanted

24:53

to set it there because that area

24:55

is so beyond the beyond in some

24:57

ways. The idea

24:59

that a global pandemic could come from

25:01

there seemed to me even more fascinating

25:03

than some of the other alternatives. Also

25:06

where the book it didn't come from as

25:09

well was the revelation that both Russia and

25:11

Greenland had announced extensive

25:13

plans to mine all across their northern

25:15

extremities. And because those areas were actually

25:17

sort of ironically becoming more

25:20

and more accessible because of global warming. And

25:23

that would mean that millions of tons of

25:25

that permafrost that is now thawing

25:27

and turning over its pathogens to

25:29

the sun would be

25:31

excavated and would be piling up next

25:33

to miners who were living there

25:36

short term and then flying back to their homes.

25:38

And that just seemed to me if

25:40

you were trying to design a global pandemic, that might be

25:42

one of the ways you go about it. And

25:45

I'm one of those people who believes, you know, the way

25:47

career counselors say find something you're doing anyway and find

25:49

a way to make it pay. You know,

25:52

I was thinking, well, since I'm going to be obsessing about this, I

25:54

might as well try to write about it. In

25:56

fact, I think you describe yourself as

25:58

an armchair. Catastrophist.

26:02

Yeah, that's not a bad way of putting it,

26:04

I think. I mean, I

26:06

don't think I go through my daily round

26:08

terrified, but I do have three children and

26:11

I do worry very much about the state of

26:13

the world, the state

26:15

of the planet and mankind's treatment of it. In

26:17

some ways it's a trifecta, you

26:19

know, maybe the Bermuda Triangle of

26:22

calamities or of conditions coming together.

26:24

I mean, one is so you

26:26

have a microbe, you have climate

26:28

change and then you have the

26:30

capitalism that is driving the mining

26:33

and all of this causes this microbe to

26:35

be released and in this case it doesn't

26:38

come from a bat or

26:40

a pangolin, it comes from a goose.

26:43

This is a reanimated goose

26:45

bacteria. Without giving anything away,

26:47

do you want to introduce us to

26:49

this bacterium and also what happens,

26:51

how it gets released? Well,

26:54

it turns out that all sorts

26:56

of sporulating bacterium get trapped in

26:58

various layers of earth or rock

27:01

or whatever and I wanted to

27:03

come up with one that would

27:05

be, rather than just a couple

27:07

thousands of years old, quite, quite old

27:09

and so I checked with some microbiologists and

27:12

one of the things I like to do

27:14

is dump my problem in the

27:16

lap of somebody who's smarter than I am

27:18

and fortunately I teach at a place Williams

27:21

College, a liberal arts college, where I have

27:23

access to the scientists on a kind of

27:25

a daily basis and

27:27

so I essentially said to a microbiologist

27:29

who was sweet enough to work with

27:31

me, here's what

27:34

I'm imagining, how would a pathogen like

27:36

this operate? And she came up with

27:38

the idea of something that

27:40

had been trapped in the throat of

27:43

an avian species and then

27:45

actually ends up inside a rock, that's

27:47

how old it is and it's still able

27:50

to survive that once the rock is fractured

27:52

as rocks often are in the process of

27:54

mining. And this would have

27:56

been a microbe that maybe would have not made

27:58

the goose sick but But then when it's

28:00

released, it does what they

28:03

call a spillover and leaps into humans.

28:05

Exactly. Exactly. Okay.

28:09

So coming to a moment in the book

28:11

where the CDC investigators are trying to figure

28:13

out the origins of the pandemic other than

28:15

it started in Greenland, and they are interviewing

28:17

Alec and asking him whether

28:19

there was anything unusual that happened

28:21

prior to the pandemic.

28:24

But he's too scared to admit

28:26

about his and Malik's secret visit

28:28

to the pit. Now here's

28:30

a question. Is it giving away

28:32

too much to say that there's a

28:34

big question mark over whether that connection is

28:36

ever made? No, I don't think

28:38

it's giving away too much. I think one of the things

28:40

that immediately is

28:42

facing epidemiological investigators

28:44

when they're chasing something down is how many,

28:47

first of all, what is this and where

28:49

did it come from? Secondly, are

28:51

we dealing with more than one thing here? And

28:54

that last question is a pretty

28:56

crucial question. And because these pathogens

28:58

mutate so quickly, it's not a

29:01

very simple question a lot of

29:03

the time. And that's where

29:05

a lot of dealing with human beings comes from, right?

29:07

If we can track it back pretty

29:09

clearly to one source, then we have a

29:12

different situation than if we're tracking it back

29:14

to two different sources. So happily

29:16

for the dramatic shape of a novel

29:19

like mine, it becomes crucial to get

29:21

information from this boy, even though this

29:23

boy is traumatized enough that

29:25

he's resistant to giving out information. And

29:29

there's a moment late in the book, and I don't think

29:31

I'm giving away a lot or even I don't even care

29:33

if I'm giving away a lot in this case. There's a

29:35

moment late in the book, remember, when Alec resolves that he

29:37

is going to tell them. And

29:39

one of the ambiguities that remains is, well,

29:42

is he doing this too late or not?

29:44

Right. It doesn't matter, really, if

29:47

we understand the origin at this point in

29:49

the novel. Now, to be clear,

29:51

and we haven't said this explicitly, but

29:54

we should, you wrote this book before

29:56

the COVID-19 pandemic, and

29:59

you were just about to release it, I think

30:01

in February 2020, and

30:03

your agent or editor said,

30:05

let's hold on here. What

30:07

was it like, what do you want us

30:09

to know, Jim, about what it was like

30:11

to release a book about a pandemic during

30:14

a pandemic? Well,

30:17

I delivered the book right as the pandemic

30:19

was breaking. I delivered the book in February.

30:22

And none of us knew at that point what

30:24

the right time to release a book about a

30:26

pandemic during a pandemic might be. But

30:29

it seemed to make the most sense to

30:31

not rush the book forward, and to give

30:33

it a little bit of time. And maybe,

30:36

since it's literature rather than nonfiction,

30:38

maybe allow a little bit of

30:41

space from the trauma of the

30:43

catastrophe. So it was

30:45

decided to wait almost a year. And one of

30:47

the impacts that that had on the novel itself,

30:49

which was useful, was when

30:52

you're writing a book like

30:54

this, you have all this exposition to

30:56

dump on the reader about how pandemics

30:58

operate and how pandemic response operates. I

31:01

was able to start cutting almost all of that

31:03

because we all had a forced education in that

31:05

one way or the other. So my pretty

31:08

slim book got even slimmer, which

31:10

I was quite pleased with. And

31:12

in terms of what it's like, as you

31:15

might expect, the experience of watching a catastrophe

31:18

unfold right after you worked as hard as

31:20

you could to try to imagine what a

31:22

catastrophe like that would look like is

31:24

a pretty surreal thing to go through.

31:27

It must have been because you were kind of in

31:29

the role of like a Cassandra-like figure. Exactly.

31:32

And one of the other, of course, sobering

31:34

things about it is you've quickly learned that

31:37

Cassandras are a dime a dozen. And of

31:39

course, by definition, they're ignored. So

31:42

the fact that I had been waving my arms and

31:45

saying stuff like this for years, well, I'm

31:47

a fiction writer that not many people have

31:49

heard of. So why would anybody be listening

31:51

to me anyway? And God knows, it's not

31:53

like I was coming up with stuff that

31:55

epidemiologists hadn't come up with. They were saying

31:57

the same things. That

32:00

was what the title means, Phase Six. Oh,

32:03

Phase Six is the World

32:05

Health Organization's highest level of

32:07

disaster, essentially. But it

32:09

has an additional meaning in the novel as

32:11

well. And that is one of my protagonists,

32:13

a CDC investigator, who feels as

32:16

though she's not very good at relationships, laid

32:19

out for her boyfriend how she

32:21

thought relationships operated. And it was

32:23

sort of an inexorable process that

32:25

got you eventually over to

32:27

something like George Costanzas, it's not me,

32:29

it's you. Or

32:31

it's not you, it's me, rather. And that was Phase Six.

32:33

And he was sort of floored by

32:36

how fatalist she was. Right.

32:38

And as I was reading the book, I

32:41

was on the lookout for the moment when

32:43

the meaning of the title would reveal itself.

32:46

And when the CDC investigator says, it's not you,

32:48

it's me, I

32:50

knew she was referring to relationships.

32:52

But what it suggested to me

32:54

was an admission by humans of

32:57

what they've done. I mean,

33:00

these incursions into wild areas, for

33:02

example, the connection between

33:04

climate change and pandemics, and

33:07

that maybe it is time to take some

33:09

responsibility. Maybe that was a little bit more

33:11

meta than what you intended, but that's how

33:13

I thought of it. That's exactly how I

33:16

intended it, Molly. And in fact, on

33:18

top of that, the way in which there's something slippery

33:21

about the responsibility taken. I mean, there's

33:23

a reason that when George Costanzas says that

33:26

it's funny, right? I mean, it's both,

33:28

I'm going to take responsibility now. And

33:31

some ways I'm trying to wiggle off the

33:33

hook at the same moment by

33:35

sounding generous. And

33:37

that I think is all

33:39

about the ways in which the way it

33:41

lines up with the more scientific version of

33:44

phase six is the way as human beings,

33:46

we simultaneously both take responsibility for

33:48

things and refuse to take responsibility

33:51

for them. And then that's

33:53

been in some ways our undoing, right? We say,

33:55

oh, yeah, we all know that we're causing climate

33:57

change. And then we

33:59

go on. doing it. Jim

34:02

Shepherd, what a pleasure it is to talk to

34:04

you. I enjoyed your book and your writing so

34:06

much. Thank you for joining us. Oh,

34:08

thank you for having us Molly. It was wonderful talking with you.

34:12

Jim Shepherd is a novelist and short

34:14

story writer. He teaches in the English

34:16

department of Williams College. His novel about

34:19

a pandemic trigger from melting in mind

34:21

permafrost is phase six. Well,

34:23

as Jim Shepherd said, his fictional tale

34:26

was inspired by the news that in

34:28

2016 a young boy died

34:30

because of anthrax bacteria that had

34:32

been exposed by melting Siberian permafrost.

34:35

And from what epidemiologists and biologists

34:37

told him about the possible viability

34:39

of frozen microbes, including viruses and

34:41

bacteria, you know, it sounds like

34:43

this is kind of a

34:45

realistic story. But of course, we wanted

34:47

to investigate that further. And

34:49

Seth, on this show, you've talked

34:52

to scientists who have described a

34:54

couple different organisms that have been

34:56

reanimated after being frozen for

34:58

very long periods of time. Yes, yes.

35:00

There was the rotifer. Remember, that was 24,000

35:04

years in the ice or whatever. And it

35:06

came back and a rotifer is a multicellular

35:08

organism, not many cells, but and then there

35:11

were the worms and those are also multicellular

35:13

and they came back after 40,000 years.

35:16

These things, they start wriggling, they show

35:19

all the signs of being alive. And

35:21

so we know that organisms can

35:23

come back, microorganisms can come back, right? You

35:25

can't bring back a woolly man

35:27

that they won't be alive even if you do

35:30

defrost them. But for these microorganisms, they can

35:32

come back. So if microorganisms

35:34

can come back, pathogenic microorganisms can

35:36

come back too. So that's right,

35:39

Seth. Those are organisms that were 24,000 years old

35:42

and 40,000 years old and they came

35:44

back wriggling back to life. But that's

35:46

not the same as a

35:48

pathogen coming back, a bacteria or a

35:50

virus, and infecting us. So

35:52

if you remember, the anthrax bacteria that

35:54

killed the boy that had been found in

35:56

a reindeer carcass, and I believe that was

35:58

in 1941. one, so that

36:01

was able to sustain itself for 80

36:03

years. The question is, what about other

36:05

diseases? So what scientists

36:07

have found is fragments of RNA from

36:09

the 1918 flu, these are

36:12

from bodies buried in Alaska,

36:14

and DNA fragments of smallpox

36:16

found in the bodies

36:18

of victims of smallpox in

36:20

Siberia. These are all

36:22

bodies that have been since exposed because

36:24

of thawing permafrost. And

36:27

those fragments of DNA and RNA

36:29

are not the same as a live

36:31

virus. So they didn't find any viruses

36:33

that were then reanimated. True,

36:36

but a virus is in fact just an

36:38

RNA string, right? I mean, it's

36:41

not so hard for me to believe that

36:43

something pathogenic could come from the past.

36:45

That just doesn't strike me as an

36:48

unreal scenario because if things that are

36:50

harmless can come back from the past,

36:53

I don't know the difference between something that's pathogenic

36:55

and something that's harmless. Okay, so in your

36:57

opinion, you'd say though, even though scientists have

36:59

not found any viable viruses, you still think

37:01

it's possible? I think it's, yeah, I think

37:04

it is possible, not just viruses, but also bacteria.

37:06

I mean, I think that this is a selection

37:08

effect problem at this point, might be wrong, but

37:10

it strikes me, I mean, they haven't, you know,

37:12

seen so many that they can say, oh, the

37:15

one in a million bacteria, whatever the number is,

37:17

that are dangerous to you. We didn't

37:19

see that. Well, yeah, but they only saw

37:21

a handful of things that have come back. It

37:23

is true that we're seeing evidence on both

37:25

sides here that some organisms can survive a

37:28

very, very long time in the ice and

37:30

others, they don't seem to survive with the

37:32

same kind of robustness. The bottom line is

37:34

we don't know what will happen, but what

37:36

we do know is that life

37:38

is hardier, always turns out to be

37:41

hardier than we could imagine, and that

37:43

ice is a great preservative. And

37:45

the ice is going away and

37:47

the permafrost is warming. So we

37:50

have a situation set up for

37:52

great uncertainty as to what will happen next.

38:15

The release of long frozen microbes from

38:17

permafrost may or may not trigger the

38:19

kind of calamity that Mr. Shepherd imagines,

38:22

but that thawing of the permafrost

38:24

is already exposing carbon in the

38:26

ground to industrious microbes who then

38:28

emit both carbon dioxide and methane,

38:31

and those are very potent greenhouse gases. We

38:34

discuss that next as we look at what

38:36

it means for us when the permanently frozen

38:38

ground thaws. This episode is

38:40

Deep Permafrosting on Big Picture Science.

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Grainger for the ones who get

39:17

it done. Earth's

39:30

surface is warming, but the Arctic is warming

39:32

faster, roughly three times faster than the rest

39:35

of the planet. And most

39:37

of the world's permafrost is in the Arctic.

39:39

The current estimate by the U.S. Geological Survey

39:41

is that the Arctic could lose up to

39:44

70 percent of its permafrost by 2100. We've

39:47

heard about some of the consequences

39:49

of thawing permafrost, including the exposure

39:52

of mega and microfauna, but there

39:54

is an urgent concern regarding thawing

39:56

ice. That is the production of

39:58

greenhouse gases. The fine permafrost

40:01

exposes carbon-rich organic material that

40:03

is a feast for microbes

40:05

who then churn out carbon

40:07

dioxide and methane gas. The

40:10

amount of carbon frozen in permafrost is measured

40:12

to be around 1,400 billion

40:15

tons, that is according to the

40:17

National Snow and Ice Data Center.

40:21

And even scientists not given to

40:23

hyperbole have dubbed the potentially catastrophic

40:25

release of emissions as the methane

40:28

bomb. To understand the role

40:30

that microbes might play in creating

40:32

it, ecologist Scott Seleska from the

40:34

University of Arizona and his colleagues

40:36

pull on knee-high boots and tread

40:39

through the squishy peat of

40:41

Stordalen Meyer in Sweden. This

40:48

is a discontinuous permafrost zone, so there are

40:51

patches that are frozen, you can walk on

40:53

solid ground very easily. There are other parts

40:55

that have thawed that, when it's completely thawed,

40:57

it's basically underwater, it's an inundated wetland where

41:00

you could be up to your knees or waste

41:02

in water. And so you're putting

41:04

a core down into this very squishy,

41:07

mucky mess and you can smell

41:09

the pungency of the different plants that are growing

41:11

there. It's both thrilling because

41:13

as an ecologist, I really appreciate the world

41:15

of nature and being in nature, but it's

41:17

also disheartening and sobering

41:19

to realize how quickly the system is changing.

41:23

Dr. Seleska and his team are sequencing

41:25

the genomes of the bacteria and archaea,

41:27

that is the most ancient class of

41:30

single-celled organisms, that are found there. This

41:33

is part of the project IsoGenie,

41:35

which he co-founded with the goal

41:37

of determining which microbes are doing

41:40

what to the carbon-rich permafrost as

41:42

it thaws. If

41:44

you think about where the carbon is in the

41:46

Earth's system, you might think about big tropical forests

41:48

or where there's all that carbon

41:51

in trees. I like to

41:53

think of permafrost as basically upside-down

41:55

forests, where instead of in

41:57

the wood above ground, you have this immense

41:59

amount of carbon. store of carbon in the

42:01

soil below ground. In the

42:03

case of permafrost, frozen away. This reminds me

42:05

of something I noted in

42:07

Europe where they had something called peat in

42:09

English. It was kind of

42:12

a soft coal and it was just sort

42:14

of partially decomposed organic material

42:16

from plants. Yeah, that's exactly the definition

42:18

of peat. Peat is basically

42:20

undecomposed plants or only partially decomposed

42:22

plants that is then sort of

42:25

frozen in time in that state

42:27

of only partial decomposition and you

42:29

can actually identify if you dig into the

42:31

peat little pieces that look

42:33

like they might have been leaves or stems long

42:36

ago. I see. Okay, so

42:38

melting permafrost, I mean. Let's say thawing

42:41

permafrost. Oh, yes, melting. I guess it

42:43

would take a higher temperature to melt.

42:45

No, just think about your frozen meat

42:47

in the refrigerator. You don't pull out

42:49

a steak to melt it.

42:52

You pull out a steak to thaw it. The water

42:54

melts, but the peat, like your

42:56

steak, thaws. Okay,

42:58

thaw. I hope I don't make that mistake

43:00

again. That's a common thing that people say.

43:02

It's one of the little indicators

43:05

of whether you're a real permafrost scientist

43:07

is whether you say it thaws or

43:09

whether it melts. So even the Alaska

43:11

pipeline has been said to be possibly

43:13

threatened by thawing permafrost, but

43:16

that's not what you're interested in studying.

43:18

You're interested in studying sort of microscopic

43:20

consequences. Right, that's right. All that organic

43:22

matter that I said has been built

43:25

up over thousands of years of plants

43:27

growing and building this upside down forest,

43:29

if you will, is leaving behind all

43:31

this really rich, yummy carbon.

43:34

But it's frozen, so like the steak

43:36

in your freezer, it's not doing anything.

43:38

But if the freezer

43:41

started failing and that steak started thawing,

43:43

it would not last long

43:45

before it was smelly and decomposing and

43:47

no longer edible. That's because the microbes

43:50

are getting their food supply from

43:52

decomposing that thawing in the

43:55

case of the freezer, your meat, in

43:57

the case of permafrost decomposing those plant

43:59

parts. And when it

44:01

decomposes it, it either turns into carbon

44:03

dioxide or methane, and those

44:05

two are powerful greenhouse gases. So that means

44:07

that all this carbon that's stored in

44:10

the frozen permafrost peat, which amounts to over

44:12

twice as much as there is in the

44:14

atmosphere as carbon dioxide, starts

44:17

to be susceptible to being lost through microbial

44:19

decomposition and attack. Okay, let me just make

44:21

sure I understand this. These are microbes that

44:23

are already in the permafrost. These

44:26

are not microbes that come in from the

44:28

air or something like that. Well, it's some

44:30

of both, actually. So yes, there are

44:32

microbes frozen into the permafrost, and

44:35

they are activated or released when the

44:37

permafrost thaws. What we're concerned

44:39

about is that those microbes, some

44:41

of which are thawed in the permafrost, some

44:43

of which are, as you said, opportunistically coming

44:45

in from the already thawed areas, even

44:48

from the atmosphere. There's microbes that are blown around

44:50

in the dust in the atmosphere. When

44:52

this feast gets unleashed, they will move

44:54

to take advantage of that available carbon,

44:57

that available energy, that food supply. And

44:59

you mentioned that what they then

45:01

produce as exhaust gases from their

45:03

own metabolism is carbon dioxide,

45:05

which doesn't sound like a good thing to add

45:08

to the atmosphere, and then

45:10

also methane, right? And they're

45:12

both greenhouse gases, right? Yes. Carbon

45:14

dioxide is the one we usually talk about,

45:16

but methane is, in some cases, even worse.

45:19

It's 30 times more powerful per unit

45:21

mass than a carbon dioxide molecule. So

45:24

a little bit of an equal

45:26

amount of methane and carbon dioxide,

45:28

the methane is 30 times worse.

45:30

In terms of amplifying climate change.

45:32

What exactly happens depends a lot

45:34

on who's inside that microbial black

45:36

box. Who's actually decomposing the carbon,

45:38

whether it's one species or another

45:40

species of microbe? Well, you've started

45:42

an initiative called Isogene.

45:45

I hope I'm not mispronouncing the Greek there.

45:48

So the idea is you and other people

45:51

who know about these things are up there

45:53

in Sweden trying to, if you will, quantify

45:55

the extent in the nature of the

45:58

problem. Isogene comes from isotopes of... methane,

46:00

different flavors of methane, if you will. You can tell

46:02

what micro produced the methane by what

46:04

flavor it is, what isotope it has. And

46:07

the other part is genies standing for

46:09

genomes. So we're really looking into who's who

46:11

of the microbial world

46:13

by looking at their genomes. And

46:15

we sequence whole genomes not just of

46:17

individual organisms but of everything that is in the soil.

46:20

So we have what we call a metagenome,

46:22

a catalog of all the

46:25

genomic genes and what their activity

46:27

could be across the thousands of

46:29

species of microbes that are in the soil that can

46:31

tell us what they're capable of doing,

46:34

how much methane they're able to produce. I must

46:37

say that strikes me as truly amazing.

46:39

It's like trying to analyze overlapping fingerprints

46:41

at a crime scene. It's something like

46:43

how you separate out the individuals. Well,

46:45

does it only depend on the species

46:48

of microbes or does it

46:50

also depend on you know whether this thing

46:52

is partially thawed, a little bit thawed, you

46:54

know fully dead, that kind of thing.

46:57

Yeah, thanks Seth. That's a really important question. In

46:59

fact, that's one of the one

47:01

of the first findings of this isogeny

47:04

project was that who's there matters. Sort

47:06

of look for the name tag of whose DNA

47:09

it is and we find out that there's different

47:11

microbes that are metabolizing

47:13

the peat in different ways

47:15

and producing basically slightly different

47:17

kinds of methane. One kind

47:19

of methane produced by one kind of microbe and

47:21

another kind produced by other kinds of microbes. We're

47:23

talking about two different what

47:25

we call metabolic pathways for methane

47:27

production. There's the hydro-nootrophic

47:30

methane which seems to be the dominant kind

47:32

that's being produced by the microbes in the

47:34

only partially thawed bogs and

47:36

then as we get fully thawed fends

47:39

that sort of submerge into the water

47:42

table we get much more active

47:44

community of microbes, greater diversity of microbes and we're

47:46

able to sort of put together the story that

47:48

shows that as permafrost thaws

47:50

the microbial community changes and it

47:53

shifts from sort of miserly microbes

47:55

that can barely decompose some methane

47:57

to expansive very hungry

48:00

active communities that are decomposing all kinds of

48:02

methane through other pathways and we can see

48:04

that both in the shift in the microbial

48:07

community and in the change in the type

48:09

of methane we measure coming out. Obviously not

48:11

a simple problem. Well,

48:14

you know, who cares, right? Who

48:17

cares what kind of methane, what kind of, what

48:20

flavor of methane that's coming out or what kind

48:22

of microbe is doing it? It's coming out, right?

48:24

But it's coming out differently depending on who's doing

48:26

it and understanding the future. If you want to

48:28

predict the future of how much of this

48:31

frozen peak gets turned into the methane and amplifies the

48:33

climate change, it turns out you need to know something

48:35

about the microbial biology of the guys that are doing

48:37

it. So in order to understand the the

48:40

play here, you've got to know the characters

48:42

it sounds like but I mean, exactly Okay,

48:46

but this is a little scary. I

48:48

mean we started off by noting that

48:51

the amount of carbon in the

48:53

permafrost is very substantial compared

48:56

to, I don't know, the Amazon rainforest. It's

48:58

still a lot of carbon and this strikes

49:00

me as a positive feedback

49:02

system in the sense that, you know, you

49:04

melt a little bit of the permafrost that

49:07

produces methane in CO2 which results in warmer

49:09

temperatures which melts more the permafrost which, you

49:11

know, releases more CO2. I mean it just

49:13

gets worse and worse. That's the positive feedback

49:15

that you don't actually think very positively about.

49:17

You want positive feedback from your boss at

49:20

work but you don't want positive feedback in

49:22

the climate system. So that's what we're

49:24

talking about here and trying to understand

49:26

exactly how strong is that positive feedback.

49:29

Well because some of the permafrost

49:31

is thawing now, presumably both CO2

49:34

and methane are being made now, do

49:37

you have some idea of how this is

49:39

going to go? Suppose there's another degree Celsius

49:42

of warming in the Arctic.

49:44

I mean that's not impossible. Does

49:46

that just happen? Yeah, it's going to happen. Does that

49:48

just increase the amount of these greenhouse gases by, I

49:50

don't know, 10%, 20% or does it double it or?

49:54

Well you made a good point, Seth, by pointing

49:56

out that this is happening now before our eyes.

50:00

this summer we were up there measuring

50:03

methane being produced by the thawed

50:05

areas and this is something that

50:07

we've observed because going back and

50:09

looking at aircraft records since

50:11

the 1970s or even the 1940s this landscape is

50:14

dramatically changed. We can actually see it

50:16

how it's changed from the few years

50:19

that we've been working there. So there is

50:21

right now much more methane

50:24

being produced by this one wetland

50:26

that we're studying in northern Sweden than there was when

50:29

we started 10 years ago and that's

50:31

happening across the Arctic and so

50:33

this is a challenge that like I said it's

50:35

not just hypothetical or in the future but it's

50:37

happening now and will continue to happen

50:40

as the climate warms. Scott

50:42

Sileska thanks so very much for speaking with

50:44

us. My pleasure Seth thank you for having

50:47

me. Scott Sileska is

50:49

an ecologist and professor of ecology

50:51

and evolutionary biology at the University

50:53

of Arizona and he is the

50:55

co-founder of the microbial sequencing project

50:58

Isogene. All

51:01

right Seth what is the

51:03

big picture here as the permafrost

51:05

thaws? You know we've

51:07

all heard about the melting ice sheets

51:09

in Antarctica and Greenland and so forth

51:11

but this is permafrost it's a little

51:13

different this is frozen ground and years

51:15

ago I read about the threat to

51:17

the Alaska pipeline by melting permafrost but

51:20

these things we've discussed in this show these are things

51:22

that had never occurred to me that

51:24

you might in fact release even more

51:26

greenhouse gases and methane which is a

51:28

very effective if that's the kind of

51:31

adjective you want to use greenhouse gas.

51:34

And for me the big picture here is this

51:36

possible feedback loop yeah well that we might

51:38

get yeah it's a positive feedback loop which is

51:40

not what you want here I mean it's like

51:42

air conditioners right you know the

51:45

climate's warming so you use your air conditioner

51:47

more often but that requires more power from

51:49

the generating plant which is burning some sort

51:51

of fossil fuel which creates more warming so

51:53

it's a positive feedback loop exactly what you

51:55

don't want. And this is creating

51:57

a whole area of uncertainty for

52:00

what will happen next? What

52:02

will be revealed by the ice? Will

52:04

we have an accelerated situation? Will

52:06

this greatly contribute to the climate

52:09

emergency that we are experiencing now?

52:12

Yeah, so in a way, you know, scientists

52:14

have sort of blown the whistle on this,

52:16

on this potential danger. And when

52:18

they do that, and when they investigate it further,

52:20

such as what they are doing, you know, which

52:22

microbes are doing what and so forth. And there's

52:25

always the hope that you can find a fix

52:27

or short of that, that you can find some

52:29

sort of other mitigation that would,

52:31

you know, slow this down, because you

52:33

don't need positive feedback when it comes to

52:36

a warming climate. Well,

52:52

we couldn't do the show without the

52:55

cool heads and the talents of senior

52:57

producer, Gary Niederhof and assistant producer, Sarah

52:59

Derwin. They make Big Picture Science possible.

53:01

I am executive producer of the

53:03

program, Molly Bentley. Thanks also to

53:05

financial support from Renu Shulsky, David

53:08

and Sammy David, to NASA, and

53:10

to the William K. Bose Junior

53:12

Foundation. Big Picture Science has produced

53:14

at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit

53:17

education and research organization that among

53:19

other endeavors also studies microbes in

53:21

extreme environments, such as permafrost. I'm

53:23

the Institute's senior astronomer, Seth Shostek.

53:26

Also, a big thanks to our

53:28

listeners and our Patreon supporters.

53:30

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