The Doomsday Glacier - Professor Richard Alley Part 2

Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00] Welcome to planet geo the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works and why it matters to you.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, Chris man. Wow.

Chris Bolhuis: That was. That was.

Chris Bolhuis: a lot of fun.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah.

Jesse Reimink: a, a lot of fun.

Chris Bolhuis: It was, we had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Richard Allie. Um, we just got done with our interview or talk, I should say. And that was, uh, that was amazing. It was very thought-provoking you don't know what you're in for. I mean, this is a really good interview coming up, talking about. Climate climate change, glaciers, doomsday. it's got a little bit of everything. Everyone just sit back and relax.

Jesse Reimink: got a little bit of everything, and it also comes from somebody who has a lot of, a lot, like this [00:01:00] guy. Is an amazing teacher. You can tell this just by listening to him, right. you can tell he has won the top teaching award for Penn state university, which I can't really convey how big Penn state is and how many professors are at Penn state without like walking around campus. But it's huge. And that is a huge deal. And yet that just comes across you also, this guy's an amazing researcher. He's a member of the national academy of sciences. He's a foreign member of the Royal society. He has won countless prizes. He has the Evan P university professorship, which is the top award a professor can get at Penn state. He has the presidential young investigator award back in the day, he's been on a PBS special called earth, the operator's manual, which we talk about a bit he's briefed senators and vice presidents. I mean, it's amazing.

Chris Bolhuis: How many papers has he published?

Jesse Reimink: I don't even wanna say it, cuz it's embarrassing. Like over 300,

Chris Bolhuis: Well, okay. How many papers have you published?

Jesse Reimink: I plead the fifth. [00:02:00] I plead the

Chris Bolhuis: okay. That's fair. That's fair, but I'm sorry. I laughed harder than I should, but I thought that was really freaking funny. And, and you know what, too, if you look through some of his publications, the guy has a knack. Richard alley has a knack for coming up with really catchy, punchy

Jesse Reimink: Oh,

Chris Bolhuis: I admire that.

Jesse Reimink: and I think that comes across in the teaching too. Like he knows how to make a, a punchy statement in a meaningful statement. He did this a couple times to me, he phrased things in ways that I've never heard before in this interview. And it just kind of left me like, oh, damn, that's really, really insightful. That's a deep statement that I gotta like, think about a minute, you know? Like I gotta think about that, cuz that's a really. really clever way to phrase it or really important way to say it.

Chris Bolhuis: A hundred percent agree. I just got done with the interview with you, you know, and, and Dr. Richard all, and I can't wait to go back and listen back on it. Like

Jesse Reimink: I know, I know. I know.

Chris Bolhuis: I need to, so maybe you all are listeners should listen to this two or three [00:03:00] times,

Jesse Reimink: I it's just ANMA yeah, it's worth it. Totally. And, uh, and he's just an amazing guy. I would recommend going to Google and typing in professor Richard alley and just watch the videos that come up in the images and videos feed, because he's got some really, really good stuff out there. We only just scratched the surface in our interview of things that he's done, but. Can teach and he can explain. And there's a lot of content that he has online.

Chris Bolhuis: Very good point doing my research for this was a lot of fun because I got to watch videos and read, stuff that this , that this incredible person has done. so without further ado, let's get to the interview before we do real quick. We are your host. This is Dr. Jesse Reimink and Chris Behe coming at you planet geo interview with Dr. Richard alley. Let's go.

Jesse Reimink: Sorry. This is [00:04:00] probably very juvenile Richard. You've done a lot of interviews and we've probably seem like really sort of, uh,

Professor Richard Alley: no. This is cool. I mean, you've got it together. This is all right.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. Well, I mean, as that as an intro, maybe we should just get started here. So, today we have the great pleasure of talking with professor Richard, all who is actually a professor in the department that I'm at at Penn state in the geosciences department. Although Richard dares say you are at a very different level from where I'm at, you are at an aspirational level. at Penn state geoscience.

Professor Richard Alley: I'm old. Come on, Jesse.

Jesse Reimink: Well, a little bit more of a personal note, I'm very happy to be talking to you. I consider you one of the, the people whose opinion. I respect the most in our department. For sure. When you say stuff, my ears perk up. And so I, I'm excited to talk to you about all things geoscience on planet geo here. So welcome Richard.

Professor Richard Alley: Well, thank you and, and great, great to be chatting with you and Chris and Chris greetings to you.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Nice to meet you, Richard.

Jesse Reimink: So Chris, why don't you, why don't you take us away

Chris Bolhuis: why don't you? Yeah, so, [00:05:00] Richard, we always start off our interviews with a question like this. And so I wanna ask, was there an aha moment for you? Because there was something definite for Jesse and I, where we were exposed to something and we knew right away, this is what we're going into. We're gonna go into geoscience and we're not gonna look back. So Did you have a moment like that,

Professor Richard Alley: Oh, it grew, um, maybe Yellowstone, right? So the, the family took us out to the, Badlands in the black Hills. One year we made it to Yellowstone the next year. That's a. Strong, uh, bringing you on, you know, it's

Jesse Reimink: that's a strong start. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. How old were you

Professor Richard Alley: yep.

Chris Bolhuis: old are you? Oh,

Professor Richard Alley: I'm 65 just turned 65

Jesse Reimink: How old were you when you went to Yellowstone?

Professor Richard Alley: how old was I? I was, oh dear. So this was upper elementary school and into, into

Professor Richard Alley: middle school,

Jesse Reimink: Sorry. We don't, we don't get too personal here on point view. We don't need the details. That's a little faux PA I guess, asking people. [00:06:00]

Professor Richard Alley: yeah, I know, but you, you got it. I

Jesse Reimink: there we go. Okay. All right.

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse's full of UX. It's all right.

Jesse Reimink: ah, yeah, just one after the other around here. Um, how so I'm curious how, okay. Yellowstone is, not really similar to what you've studied for most of your career. So I don't know. Can you give us Give us your category. What would you categorize yourself as? And then how did you get into that?

Professor Richard Alley: Right. So probably I am a glaciologist. I study ice, with a geology background in material science and met engineering. and I went to Ohio state. It was down the road. We could afford it, a great place to do it. And I desperately needed a summer job. And there were two summer jobs open one would've involved cleaning fossils with a dental pick that had been collected in Antarctica. And the other one was helping the glaciologist, whatever that was. And I opted the Ian Willens of Willens ice cream. I helped the [00:07:00] glaciologist and I was finding. The fallout from atomic bomb tests in the ice sheet, because we knew what year we blew up bikini, a toll, the amount of snow on that tells you the average snow accumulation. I was tracing radar reflections from volcanic eruptions in the, um, ice sheet to see how the flow had happened. And it was just way cool. And I have to admit when I, I graduated and I said, I can't get a job in this. I gotta find something that I can make a living at. And so I worked for an oil company one summer, and I went and TAed field camp. And I talked to all the faculty members about what they were doing, that I could get a job in. And I went back to the glaciologist and I said, would you take me back ? he said, sure, why not?

Jesse Reimink: and then you did grad school at Ohio state as well at the Ohio state. I guess we should call it.

Professor Richard Alley: At the Ohio state, I did masters [00:08:00] there. Um, Ian had told me, you do your PhD with the best person in the world. And I didn't know what I was doing. So I did the, masters there and then, went up to Wisconsin and worked with Charlie Bentley for my

Professor Richard Alley: PhD.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, cool. So just to quickly backtrack, how can we see the, is that the mic test or the Bravo test that blew up bikini atoll? How does that represent itself in the ice record? Is there like actual shards of BI like dust from bikini atoll?

Professor Richard Alley: right. That's the castle test. It was probably the dirtiest bomb and history. It was a fish and infusion fish bomb. So you set off a, um, oh no, it was bigger than it was intended to be apparently, but it was designed that way In 1954, it falls in 1955 out of the stratosphere and it's radioactive. And to this day, if you have a really sensitive sensor, you could drop it down a hole and you'll get a spike in the, the early mid sixties from some Soviet tests. [00:09:00] And you'll get a spike in 1955 from castle. We were looking for it in the radiation either, cm, 1 37 or 90. And, um, you can pull those out and identify it.

Jesse Reimink: Wow. That okay.

Chris Bolhuis: Richard is it found somewhere? more in one place than another or is

Professor Richard Alley: it because it was stratospheric, it, it went around the world. And so it, it injects outta the stratosphere. And so you find it pretty much everywhere. you know, it's, it's soluble stuff for the most part. So if it was really wet, it might have washed away, but it's still down in the ice sheet.

Chris Bolhuis: that's amazing.

Chris Bolhuis: Wow. Wow.

Jesse Reimink: That,

Chris Bolhuis: idea. Okay.

Jesse Reimink: okay. So that's quite a lead in, into your field. I mean that let's just set the stage. That's one hell of a start to a career. That's totally cool. Chris, I'm gonna take a, I'm gonna go for one here. So Richard you have an amazing resume and CV. You're a national academy of science member. You're a foreign member of the Royal society. You're at [00:10:00] Penn state, the Evan pew university professor, which is one of the top. It's the top professorship within, uh, Penn state that you can get. You've won Penn state's top teaching award. So not only are you a world class researcher, but also teacher, , you've briefed the Senate. You've briefed, international legislatures, and people have described you to me as perhaps the most famous professor at Penn state writ large and Penn state is a huge complex here. uh, so that, that's a pretty impressive thing. so I kind of want you to set the stage, cuz we're gonna talk about a, I hope we're gonna talk about a couple different climate change and glaciology related things, but can you set the stage for us for kind of where that field was when you started your career? and then we'll kind of hopefully get to where it is now, or maybe we'll jump to where it is now. but what, what was it like when you started this particular field?

Professor Richard Alley: Yeah. So, glaciers, you know, why do we study glaciers? And, uh, if you've been watching the news, this past summer, a little glacier fell off of a [00:11:00] mountaintop in Italy and killed a bunch of people. So local hazards are important, um, floods and other things. when we can we study glacier erosion, because why is he Yosemite? Beautiful. Um, and that's fun. It's just, there's a new paper out showing that snowball earth eroded the great unconformity.

Jesse Reimink: yeah, there we

Jesse Reimink: go.

Professor Richard Alley: right. So, so this is, this is way cool, but what we really do is the history of climate , to learn, , how climate has changed naturally to test our models of climate, to test our understanding and the future of ice and sea level. So there is enough ice in, Antarctica, Greenland in the high mountains to cause huge troubles for people on the coast. So ultimately we do climate history and we do sea level rise and the field was working on those when I got into it. But it was just, it was so [00:12:00] hard to do things that, you know, how did they learn the shape of the ice sheet? Initially, they were doing traverses where they're getting the elevation from barometer because the air pressure falls and you'd have , one traversing vehicle sit still. So it can see if the pressure is changing because the weather is changing. The other traversing vehicle drives and it can see the change from the weather and the elevation. And then they take turns. And then you may have three of 'em doing this. And then if you wanna get the velocity, you put a pole in the ice and then you come back a year later and see if you can find it and then figure out from surveying where the heck it was and it's, and right. And now what do they do? You've got SAR, interferometry, and you've got speckle tracking and you've got, you can take a satellite and you can get [00:13:00] more data. That fast then we're collected in the entire world by all scientists up to the time when I started. And so this is the big thing, is that the, availability of data, the availability to learn things has just gone through the roof. We were in a, I mean, and in so many ways we were in a different world. I'm not bragging, but I, I was a, did a little bit of pioneering ice flow modeling. I tried something that didn't work very well, but now people have done it better and it's sort of standard. And my pioneering ice flow model, I carried around in a box under my. right, because it was on computer cards and you'd take your, thesis down to the computer center to run it and you put it in and you'd run it through and it would come out and it wouldn't work because one of the cards had a, had a dog ear on

Professor Richard Alley: it. [00:14:00] I mean, what, what, what has happened is just the ability to do things has gone through the roof. Our, our understanding has gone through the roof and we're still not there. And this is huge, difficult problems. Our level of ignorance is at a vastly higher level, but we're still ignorant.

Chris Bolhuis: Richard. I wanna be clear when you say we're still not there. What do you mean? What exactly are you saying?

Professor Richard Alley: right. So the biggest question that we have a hole in right now is how much sea level will rise depending on what decisions we humans make. If you look at the most recent report from the United nations, uh, the authoritative version of the future, we get about three feet of sea level rise by the year 2100, under the strongest warming, [00:15:00] except they then put a dashed line on and said, well, if things go wrong, then it'll be way up here almost twice as much. And it could be worse than that. And the fact that at this point, we can't tell if it's gonna be this, or it's gonna be twice as much, or it's gonna be even more than that. We understand so much more deeply what would go into that, how it could happen, what the things are to look for, but we still can't go to the Senate and say, this is the number.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. So you're saying if, if we say, okay, \ , CO2 emissions are gonna drive, uh, temperature change of one degree over the next, however many years, you can't put a, a number on sea level rise. You're saying that that there's uncertainties both in that CO2. Temperature conversion or prediction, but also then in the temperature to sea level rise prediction. Is that that okay, so that link and

Professor Richard Alley: especially,

Jesse Reimink: in.

Professor Richard Alley: especially [00:16:00] in the temperature to sea level rise. And it's almost entirely in one direction. So. we have projections. this much CO2, this much warming, this much rice. It could be a little less rice. It could be a little more, it could be a lot more. It cannot be a lot less. And we actually do know that, the UN curve that they like leaves 99.8% of Antarctica's ice on Antarctica. It melts not 0.2% of Antarctica. It's really, really hard to be better than that. It's really, really easy to be worse.

Jesse Reimink: So you're saying that, and I think we should just set the stage here, Chris, briefly that we're talking the sea level rise is due to glaciers melting and putting all that water that's trapped in ice into the ocean. So I think, some people may have missed that step. So that's like the, the driving force of sea level rise here is warming, temperatures, melting ice. The ice goes into the water into the ocean and that rises. So it's [00:17:00] volume of ice into the ocean basically. And is it all Antarctica? Oh, sorry. We'll probably get to this. I'm probably getting ahead of

Professor Richard Alley: Well, yeah, Well, we could, we could do this, right. So sea level is rising and sea level is rising primarily for three reasons. One is that, uh, the ocean is getting warmer and the water expands, mountain glaciers. There's a lot of ice in the mountains. There is less ice in the mountains than there used to be because it's melting. It runs down the river. It goes in the ocean. The ice in the mountain is smaller than the ocean is bigger. And then there's some melting going on around the edge of Greenland and a little bit of faster flow around Antarctica that are taking ice from up above the ocean, putting it into the ocean, and that raises the ocean and lowers the ice. So these giant mounds of ice in green London, Antarctica, are the, big deal. if we melt. All the ice in all the mountains of the world, [00:18:00] it raises the ocean a little more than a foot. And then the mountains are ice less. There's nothing more they can do. If we melt all the ice on top of Greenland, it raises the ocean 23 feet. If we melt all the ice in Antarctica, it's 56 meters, what's that 180 feet, something like that. So that's the big beast. And so when you think about what could happen, it's Greenland and Antarctica. If you think about what is happening, it's mountain glaciers and expanding ocean

Chris Bolhuis: Richard, that's a perfect segue into the next question that I want to ask. And also to your point that we don't really know how much sea level is gonna rise when I'm doing my research to get ready for this interview. When you Google Richard alleyways, glacier pops up, you know, it's like you're all [00:19:00] over the place and it's amazingly interesting.

Jesse Reimink: there's first Wikipedia page. Then there's an IMDB page then there's news links upon news links. I mean, you have, you know, if you Google Jesse ceramic, there's like maybe two pages and then Google's like, uh, these results. Aren't where you're looking for. If you Google Richard alley, it's like 25,000 pages of Richard alley stuff. I love it. it's a really deep dive.

Chris Bolhuis: You're very difficult to get ready for, but, so your research is on the, or you've done a lot of research on thewas glacier, and I wanna spell that a minute. That's T H w a I T S for those that wanna Google that and, you know, see what's going on, but it's often called the doomsday glacier. So can you give us the pitch on what's going on and what could happen with this?

Professor Richard Alley: Right. , so I can give you the pitch and I'll give you a long pitch and then you can cut it down later because you know how to do this, right? So an ice sheet likes to get into a balance snowfalls on top. It spreads under its [00:20:00] own weight and it melts or breaks off at the edges. if you wanna a mental picture, , think of making pancakes and if you pour pancake batter in a griddle, the pile of pancake batter spreads under its own. And the only things you really need to worry about if it's runnier, it spreads faster. If it's on a waffle iron, rather than on a grease griddle, it spreads slower. If you hold it back with the spatula, it spreads slower. So basically that is the picture. Think of an ice sheet as the world's biggest pancake spreading under its own weight. In some places, the bed is a greased griddle. In some places it's of awful iron. In some places it's sort of held back because it has to flow around a mountain that's in the way, and that it has these floating extensions called ice shelves that have friction with their sides. And then how harder, how soft it is, Jesse, Chris, [00:21:00] your geologist, um, that's geology ultimately. Okay. so that is, that is the big picture of what's going on. What glaciers do when they flow into the ocean. they like to make these floating extensions, which we call ice shelves and those hang up on a high spot in the bed, or they scrape past the Rocky walls of the field and that generates friction. And so they're sort of like the spatula, that's holding back the motion of the ice back to where it's not floating. And if it goes faster, it can raise sea level. And if you warm 'em up enough, those ice shelves thin, and then they break off and then the non floating ice flows into the ocean faster. And that raises sea level.

Jesse Reimink: So can I, can I ask you a quick question there, Richard, how far, how, how long is the floating section? Like if we try and picture, you know, some tongue of [00:22:00] a glacier coming out into the ocean. how far from shore is it projecting out this sort of tongue typically? I don't

Professor Richard Alley: Right. So.

Jesse Reimink: maybe there's no such thing as typical, but

Professor Richard Alley: right. So the range of ice shelf lengths, the, the Ross ice shelf is hundreds of miles. And, um, the weight size shelf is just a few miles. Now they're getting it's fairly small. So there's a huge range. Mostly they generate they're drag pretty close to the non floating ice. So the long extensions, mostly you're serving to protect the, farther towards the middle and the farther towards the middle does most of the work.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. So,

Chris Bolhuis: So the ice shelf is kind of like a toe hold

Professor Richard Alley: it's a toe hold. It's a toe hold and it usually gets stuck in a bottleneck. now I want you to think about the last time you got caught in a really nasty, uh, traffic jam. You're driving down the interstate and they've closed the left. lane because of [00:23:00] construction. And there's this huge backup, cuz you're into a bottleneck, almost always glaciers, like to end at a bottleneck if they're flowing into the ocean, because the stuff that gets past the bottleneck is like the cars that get past the traffic jam, they turn on the gas and they take off. And in this case it turns on the gas, it breaks off, it floats away as an iceberg and it melts somewhere else. And so usually the ice is sitting in a bottleneck and you know what happens with, with bottlenecks, you're stuck and there's lots of cars stuck behind you. But if you could open it, if you could get rid of that net lane, all of a sudden the ice behind you speeds up and for the commuters, they're happy. We're going places for the ocean. If you open it up, it will, um, raise the ocean. And so what we see in the history. Almost everywhere. Almost all the time for [00:24:00] glaciers is they'll get stuck in a bottleneck. They hang on, there's all kinds of things they're doing to keep them in that bottleneck. Nothing's happening. If you warm 'em a little bit, nothing happens. You warm 'em a little more. And eventually they back outta the bottleneck. Then they break off icebergs that, turn on their sides and float out through the bottleneck. And then they fall apart. an example, if you ever get the chance to go to Chris or Jesse, if you've been to glacier bay in Alaska,

Jesse Reimink: I have not. No,

Professor Richard Alley: go that's wonderful.

Professor Richard Alley: Okay. so glacier bay is, you know, it's national park and it's beautiful and whales and seals and sea lion said, oh, you know, it's just the bears on the shore. It's just this wonderful place. Vancouver discovers it. Of course there's people there, but when Vancouver discovers it for written things, going back to, Europe, uh, 1794, I think it was, it was entirely full of ice. [00:25:00] It's a glacier, that's a mild thick up in the middle. John Muer did all kinds of observations in 1888 and it was retreated 50 miles, and it didn't melt. It fell apart. It backed out of a bottled neck. And John Muir is watching these icebergs fall off and taking these observations that we still make use of um, and the thing thin by a mile and it retreated by 60 miles in sort of a hundred years without primarily melting, just breaking off.

Jesse Reimink: So that's

Jesse Reimink: that. So is that a common, um, A common misconception that you come across then is that, you know, when you see those pictures we see these on like Facebook or Instagram or whatever Twitter, you know, where you've got the, the mountain valley with the mountainsides, you've got a glacier 1920 photo where the glacier's pretty close to the camera. And then in that 2021, when it's like really far away, is it a common [00:26:00] misconception that you come across that that is strictly due to just temperature increasing and getting warmer as opposed to this toehold breaking off and the glacier actually falling apart as you're describing, like, yeah,

Professor Richard Alley: right. So all of those are warming, including the ones losing the toe hold, but the ones that have really changed usually have a lake in front of them. And so what those did is they backed up into a hole. They had eroded \ so the warming causes them to back up. Once they get in that hole rather than just melting at the front and melting on top. They're also breaking off icebergs that can go all the way down the lake and they can melt all the way down the lake. And so it falls apart way faster. So the ones you see that have the biggest changes, the ones you go, Ooh, the most usually have made a lake and they've broken icebergs into the lake and that makes them go faster.

Jesse Reimink: No, that's so cool. That's a great description by the way that, was perfect. I could visualize that all the way through. That was perfect for, you know, [00:27:00] podcast. That's great.

Chris Bolhuis: I wanna just ask a question here that follows up. On what you just said, Richard. So basically if they back out out of the bottleneck, there's nothing holding the thing back anymore. And so it speeds the whole process up. Is that an accurate description of

Professor Richard Alley: that's correct. I mean, there's still the stuff that hasn't broken off yet still has friction below it. And on the sides, it still has strength ice. but it's lost. You can think of the, you know, just if, if you were trying to find a good analogy, right. So if you made a little tiny hole in the side of, of the pan that you were doing, the pancakes in and the stuff is flowing out, and then somehow you just opened that hole,

Jesse Reimink: Okay.

Professor Richard Alley: would go way

Professor Richard Alley: faster.

Professor Richard Alley: So this beco

Jesse Reimink: Okay.

Professor Richard Alley: bigger.

Professor Richard Alley: Sowas glacier is the first place that we expect Antarctica to do what glacier bay did. What [00:28:00] a lot of those mountain glaciers have done that we've seen that it seems to be the most vulnerable of the bottlenecks that are holding back ice in Antarctica. There's others that are also vulnerable, but thewas glacier looks to be the most vulnerable. And if thewas glacier does what glacier bay did, does what the ones in the mountains have done. It is about 10 or 11 feet of sea level until it gets to the next stable point, because weights glacier is not draining a little valley in Alaska. It's draining this vast, deep. Bentley trench that, my PhD advisor discovered. And so there's this huge space that it would retrieve through before it gets all the way back to the trans Antarctic mountains and its stabilizes. So,

Jesse Reimink: So, wow. The 10, 10 feet. That's really. So I have a couple questions about this. All right. So first off. [00:29:00] How well is that 10 feet calculated? Like, have we mapped this glacier enough to know that really well. And the second part of that then after that answer is probably where's the uncertainty then in the sea level, like where, where does the uncertainty in the sea level rise that you alluded to initially? Where does that uncertainty come from? Sorry, Chris, you're

Chris Bolhuis: oh, hold on. I'm laughing. You are a funny guy, Jesse. The, our listeners want, you know what our listeners wanna know Jesse. They don't wanna know the uncertainty in the calculations here. You know what they wanna know they wanna know. how quick this is gonna happen.

Jesse Reimink: Okay.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay.

Jesse Reimink: fair enough. That's a better question to start with, but I still want answers to mine. Don't

Professor Richard Alley: yes. Right? Yeah. So, so the sort of it's, it's 3.3 meters of sea level equivalent. So, you know, you can do that and it's 10, 11 feet that 11 feet, I guess it is. And, and that's pretty well known. So we, we could do better. We could refine that, but my guess is most of your listeners, [00:30:00] if you told 'em it's 11 feet and it could be 10, it could be 12, they don't care. it's a holy bad word. This is not a good thing. Um, how fast it is could be the big issue is will we kick weights out of the bottleneck? And that is a, that is a. Issue to do once it's kicked out of the bottleneck, there there's various things. It will try desperately to get back to the bottleneck. It might break off iceberg so fast that they jam up at the bottleneck. So there's a lot of possibilities, but the worst case is really scary. I'll be perfectly honest because, it's, you know, if we wanna get technical, right now, most of the icebergs breaking off of most of the ice of the world break off when the flow processes make them wanna break off. And so the, the rate of breaking off [00:31:00] is controlled by the spreading of the pancake batter. It's not controlled by the breakage. And if, Thwaites were to retreat, it could make a, a cliff higher than Yosemite. that will. That will not stand in ice the way it stands in granite. And then you start thinking about things, breaking on what we might call human time scales. Boom, boom, boom. And, and this could be really scary,

Jesse Reimink: Wow.

Chris Bolhuis: I I want that's awesome. What you just, well, it's scary as hell, but it's a great visual, but Richard, can you, let's back up a second because I wanna make sure that we paint a, picture of how is it that that drop off could be bigger than Yosemite. Can you describe that for me again? Let's just, let's take a step back and go through that description again.

Professor Richard Alley: weights glacier is a, a fairly narrow, fairly narrow, right? So it's, it's 70 or 80 miles wide and it's [00:32:00] fairly shallow. So it's. 1500 feet or so, and that's the bottleneck, but behind it, it's, a lot wider. And the deepest spots back there, the ice is just almost 4,000 meters thick and 4,000 meters is, you know, well over two miles. And there's all kinds of ways that you could think of that, it wouldn't expose that whole cliff to the, to the ocean. But if it happened to expose that whole cliff to the ocean, it would break really, really fast,

Jesse Reimink: at the worst case, the 10 feet is happening in, uh, in decades shorter.

Professor Richard Alley: decades, maybe shorter. And, and it's, it's a little, we have seen a glacier retreat floating ice, not on the ground, but we've seen floating ice retreat that [00:33:00] it did about 30 miles in, um, you know, a few weeks. And so, you know, a few miles a week so that sort of number, if it becomes scientists like to say, if it became rate limited by brittle processes, it's absolutely fascinating to go look at videos of landslides. Uh, retrogressive slumps that are rate limited by brittle processes and it's scary.

Jesse Reimink: Really. Okay. Wow.

Professor Richard Alley: If you have not seen the quick clay slide at RSA, I strongly recommend this.

Jesse Reimink: okay.

Professor Richard Alley: S S a it's on

Professor Richard Alley: YouTube.

Jesse Reimink: Say that again, Richard.

Professor Richard Alley: from the,

Jesse Reimink: it's the,

Jesse Reimink: quick clay slide at RSA. Is that what it is?

Professor Richard Alley: that is what it is quick as in fast and clay, as in clay. And it's a, it's a report from the Norwegian geotechnical Institute, the exact name [00:34:00] you can find there. And it's one of these places that, um, there was a, a little landslide happens, and then that frees up the next piece, and then it goes, and then the next piece goes, and then the next piece goes, and it's old enough that the guy is filming with his super eight movie camera. his new camera. So this, this dates it, and he's filming. He's filming and he's filming and he's filming and he has to turn around and run for his life

Jesse Reimink: Okay. Wow. Okay.

Professor Richard Alley: coming

Professor Richard Alley: for you.

Jesse Reimink: I've I mean, I've never seen this, Chris, have you seen this? We'll we'll, we'll find it put a link to the, uh, in the show notes here, but

Chris Bolhuis: think I have, because his last description sounds really familiar to me, but yeah, we're gonna put a link to this in the show

Chris Bolhuis: notes, for sure.

Jesse Reimink: So

Professor Richard Alley: it's way. Cool. But, and it's different physics, but it is a case where breaking is now what you're worried about rather than flowing. And when breaking is what you're worried about, rather than flowing, it can go really

Jesse Reimink: is [00:35:00] the analogy, if we can go back to our traffic jam analogy here, and maybe it's better to make this like a five lane highway going down to one lane or something like that for this analogy, but , is the breaking limited versus flow limited? Is it more like this rate is limited by the acceleration of the trucks. Like if it's all semi trucks or if it's all Teslas, like that's the diff that's the rate limiting thing. Is there some analogy in this that we could, you could set the physics apart for us there or not?

Professor Richard Alley: Yeah, that one's not terrible. I mean, if you can think about them, if they were all tethered together by, by Buny cords and they broke 'em as they accelerated away, that would work

Chris Bolhuis: . Yeah, I, I think can I have a go at this? Okay, Jesse. right. So you

Jesse Reimink: so Chris really quickly Richard, uh, Chris has been on fire with the analogies recently, so I've just been kind of giving him free reign, but that means that he's got a lot of leeway, which sometimes he gets sketchy when he gets

Chris Bolhuis: yeah. You let me know if this is bad. [00:36:00] let me know if this is bad. but here's what I'm thinking. Five lanes going down to one, but before the five lanes converge, it's going down a steep hill. So if you back off the bottleneck, which is going down to the one lane, everything's back to five lane and it's going down a steep hill. So everything's flying.

Professor Richard Alley: Yeah, that'll that'll work. The truth is for weights. It's it's five lanes going down to one and it's two or three decks going down to one, right? So

Jesse Reimink: Oh, oh,

Jesse Reimink: cool. So you got the tunnels, you got the which one is it? The Washington bridge or something in, you know, the one crossing the Hudson river where you're in two, you got top and bottom flow of traffic. I like that. Okay. The couple stacked up. That's cool. Yeah, that's

Chris Bolhuis: Alright. good

Chris Bolhuis: That

Chris Bolhuis: works

Jesse Reimink: now. That's awesome.

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. . All right, Richard, we're you okay with switching gears on us, Richard? All right. Good deal. Richard in getting ready for this, I watched you online, give a lecture, the title of it, which is an awesome title, [00:37:00] was something like the carbon control knob. Can you, I wanna talk about this and then I have some questions that I wrote based upon the lecture. So do you remember this lecture? First of all? Okay. can you give us a short version of that?

Professor Richard Alley: Sure. So, so we we're geologists and

Professor Richard Alley: have,

Jesse Reimink: It's just the best to be a geologist. Yeah.

Professor Richard Alley: It is the best. It is great. So, so one of the things we're really interested in is, is the history of the climate, the history of life, the history of the rocks, the mountains, we love all of this stuff. It's great. And what people have seen is that who lives, where, and who lives and who dies, changes a lot over time. And some of this is, you know, drifting continents. If you're living on something that's in Antarctica, and then it drifts up to the traffics, you what lives on you is going to change. but what we found more and more is that there have been real [00:38:00] changes in the climate. that a lot of the big extinctions happened because of climate changes. and that a lot of the slower things happened because of climate change. And usually the path was someone discovered a whole bunch of things died here. and then you say, well, why, and then there's about 50 hypotheses. And eventually it turns out in one case it was a meteorite that changed the climate. And in basically all the other cases, it looks like, yeah, what's the climate. usually a volcano changing the climate by belching out fast amount of CO2. But when you start reconstructing climate and then ask what controls it, and there's a huge number of things, there are so many knobs that control the climate and they're all interesting. And the geologists get to work on all of them. And this is one of the cool things to being a geologist, but it turns out the biggest one has been [00:39:00] changes in carbon diox. and some of those have been driven by changes in volcanoes. Some of those, the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs hit a bunch of rocks that were full of carbon and put a lot of carbon in the air in the hurry. Some of them have been ice age switches where carbon moves into the ocean from the air and then outta the ocean into the air. But the biggest control on fairly short times up to really long times has been natural changes in carbon dioxide. And so you put together histories of carbon dioxide, you put together histories of, temperature. You make sure you understand this is a change in temperature caused by carbon dioxide. Now the change in temperature may change carbon dioxide. That changes temperature. So you gotta get it right, but when you actually get it all right, the climate history is more a history of carbon dioxide than [00:40:00] anything. You then ask, where does the human change in carbon dioxide rank on this? And the answer is if we burn the fossil fuels that we know about, we could be almost as big as the biggest things that nature is done and faster than just about any of them, except the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. And if you ask how good are our models, the models that we're using to project the future, how good are they in the past? Either they're really good. Or the carbon dioxide changes the climate a little bit more than the models. Like not.

Chris Bolhuis: That's a great segue then into my next question, which is. Can you run down for us, how we are able to determine carbon levels in the past, back in time. And then also I think more difficult for people to understand is [00:41:00] how can we possibly determine temperature back in those same time periods.

Professor Richard Alley: Right. So, so doing paleo climate I get to teach this class and, um, I spend a whole semester trying to, to do this next little segment. So I'm gonna be a little bit brief um, carbon dioxide history, forest back as, as we have ice cores is actually really easy. The ice core bubbles have carbon. They have old air in them and ice is a really, if the, the clean cold ice of Antarctica is a really good bottle for old air, you drill it up. You get an age for it, which takes a little doing, but we can do you get a brilliant ice core scientist like ed Brook or Jeff severing house, they break the bubbles. They suck them out. They analyze 'em. They tell you the co when they've got. older than that. It's a little more challenging. Okay. So there's a lot of [00:42:00] things that people use. You can in part, just do a, a bookkeeping, how much CO2 was coming out of volcanoes, how much was being buried as fossil fuels? Um, so there are models that try to do bookkeeping. You can look at, um, if you are a leaf of a maple tree or a Kinko, they're really good. you have to breathe and you need CO2 to come into your leaf so that you can, make sugars and other things. But when you open up your, your little stomata, your mouth to, to breathe in CO2, you lose. So when CO2 is common, you only grow a few mouths so that you don't lose water and then you're happier. And when CO2 is rare, you have to have more mouths to get CO2. You can find fossil leaves, you can flip them over and you can count the density of stoma and find out then how much CO2 was. There's a bunch of other things that [00:43:00] go on. And usually these drift into isotopic indicators of some sort. So, carbon comes in various flavors. There's carbon 12 and then there's carbon 13. It has an extra neutron, carbon 14 that's radioactive that has two extra ones. plants will prefer to use the carbon 12. It's a little more chemically reactive, and it's a little faster diffusing. And so when carbon is common, they make things that are really rich in carbon 12. And when carbon is rare, they have to use more of the carbon 13. So you can find carbon 12 carbon, 13 ratios in various things. So, and you'd use all these different there's when carbon is common, the ocean gets acidified a little bit and that. The ionization state of the boron in the ocean. And, um, that in turn affects how much and what isotopes go into carbonate shells. So you could go to a carbonate shell and you [00:44:00] can look at the boron in it. And that tells you whether it was, was a, a charged or an uncharged form of the ocean, which tells you how much CO2 was controlling it it's it's and you do all these different things and they really agree pretty well. So you have a good history of, of

Chris Bolhuis: Okay. That's amazing.

Professor Richard Alley: it's amazing. It's just amazing.

Jesse Reimink: so cool. I mean, it's, it's I, I just sitting here just thinking this is, you know, there's so much, so many different types of indicators, it's, it's really shocking. I mean, I've never heard them sort of list it out like that in, in sort of consecutive order, but there's so many different types from so many different places. It's a really impressive data array actually. It's I dunno. Yeah, that just struck me as very, very cool and very impressive.

Professor Richard Alley: It's it's wonderful. Okay. So to do temperature, right? Yeah. So, the most important ones are probably not the ones I've worked on, but I've, I'll tell you one I've worked on, which is just so much fun. You just can't believe it. So, [00:45:00] so you, the analogy, okay. If you, if you have ever roasted a, a Turkey for Thanksgiving, , and you put it in the oven and it's cold, and then you have to have a thermometer to tell you how the center goes and you start off and the outside is cold and the inside's cold. And then pretty soon the outside is warm, but the inside's still cold. And then the inside gets warm and it takes some hours for the inside to get all the way up the hunt. If you. Put the Turkey in the oven and then left the go for a walk and, and your company comes, they could tell how long the Turkey has been in the oven by looking at the temperature, which is pretty cool, actually. So it turns out that if you go to Greenland, or Antarctica, you drill a hole through the ice. It's two miles long. You wait for the little, tiny bit of heat from your drill to spread out, and then you [00:46:00] measure the temperature. A mile down in Greenland is colder than the top. And it's colder than the bottom because it has not yet finished warming up from the ice age.

Jesse Reimink: Whoa.

Professor Richard Alley: And how cold it still is actually tell, we sort of know when the ice age was so how cold it is, tells us how cold the ice age was in Greenland in the same way that we could learn something from the temperature in your Turkey. We actually got the temperature, the ice age from the cold. That's still in

Jesse Reimink: That's cool. So wait, it, it it's, it's like, okay, hold on. This is very cool. I've never heard this before. This is totally cool. So it's like the inverse of you turn the oven up to 500. You heat up your whole Turkey to 500 and then you turn the oven down to three 50 or something. And the outside's cooling down. The inside stays hot. It's the inverse of that. You're saying it's cold. It's cold on the inside. Colder than it should be. Therefore it's, we're still recording the temperature of the ice [00:47:00] age,

Professor Richard Alley: Absolutely. And this is works elsewhere. So, so both of, you know, the center of the earth is hot. If you drill a borehole, it's supposed to get hotter as you go down in a hole, but virtually all the bore holes on earth. When you go down today, they get colder for a little bit, as you go down before they start heating up again. And the reason is that the near surface has warmed over the last a hundred years and especially the last couple of decades and the cold from before humans, before industrial revolution. So the cold from before we really changed the climate is in the earth and you measure it. And this is actually confirms the warming from thermometers and other things it's pound on the table. This is right. It is.

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. What an awesome analogy. I love That

Jesse Reimink: so good.

Chris Bolhuis: drives it home. That's right. That's right.

Jesse Reimink: it's going in the lectures, you know,

Chris Bolhuis: it is, I'm stealing it. [00:48:00] Richard. I'm gonna take that, um, that I steal things all the time.

Professor Richard Alley: Good.

Chris Bolhuis: okay. But Richard, can you talk a little bit about some of the other ways that we determine temperature?

Professor Richard Alley: So as we go older than, than ice course, there there's lots of, and ice course. There's lots of other things that one could use. Maybe the easiest one is just who lives, where, so you go up to, uh, somewhere in the Canadian high Arctic and you start collecting fossils from the, the, um, 50 million years ago. And there's Croke. and we happen to know that crocodile don't like it where it's, it's not quite a crocodile, but it's basically a crocodile. We, we sort of know that crocodile don't like it where it's really, really cold. It was warmer. Then I have collected th this is true. I, when I was a sophomore, I went to an, the Antarctic peninsula to carry boxes for a really good geologist. And I collected Fern fossils [00:49:00] on. Flora at the tip of the Antarctic peninsula. And it's called Mount flora because it has Fe fossils. There are no ferns growing at Mount flora today. so, so you do that. There's a lot of things then that go into isotopic indicators that people like to use. So, um, the difference in, oxygen 18 to oxygen, 16 ratio of a carbonate shell that grows into the ocean relative to the ocean it's growing in. The difference is bigger when it's colder because the, the heavy one likes to sit in the shell more. So there's a whole bunch of things people use. They're doing fantastic new things with not just isotopes, but clumped, isotopes, and whether it's two 18 sticking next to each other versus eighteens, just sticking with sixteens, turns out to be a, thermodynamically controlled. And it's actually a pretty [00:50:00] good indicator. So there's a whole lot of just, you can't imagine how, brilliant some of these things are. Um, Jeff severing house had Brooke friends. I helped the tiniest little bit with some of this that you can, snow falls on an ice sheet. And, um, it. the spaces are opened down to about 200 feet before the bubbles get closed off. And if you get a temperature gradient across that, so the surface has warmed or the surface is cooled. It turns out that gases someplace that's not well mixed by the wind tend to separate just a little bit by weight when there's temperature differences. And this is actually something that was tried in the Manhattan process for separating isotopes of uranium. It's not the one they finally used, but they tried it well. When the temperature warms at the surface, the bubbles start trapping [00:51:00] very, very slightly anomalous gas, which is easily measured. And you can say, wow, that's where the surface suddenly warmed. And you can say how much the surface.

Jesse Reimink: Very cool. Yeah. So,

Professor Richard Alley: and is that cool? So, so when we get to abrupt changes, you can say, yes, that's how much, and we know pauser minus is a degree that was 10 degrees, you know?

Chris Bolhuis: So the takeaway is you, scientists can determine temperature accurately and back in time. Okay. That's the takeaway. That's awesome. What, what an exciting thing to do? It has to be Richard, like I'm serious. I'm, I'm listening to this and if I was a young, much younger person and I'm contemplating my future, this would be something that I think would get me very excited. Like

Professor Richard Alley: yeah. They pay

Chris Bolhuis: onto.

Professor Richard Alley: this. It's amazing.

Professor Richard Alley: Well, and I mean, be, be honest, Chris, you, you go to these beautiful places with students and the places that Jesse [00:52:00] goes, right? These are fantastically beautiful places,

Chris Bolhuis: yeah.

Professor Richard Alley: very, interesting things. And sometimes he gets a, he.

Chris Bolhuis: I know i, know i, they

Jesse Reimink: mosquitoes.

Chris Bolhuis: yeah, they haven't caught onto Jesse's scam yet, but

Jesse Reimink: No,

Chris Bolhuis: Uh, yeah, they will.

Jesse Reimink: stop saying that, richard. No, nobody's checking.

Chris Bolhuis: Um, alright

Chris Bolhuis: Jesse, why don't you take this next one here? Do you want, you wanna do this.

Jesse Reimink: yeah, so I think the, um, back to the, control part of the carbon control knob in your title, like how you said it's kind of the primary control or it's a bigger control than the other one's carbon CO2 in the atmosphere. How, um, dramatic have these been and the rate of back in time.

Professor Richard Alley: Right. So if we look at rate of change, the one that stands out as a meteorite that kills the dinosaur, because you're, you're sitting there behaving yourself and then this meteorite hits and, and it blasts, first of all, you, you with danger burning up, cuz stuff is [00:53:00] falling back from being blasted above the atmosphere. And then you're gonna freeze because the sun is blocked by the little pieces that haven't fallen down yet. And then you're gonna get cooked because the, the CO2 has made it hot. And that's really fast. after that nature has made big changes and probably a little bigger than what we're likely to do. if we continue on sort of fast burning, if we do the, the higher CO2 emissions path that humans could be on, we will rival the biggest things that nature has done in size and maybe faster in speed. I actually helped a little with a paper that looked at this as part of a us government report a decade ago that we then published and we humans hadn't quite come out of the natural envelope, but we were getting pretty close to it. So we could [00:54:00] be a really big deal.

Jesse Reimink: Okay. That, that, yeah, that's really interesting. So, Chris,

Chris Bolhuis: I wanna ask this question because you addressed this in the lecture that I watch, or one of the many lectures I watched online, , I want to ask how you would respond or how you do respond to people that say, quote, unquote, climate has always changed. So we don't need to worry about a changing climate.

Professor Richard Alley: Absolutely. So climate has always changed and that is a very strong reason to be concerned about climate change. And we'll do the analogy. Have you ever met anyone who said fires have always occurred? So we should not worry about those kids with the illegal fireworks in the gas can heading up into the tender dry Hills. Right?

Jesse Reimink: that's a, that's a funny analogy.

Professor Richard Alley: have, have you, have you ever met anyone who said people have [00:55:00] always died? So I don't need to worry about that guy in the mask coming after me with a chainsaw right. Fires have always occurred. So we worry about arson. People have always died. So we worry about, murder. Um, climate has always changed. So what do we know? Climate change has always affected living. We see the record that extinction was when it got too hot in the tropics for large animals to live there, that we see the record of climate affecting living things. So climate change is important. Climate change for many reasons, but especially CO2. So our CO2 is especially important. You look at this history and I think if anyone who seriously looks at it becomes more concerned about what we're doing, not less.

Jesse Reimink: Yeah,

Chris Bolhuis: right. that, is very, very well put. Um, I love the logic in it. [00:56:00] It's because climate has changed in the past that we need to be concerned about it. We need to study this. We need to know everything that we possibly can about it. I, I love that thought process. That's awesome.

Jesse Reimink: So Richard, I have one final question for you, but before we get to that really shortly, I want you to tell us what you think every human should know about the geosciences, like a one statement that you tell every student that ever comes into any of your classes or anything you do on PBS. Like, do you have a, a, singular thing that you think people should take away?

Professor Richard Alley: Right. Geosciences help people. We need a few of you to come join us and do it. And we need a lot of you recognize the that we can do together.

Jesse Reimink: Oh, wow. That's. That's amazing. Okay. I'm making a sign of that and I'm putting it in my office. We need a few of you to come join us and a lot of you to pay. That's great. Well, okay, Richard, this has been very fun. We've taken up a lot of your time, but we have to ask our final [00:57:00] closing question. We always ask everybody what has been your best day as a geoscientist.

Professor Richard Alley: I suppose my best day as a geoscientist is also my worst day as a GS scientist. So we were, we were up in Greenland, we're working on an ice core and we're trying to find out whether it really is true that the climate can change abruptly. Is it possible at least in regions to have jumps that you've been pushing it slowly and rather than changing slowly, it'll suddenly jump. And we sort of figured that it probably was possible and we wanted to know, and that knowledge was going to be important, but we're sort of hoping that it's not true because that, Raises the stakes for climate change. And we're looking at this ice core and it's coming through and we're going down through the years of the current, uh, warm time headed back towards the ice age. [00:58:00] And my friend, Ken Taylor has a little electrical instrument. That's measuring the, chemicals in the ice and it's showing the annual layers and it's going along going, we and I look at it and it's going, oh, we, we, we, and the climate changed a good chunk of the difference between an ice age and today, mostly in one year in Greenland. And so this ability that there are, there are tipping points and we looked at it and we stood there to sort of with our mouths, open looking at a tipping point written in the ice. And it's just so. Fantastically wonderful. And yet, so sobering that, that there are tipping points and sort of assuming that our future will be smooth, probably we would be wise to be a little more concerned about the future than that, because there is a possibility that will do weird [00:59:00] things at least to regions and maybe to the whole globe.

Chris Bolhuis: Wow. Richard, what was the tipping point?

Professor Richard Alley: That one is actually, so it's, it's in the modern world. in the winter off of Norway, the ocean never freezes, that close to the pole, everywhere else on earth freezes. But the water there, when it gets really cold, it sinks because it's a little salt. And that salty water sinks and in the winter, if the water never freezes, you can't get the air much below freezing. So in Europe they play soccer all winter. if you put a little extra fresh water out there, it will freeze before it sinks. And then you can get North Dakota or Manitoba out in the ocean. And rather than being at the freezing point, it's minus 40. And so it turns out that at certain times in the past, that went from, freezing to sinking [01:00:00] really, really fast. And that had some global implications, a lot of regional ones. It is not the most important issue in our future, but it's one that we could change that system somewhat. But as a, illustration, that there are surprises in the system and occasionally something happens. It was really, really powerful. And a lot of sciences come out of, I got to chair this national Academy's panel that looked at abrupt changes, and then we've gone on from that. And it's clear that nature can change abruptly biology can change abruptly more so, and humans can really change abruptly. We can decide to get along and solve problems, or we can decide to shoot each other. And that can change really fast.

Jesse Reimink: Wow. Interesting. and that, yeah. Wow. Okay. We'll leave it at that. That was a really, uh, that's a, that's a good

Jesse Reimink: day sobering day. Yeah. I mean, I need to go sit down and have another beer outside and think a little bit [01:01:00] after that. That, that was, that was an interesting one. Well, Richard, thank you very much for joining us here. This has been, , a great pleasure and I, can't wait to talk to you again in the department. someday

Professor Richard Alley: Welcome forward to it. Thanks so much guys.

Professor Richard Alley: And

Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, it was, yeah. Richard, so nice to meet you. And just like what Jesse said it was, I've been looking forward to this for a long time, so thank you for indulging us. It was a great talk. I appreciate you so much.

Professor Richard Alley: thanks so much guys.

Chris Bolhuis:

Chris Bolhuis: All right, bye.

Jesse Reimink: Bye Richard.

Jesse Reimink: Hey, that's a wrap. You can follow us as usual on all the social medias we're at planet geo cast. Go to our website, WW dot planet. Geo cast.com. There you can follow us. You can listen to our episodes. You can support us. There's a support us page there, and you can find links to all of our social medias. Also send us an email planet geo. gmail.com. We love hearing from you and yeah, I don't know. Just look up Dr. Richard Elley. He's an amazing guy. And I think you'd find value in watching what he says on the internet. I mean, there's loads of [01:02:00] content, like we said earlier,

Jesse Reimink: Chris.

Chris Bolhuis: it's impossible not to find value in Richard alley. So anyway, Hey, share planet geo. Have a great week. Cheers.

Jesse Reimink: Cheers.