Well, I hear that you have an idea for how to potentially stabilize ice sheets.

Mm-hmm.

What is this technology?

How do you implement it?

Tell me everything, 'cause this sounds like Bruce Willis going to an asteroid to divert it to save Earth, right?

It's on that level.

Hopefully not that dramatic in implementation.

So the basic idea is if you're going to raise sea levels really, really quickly, that can really only happen by glaciers flowing very fast, especially the Antarctic glaciers.

These are the ones that we're really worried about.

And Antarctic glaciers are flowing fast because they're sliding along their beds really, really fast.

And if you want to slow down glaciers, you want to increase the friction at the base of the glacier, right?

It's sort of like putting on the brakes in your car.

So wait a minute, let me get this.

So what you're telling me is you've come up with a way to freeze the glacier to its bed.

We are working on ideas to get the glacier to freeze itself to the bed, which is even more interesting, I think.

Brent Minchew, welcome to Particles of Thought.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm excited.

Yeah, man, I am excited because we're gonna get right into it.

So you are a glaciologist, or is it glaciologist?

Oh, glaciologist.

Glaciologist with a joint appointment at both Caltech and MIT.

That's right.

Ah, kind of underachieving there.

Right.

A little bit.

So, you know, normally I start off with an icebreaker, but for you as a glaciologist, you know, let's get right into it, man.

Yeah, yeah.

So what is the state of the world's glaciers today?

Well, they're all melting.

So they're starting to disappear at kind of accelerating rates.

And I spend most of my time sort of thinking about what's going on in West Antarctica in particular.

Very special place.

It's a very special place.

So I understand that there's one glacier in particular that has the nickname the Doomsday Glacier.

That's right.

Is it pronounced Thwaites?

Is that— Thwaites Glacier.

Thwaites Glacier.

What makes it the Doomsday Glacier?

So if we're going to get relatively catastrophic levels of sea level, so upwards around 2 meters or so by the end of the century, so within my daughter's lifetime, a lot of that really rapid rise pretty much has to come from Thwaites.

It's one of the only places that could give us that fast a sea level rise.

And so if we're looking at 2 meters of sea level rise, we are really looking at like southern half of Bangladesh becoming uninhabitable.

We're looking at losing Bangkok, Shanghai, New Orleans, you know, you sort of step around the world.

Let's talk about how big is it, what it is, what makes it so dangerous, and what type of impact it would have if it has some kind of catastrophic outcome?

Absolutely.

So Thwaites is roughly the size of Florida.

So it's a massive piece of ice.

It is one of the fastest changing glaciers in the world right now.

So on net, it's losing about 50 billion tons of ice every year.

So, you know, so it gains about— That's a number.

But—Yeah, yeah.

I don't have a context for understanding that number.

Yeah.

I mean, 50 billion tons is going to be— A lot.

Yeah.

In order, you know, what a car weighs, 2 tons, somewhere around there.

So, you know, 25 billion cars.

Wow.

Okay.

That's context.

Yeah.

Worth of mass loss.

And, you know, its neighbor is losing, you know, a similar amount.

And so all of this kind of put together is enough to start to raise sea levels.

Right now of order a few millimeters per year, which is small.

But its potential for acceleration into the future is higher than any other glacier in the world.

And the reason for that is that Thwaites Glacier is resting on the seafloor.

And so the bed of Thwaites Glacier is roughly 2 kilometers or so below sea level.

And because ice floats, then there are buoyancy-driven feedbacks in this system, positive feedbacks that can cause Thwaites to shed a lot of ice to the ocean relatively quickly.

So you can think of Thwaites Glacier, and basically all glaciers in Antarctica, as something like conveyor belts of ice, right?

Right.

So the reason that they contribute to sea level rise, all the Antarctic glaciers, this is true, the reason they contribute to sea level rise is that they are essentially moving a lot of big ice cubes and dumping them into the ocean, right?

This is their sea level contribution.

Thwaites and the rest of kind of the broader West Antarctic Ice Sheet, of which Thwaites is a part, that's all resting on the seafloor.

Right?

And it's resting on the seafloor just because it's thick enough.

Right, right.

And so as the climate starts to warm— Oh, you said because it floats.

That was it.

That's right.

Yeah.

So as the climate starts to warm, the glaciers start flowing faster.

Okay.

And then when they're flowing faster, they have to thin, right?

Because the snow is still more or less falling at the same rate, right?

So you can think of the thickness of the glacier like the balance of your bank account, right?

And glacier flow's your expenditures, and snowfall's your income.

Got it.

And so your income doesn't necessarily adjust just because you're spending more, right?

And so essentially what's happening as the climate warms is these glaciers are spending more, right?

Which is to say they're transporting more ice cubes and dumping them into the ocean, and so they thin.

And as they thin, then because glacier's resting on the seafloor, so it's largely submerged, as it thins, it peels up a lot of ice off of the base, right?

And it's the connection between the ice and the bed, you think of it like the brake pads on your car, that generates a lot of friction that helps to hold that ice into, you know, the ice sheet itself.

So as it thins, it peels up off the seafloor, which is like losing part of your brake pads, right?

And that causes further acceleration, which causes further thinning, which detaches more ice, and so on and so forth.

So the— it's almost like the glaciers are being lubricated under the bottom.

Definitely.

With water, and less friction.

So they flow out.

That's exactly right.

And so that's both true when they start to float, of course, because the water provides no meaningful resistance to their flow relative to what the bed can provide, right?

And then in the bed itself, you know, the grounded side where the glacier is still resting on the mud and the rocks that are underneath it, there's a whole network of rivers, lakes, and streams and so forth that evolve over time.

We refer to this as the subglacial hydrological system.

I hadn't.

Yeah.

And so— So let me get this right.

Underneath glaciers where they meet the ground, there is a whole system of, a water system that is, it's not subterranean, it's on top of ground, but underneath ice.

Underneath the ice.

How do you call it?

We call it the subglacial hydrological system.

So Antarctica, fun fact about this, Antarctica is both the world's largest desert and the world's largest wetland all at the same time.

And so desert on top in the sense that, its precipitation rates are lower than the Sahara, in most areas, right?

It doesn't receive a lot of snowfall.

It's a big pile of snow that's been compacted into ice just because it doesn't lose ice very quickly.

And so it's able to take a little bit of snowfall and build it up over long periods of time.

And then world's largest wetland in the sense that there's all these active lakes and rivers and streams and so forth that exist underneath the ice sheet.

And so we see lakes fill and we see lakes drain from satellite observations.

And there's life associated with this?

There are, yeah, there's certainly microbial life underneath.

In fact, there's even some macro fauna in some areas, as in like a fish.

You know, people have drilled holes in the ice and gone into certain areas, you know, hundreds of miles from the open ocean and stick cameras down there and a fish swims by.

Wow.

The astrophysicist in me thinks of these ice worlds that have water.

Yeah.

And I'm thinking like, wow, that's another system.

Yeah.

To be interested in another ecosystem.

So when you look at Thwaites in the context of, okay, so you have this big, massive sheet of ice that's sitting on the ocean bottom, it's starting to move faster.

Yeah.

And if it's— so, so a distinction I've heard in the past is that ice in the water does not raise sea levels because it's already in the water.

but ice on land does.

So Thwaites sounds like it's in the water, but it is affecting the flow of glacial ice off the land into the water.

So it's sort of like a valve, or like, how do you think of it?

Yeah, so ice that's floating doesn't contribute anything additional to sea level, right?

And so the floating ice acts as, a buttress —what we call a buttress, where it just sort of signifies the flying buttresses of cathedrals and so forth.

And this symbolism is really important because the floating ice will sometimes provide a little bit of back pressure to help to hold the glaciers to the land.

They slow down glacier flow and so forth.

And then as the warming of the ocean locally comes in and you get these warm deep water and it sort of melting these things, you could think of it like it's eroding the foundation of a buttress on a cathedral, right?

You start to lose this kind of very important force, right?

The flying buttress of a cathedral is not itself holding up the main part of the cathedral, but what it's doing is applying a little bit of force so that the wall stays intact and the wall itself doesn't start to buckle.

And so, as we, you know, as these floating extensions, we call them ice shelves, as they start to thin, both because the atmosphere is warming and the ocean water underneath them is warming because of transport of heat through the ocean.

As those thin, then you lose this resistive force, and so the glaciers start to accelerate.

And it is this acceleration, the increase in the rate of transport of ice from the grounded side into the ocean, that is the sea level signal.

And so all the stuff that's grounded, has some sea level potential just because the fact that it's resting on the ground just means that it has enough mass to overcome buoyancy.

And so then you can pile it up higher and higher and higher.

And so the technical term that we refer to is the, typically the mass above flotation.

That's the sea level signal, right?

I love these phrases, man.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

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This is— might be, you know, not the smartest question I've ever asked, but we always focus on glaciers.

And so my understanding of glaciers, you know, I got it in like the 5th grade or something.

It's just flowing ice.

That's right.

But I imagine there might be some ice that's not flowing around there.

So is it because that glaciers are more of the focus because they're more efficient at transporting water in a frozen or liquid form off the land?

That's exactly right.

So the other is negligible, is that the case?

In Antarctica, it's negligible because Antarctica is still cold for the most part, right?

The atmosphere, is, you know, remains largely below the freezing point.

In Greenland, this is a different story, right?

So roughly half, a little over half of the mass loss from Greenland is just due to the ice melting in place as the atmosphere warms.

And the other half is due to glacier flow.

And Antarctica, it's really all due to glacier flow, which the mass loss is all due to glacier flow.

And then the extreme scenarios of sea level rise that we worry about that are possible, it would be hugely impactful.

That's all related to how fast glaciers flow.

So melting the ice in place is relatively inefficient compared to, you know, taking ice and dumping it into the ocean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So as regards Thwaites Glacier, you know how when it comes to human behavior in the geopolitical context, we have a Doomsday Clock, right?

Does Thwaites have a Doomsday Clock?

And if so, how many hours, minutes, seconds are we away from midnight?

Yeah, that's a good question.

We resisted the temptation to have a doomsday clock for these things.

For the Doomsday Glacier.

We'll call it the Doomsday Glacier, but we'll skip the doomsday clock.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the term Doomsday Glacier is a little bit controversial within scientific communities as to whether or not that's an effective— In for a foot, in for a mile, man.

Go all the way.

Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, the big question, well, you can take, so sea level rise is one of the, you know, most impactful consequences of climate change going forward.

And you can take sea level rise and you can kind of break it into two pieces.

There's a predictable component to sea level rise that is related to how much ocean waters expand, how much, you know, water melts and runs off of Greenland, you know, these kinds of things.

They're relatively predictable.

They're certainly well constrained, you know, so if we knew the temperature trajectories going forward, we would have a really good approximation of how much sea level we would get from that.

And even within reasonable warming scenarios, we can still constrain those reasonably well.

West Antarctica and Thwaites in particular, this is the wild card, right?

How fast will Thwaites lose ice in the coming decades is sort of the question for, it is literally the trillion-dollar question for thinking about impacts on coastal communities and so forth around the world.

And we have a wide range of possible scenarios that sort of defines our uncertainty.

Our uncertainty is really defined as somewhere between, you know, half a meter or 50 centimeters and upwards around meter-and-a-half or so.

There's a 1 meter— Over a timescale of?

In this century.

Of the 2100s.

That's right.

What are we in?

The 21st century.

Up to 2100.

So 21st century sea level rise.

Yeah, gotcha.

Or as I think about it, in my daughter's lifetime.

Right.

And so that meter of uncertainty, which is, you know, untenable from a planning perspective.

That is basically all due to the fate of Thwaites Glacier and the broader West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

When I say untenable from a planning perspective, again, that meter of uncertainty is, you know, hundreds of millions of homes in danger, right?

It is, you know, tens of trillions of dollars worth of per year of potential flood damages if we don't adapt.

So from a coastal planning perspective, you know, there's kind of, there's a number of scenarios, obviously, they can play through that are very much dependent on geography and so forth.

You know, do you build sea walls?

Do you build, you know, green infrastructure like mangroves and so forth?

Or do you move people?

And if you want to move a large number of people, that's something that you ideally need to plan ahead for, 'cause you don't want 100 million people in an unplanned retreat.

Right.

But if you're gonna ask people to get up and leave their homes, in many cases their ancestral homelands and this kind of thing, you need to really know what you're talking about, 'cause it would also be disastrous to move populations and then that be a false alarm.

Yeah.

Right?

And so we are trapped in this very challenging situation where you don't want to cry wolf.

But you also don't want to pretend things are just going to be okay.

You don't want to give into magical thinking.

And so within the scientific community, myself and a lot of others, we work very hard to try to understand which of these outcomes is more likely.

And again, just to simplify it.

Down, simplify a complicated question down to a simple one.

1 meter or 2 meters?

What's our, you know, within the lifetime of today's children, within my daughter's lifetime, right?

That's the question.

Yeah.

And we would like to be able to have some sense of certainty which one of those outcomes is more likely.

How do you plan around it and so forth?

And what we know from the data is that 2 meters is entirely possible, and it would be disastrous.

And so right now you're kind of in this scenario where you have to plan for what we might assume— and this is really an assumption at this point— what we might assume is a low probability, high impact outcome that you still need to plan for.

You know, if you were to— if the doctor were to tell you that, you know, your child had a 10% chance of having a deadly but preventable disease.

Right.

When you hear that information, I think most of us, certainly I would make it my mission in life to figure out, you know, how to drive that probability down to zero.

Right.

Right.

And so, you know, when we think about sea level rise, that is essentially the position that we are in.

And so, you know, we obviously, we work with the best that we have, although there are real challenges in actually addressing this question in the sense that the field doesn't have a lot of funding.

Did you know that there's no persistent monitoring going on in West Antarctica?

Oh, boy.

We get satellite imagery, and we get all these images as we go over, but we don't have any persistent measurements of how much heat the ocean is delivering to the glaciers, which is really important for how they change.

We don't have any persistent monitoring of, you know, seismicity at the bed, which tells us about how the glacier is connected to the bed, and it tells us how all those things are changing.

We don't have persistent monitoring of, you know, how the subglacial hydrological system, the rivers, lakes, and streams underneath the glacier evolve over time.

We just have a lot of, unknowns to deal with.

How good is that data?

So even if you don't have data of the things that impact the melting, you do have data on the melting, right?

That's right.

So what is the status of measurement and the story it tells us?

Yeah, so we have several independent lines of data that all lead to the kind of the same conclusion.

So, you know, one of the technologies that we have available to us is the ability to weigh the ice sheets.

For example.

We can weigh the ice sheets from satellites.

And so there's a, you know, a great pair of satellites that are operating right now that are— that NASA operates called GRACE, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, but GRACE.

And then there's a follow-on called GRACE Follow-On, another pair.

And these are really fascinating satellites.

They're flying around the Earth and they're trailing one another.

And what happens whenever you have some sort of a change in gravity, change in density, or this kind of thing, right?

Force of gravity drops off as 1 over r squared.

Whenever you have these satellites coming forward, the leading satellite, for example, if I were to fill up this mug with water, the leading satellite were to come over and it would feel that effect before the trailing satellite would.

And so they would, they would get a little bit further apart as the leading one accelerates a bit.

And then of course, as they pass over and they're here, then this one is being pulled backwards a little bit while this one is accelerating.

And so that gap closes.

Wow.

And then as they go forward, this one gets pulled back.

So they kind of have this accordion effect.

And so between these two satellites, we measure very, very precisely the distance between these two satellites.

And from that, you can back out changes in mass— Wow.

—that are taking place.

And so we can effectively weigh the ice sheets from satellites.

We also have satellites with, you know, lasers on them that are shining down, and we're measuring very precisely the the elevation of the surface of the glacier.

And so as a glacier loses ice, as we were talking about before, its, you know, its account balance or its thickness decreases.

And so over short periods of time, the, you know, the bed doesn't really change its vertical position, but the elevation goes down.

And then finally, we can also, from satellites as well, we can measure very precisely how fast the glaciers are flowing.

And how much they're accelerating.

Do you have to put some markers on there, or?

We don't have to because there are already markers on the surface.

Okay.

And so this is actually the technology that got me into being a scientist.

So there's a tech— because I used to be an aerospace engineer, right?

And so I got really excited about this technology.

So one of the things that we use now, it's called interferometric synthetic aperture radar.

And that's a big mouthful.

All it really means is that we fly radar over and we're effectively scanning the surface like a document scanner works.

And then the interferometry part just means that we can measure the slight displacement in the wavelengths of the radar as it goes down.

Right?

Right.

So just like people use interferometers to measure gravitational waves and so forth, it's the exact same idea.

So, you know, we're able to make measurements down to millimeter-scale precision from orbit.

This is the thing that got me really excited, that you could measure ground motion from orbit down to millimeter-scale precision.

And when I found out about that, when I was studying aerospace engineering, I just thought, I have to know more about that.

Yeah.

And that changed my trajectory.

But so we do this and we're able to, you know, we collect a decent amount of radar data as well as we have cameras in space.

And we can do the same kind of thing with cameras.

This is a slightly different approach.

But same basic idea.

And so we're able to measure very precisely how fast the glaciers are flowing and more importantly, how much they're accelerating.

And so— Are they accelerating?

They are indeed.

Yeah.

And so—Let me just tell you something.

We thought the universe was decelerating, but when we went to measure it, it turned out it was accelerating.

That's right.

Which is crazy.

People are still trying to figure that one out.

So you accept, you expected it to be accelerating and it it is measured to be accelerating.

That's right.

It is both accelerating and it is thinning and it is losing mass.

So these three independent lines of measurement are all coming together and they're telling us a consistent— So speaking of that, do you have records of Thwaites evolving and responding to climactic changes?

Yes.

In the past?

Is that— Yeah, it's relatively short, but we have about 20 years of decent observations from satellites.

I say it's relatively short because 20 years is is not long for an ice sheet response time.

Geologic time scales, yeah.

You know, it would be great, of course, to have 100 years of observations, but we don't.

And so back to this— So how responsive is the glacier to these changes, I guess?

Far more responsive than we used to believe.

Oh, I see.

So if you go and you read the first IPCC report from like the mid-'90s, somewhere around in there, it has the phrase that ice sheets do not respond over timescales shorter than 10,000 years, which turns out to be wrong.

Sounds like it's wrong by orders of magnitude.

Many orders of magnitude wrong.

So the thing I love about talking to you is because we're not just talking about things that we can't do anything about necessarily.

The climate change is one thing, the response of the planet and people to that change is a separate matter.

That's right.

And so I have, I have an understanding that you have thought of some ways in which we might be able to have some impact on the way the story of the ice sheet evolves into the future.

That's right, yeah, our thinking is evolving from just asking the question of how bad might things be to the question of how good can they be.

Well, I hear that you have an idea for how to potentially stabilize ice sheets.

Mm-hmm.

What is this technology?

How do you implement it?

Tell me everything.

Yeah.

'Cause this sounds like Bruce Willis going to an asteroid to divert it to save Earth, right?

It's on that level.

Right, yeah, but hopefully not that dramatic in implementation.

So the basic idea, again, is if you're going to raise sea levels really, really quickly, that can really only happen by glaciers flowing very fast.

And especially the Antarctic glaciers.

These are the ones that we're really worried about.

And Antarctic glaciers are flowing fast because they're sliding along their beds really, really fast.

And so if you want to, you know, slow down rates of sea level rise and so forth, or, you know, avoid the worst case scenario, you want to slow down glaciers.

And if you want to slow down glaciers, you want to increase the friction at the base of the glacier, right?

It's sort of like putting on the brakes in your car.

And so there's a few ways of doing this, but I think important to sort of start off this idea that nature provides a blueprint for this.

So it turns out that glaciers in the neighborhood of Thwaites, like glaciers that are in West Antarctica, so they exist at the scales and in the locations that matter, they shut themselves down, they stop flowing as part of the natural process.

And they do this, um, through basically some feedback loops that exist at the bottom of the glacier.

So there's some thermodynamic feedback loops, and all that means is that glaciers in Antarctica are flowing fast because they're flowing fast.

And that means essentially that they are flowing fast because they're lubricated by water at their bed.

And if you want water at the bed of a glacier, you need to have a heat source.

And the important heat source, uh, in this particular case is the frictional heat.

So just like when you rub your hands together, you generate heat.

Glaciers that are sliding along their bed are generating a little bit of heat through this resistance.

You know what this reminds me of?

I remember seeing stories about why is ice slippery, and one idea was that because you apply pressure—Oh, yeah.

—that creates some microscopic melting that makes it slippery.

So glaciers are definitely applying pressure.

That's right.

To the ground.

So they are riding this effect to some degree?

Is that—To some extent, yeah.

So if you want a fun word for this, this is called regelation.

Regelation!

People should look it up.

That was a term that was coined by Michael Faraday.

No way!

The famous 19th century physicist.

The Michael Faraday.

Yeah, that's right.

It actually makes a really fun experiment that people can do at home.

If you take a block of ice, fill a Tupperware container, with water, stick it in your freezer overnight, you get a nice block of ice.

And then you take a metal wire, and it's more fun if you do this with two different types of metal.

So let's say copper and steel wire, just a wire that you get from the hardware store.

It doesn't need to be anything special.

And you hang a weight, you wrap the wire around the ice and you hang a weight from that.

Right.

What happens is that the wire moves through the ice, but it doesn't cut through the ice like a wire cheese cutter.

It actually moves through the ice as if it was frozen into the ice.

And that's the pressure melting condition that you were talking about before.

So it melts, it freezes above it?

Yeah, because ice expands whenever it freezes, it means that whenever you put it under pressure, you decrease the melting temperature.

Oh.

Right?

This you have to do to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, right?

And so what that means is that when a glacier is flowing along or when the wire is, is experiencing weight, it's being pulled down, then on the upstream side of an obstacle in a glacier or the bottom side of the wire that you're hanging a weight from, the pressure there is higher than in any other area.

Yeah.

And so if your ice is already close enough to the melting temperature, then that addition of pressure actually moves the melting temperature to the temperature of the ice.

Wow.

And so that causes the ice to melt.

The water flows around your obstacle or your wire, and then it gets to lower pressure states, and then it has to refreeze once it hits this state.

And then that releases, you know, whenever you, whenever you melt and you change a phase from solid to liquid, you have to absorb latent heat, right?

That's the energy that is required to move from solid to liquid.

And so you release that latent heat and it flows through your obstacle, and that completes the cycle.

It closes the energy conservation.

And so that is happening at the beds of glaciers.

So that process, your regelation, is present at the base of the glacier, but what we're really talking about is the frictional heat that's just caused by the sliding, right?

That additional heat is melting enough water to provide lubricant that allows the glacier to continue to flow fast.

And what's really interesting about this system is that the amount of heat that you get from this frictional heating is just the product of, so you just take the drag at the base of the glacier, so how much resist, the force of resistance at the base of the glacier, and you multiply that by the speed of the sliding.

And that's what gives you your heat.

Now, the speed of the glacier is very much related to that resistive force, the frictional force that's slowing it down, right?

So if I, you know, you could think of this like, like the brakes on a bicycle or the brakes on your car or something like that.

If I increase the friction, I stop the flow.

Right.

And so if that happens, because you're multiplying the two together, the flow, the speed of sliding becomes zero, then you have zero heating.

Alternatively, you could perfectly lubricate the base so you have no resistance to flow and the flow's going along.

You similarly have zero heat.

And in between, you generate heat.

Right?

Just like the brakes in your car.

And so because you're zero at both ends and you're nonzero in between, that means there has to be a maximum.

Right.

And so there has to be a point at which if I increase friction, then I start to decrease heating as you go forward.

Yeah.

And in the glacier, if I increase friction and I decrease heating, I reduce the lubricant.

Right.

Which increases friction more, which reduces heating more, and so on and so forth.

All the while, while this is happening, while this heating is happening at the base of the glacier, the surface is still very cold.

Surface of the glacier, -20, -30 degrees Celsius.

That's like -4 to -22 Fahrenheit, to do the quick conversion.

And so heat is basically the cold surface is trying to cool the bed.

So heat is moving away from the bed.

So would this be, so the base will be at the actual melting temperature, 0°C.

And at the top it's like— Yeah, like -20°C.

-20°C.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so you're always, the surface is always trying to cool the bed and the cold air is taking all that heat away.

Right.

And so if we just reduce the rate of heating at the bed, then you start to move toward a freeze-on state.

Right?

And so as glaciers start to freeze themselves to the bed, that is, they're essentially gripping their bed more and more that causes them to slow down.

And the slower they go, the less heat that they generate.

And so therefore, the slower they go and so on and so forth.

And what the observations tell us, the natural analogs, they take it all the way to zero.

They go all the way down.

What's really important about this is, and this is a little bit of an irony of the story of the field of glaciology, in the mid-1990s, people were convinced that glaciers were frozen to their bed and therefore, by definition, they were stable over thousands of years.

And this is a particular mechanism that nature exhibits that happens this, this same way.

So the glaciers start to freeze themselves to the bed, and that causes them to become stable.

And what's really interesting about this is if you could nudge a glacier into this state, it would stay stable for centuries.

So wait a minute, let me get this.

So what you're telling me is you've come up with a way to freeze the glacier to its bed.

We are working on ideas to get the glacier to freeze itself to the bed, which is even more interesting, I think.

To get the glacier to freeze itself.

Freeze itself, yeah.

So if we tried to freeze a glacier to its bed, that would require a lot of energy.

Yeah, absolutely.

That would be a very, very hard thing to do.

But if we can nudge the glacier into a state where it freezes itself to the bed by slowing it down, reducing the heating, allowing the cold surface to move heat away from the bed, then we could actually work at manageable scales.

Logistical challenge, spatial scales, time scales.

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

Like, a glacier is big.

For sure.

And so manipulating it to get it to do that is done how?

Yeah, so there's a few kind of buckets of ideas.

Again, really emphasize the fact that these ideas would work in relatively small areas.

And so, you know, Thwaites Glacier is about the size of Florida.

We're talking about working in an area that's smaller than Tampa, you know, for example, to give you a sense of scale.

So is it the case that you could do that at several strategic locations?

Absolutely.

Okay.

So you just do it at several relatively strategic locations.

So how would you get a glacier to freeze itself to the bed?

Right.

So essentially two buckets of ideas.

Both of them involve drilling from the surface to the bed, which, you know, as glaciologists, we've done for a long time.

It's relatively straightforward.

It's a very long, water hose and a hot water heater, right?

That'll get you to the bed of the glacier.

How long does that take?

Oh, well, for something as thick as Thwaites Glacier, you could do it in 24 to 48 hours with a skilled crew.

That's fast.

It is fast.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so once you have drilled down to the bed, you have kind of two options of things to do.

You can either pump water around— water is our lubricant, right?

If we change our lubricant, then we start to slow down the glaciers or my personal favorite, you cool the bed.

And so you would cool— How big of a diameter of the hole that you drill?

It's typically going to be of order coffee can, you know, or, you know, 30 centimeters is the typical diameter of a hole that you drill with hot water.

So about a foot.

About a foot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that would be plenty to do what we need to do.

So yeah, so either, you know, pump water around to change the lubricant directly.

Which is, you know, would have an effect, but it's very power intensive 'cause you need to pump water.

And so you need to show up with that energy.

There's no, you know, Thwaites Glacier is 800 miles from the nearest outlet.

Right.

And so, you know, whatever energy you're going to need, you have to bring it with you.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so energy becomes this big bottleneck.

Always.

Yeah, absolutely, always.

And so my personal favorite approach to this is using passive heat pumps.

So we're gonna cool down the bed using passive heat pumps.

These things are called thermosiphons.

They have existed for decades.

People use them in the Arctic quite regularly to stabilize the foundations of buildings, runways, roads, this kind of thing.

Oh, so not only is it a technology that exists, I know about it in home heating, cooling, but you're saying it's used for this very purpose.

Yeah.

I mean, it's never been used for quite such a big glacier, but, you know, for purposes that are very close to it.

And that's one of the nice things about the intervention ideas that we're working on, of course, is that as myself and my colleagues that work on this, we all have some backgrounds in engineering.

And so we also understand that you're almost always better off trying to take a technology that is already proven off the shelf and apply it to something than to try to to develop new technology to do things.

And so everything that we would do for these intervention ideas that we're describing could be done with existing technology.

Yeah.

And in this case, the thermosiphon.

So tell the audience what that is.

It has a cool name.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is a good name, right?

So thermo, of course, for heat, and then siphon, literally a siphon.

You know, you're moving fluid around.

In this case, you're driving convection of fluid.

And so essentially what this looks like, you drill your hole from the surface of the glacier to the bed of the glacier, and you install a flexible tube that goes down to close to the bed.

It doesn't touch the bed of the glacier.

You want to keep it off a little bit because there's sliding and shearing and stuff that will tear up your tube, right?

But if we make our tube flexible and we keep it off of the bed, which is something that we're perfectly capable of doing, then everything kind of, you know, the ice starts to freeze in around this tube.

And so in this tube, we would have about 100 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is a good working fluid.

So the air conditioner— Liquid carbon dioxide?

Yeah.

So it's going to be liquid under the right pressures.

Got it.

Right.

And so for all these things, so similar to, you know, in your house, your air conditioner, your heat pump, it's going to use some coolant.

There's going to be some working fluid.

This uses the same exact concepts.

It's just that under the temperatures and pressures that we're talking about, carbon dioxide is a better working fluid than refrigerant that's used in your home.

And so 100 pounds of carbon dioxide pressurized to about 400 PSI, that's like high end of what an air compressor at Home Depot can do for you.

And under those pressures, the carbon dioxide is a liquid at the base of this tube.

And so the bottom of a glacier is much warmer than its surface.

So roughly 0 °C at the bed of the glacier, roughly -20 °C at the surface of the glacier.

And so the heat comes in and it boils the carbon dioxide.

And so the carbon dioxide vapor starts to rise through buoyancy within this tube.

And then it ultimately starts to interact with the cold tube that's exposed to the atmosphere, the cold ice above.

And so that causes it to recondense.

And when it recondenses, it releases that heat that it absorbed from the bed.

It goes out into the atmosphere and so forth, like roughly the same amount of heat that's coming out the Earth all the time, so minor thing for the atmosphere.

It's like you're making a base sweat.

That's exactly right.

And then that CO2 rains back down to the bottom, and then that process repeats itself.

No additional energy input required.

It's like a heat elevator, right, from the base to the top.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But the temperatures in the glacier are enough to drive this process on their own, so we don't need to power it.

Yeah.

It has no moving parts.

—no additional energy input.

So you put this thing in the glacier, and it operates for a while.

Our estimates right now from the models that we've worked on suggest, you know, minimum time to failure of about 30 years, somewhere around in there.

And so this tube continues to cool the glacier for about 30 years.

And back to the natural analogs, the observations tell us that that's roughly the timescale at which this— stabilization process, this freezing of a glacier to its bed, plays out.

Oh, so the time this thing operates is about the amount of time it would take to freeze that location to the bed.

That's right.

Wow.

So it should survive for as long as we need it to survive to have the effect that we need.

And again, once this freeze-on process starts to take hold in the glacier itself, the glacier will just continue this process on its own.

We don't need to continue.

So when you talk about a glacier like Thwaites and, you know, putting in these thermal siphons, are there particular sweet spots that are, uh, will be more effective for, you know, what you're trying to do?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So we're working on this.

There's kind of two extreme cases that you would work on.

One would be upstream where the maximum amount of heat is being generated.

And supplying meltwater to downstream.

And the other one would be downstream where we have the maximum rates of freeze-on.

So trying to encourage that freeze-on in that area.

Freeze-on is?

The rate of freezing at the base of the glacier.

Oh, okay.

So as you go more downstream, it's a faster rate of freezing at the base?

Sometimes, yeah.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah.

I thought that would be where it's warmest because that's where it's interfacing the ocean.

It's true, but you also have the the most lubrication down there, and therefore your rate of frictional heating is lower.

Less heating.

That's right.

Right, got it, excellent.

Is there a natural precedent to this approach?

Absolutely, yeah.

So the classic example of this is what's known as Kamb Ice Stream.

Kamb.

Kamb is named for Barclay Kamb, who's a professor at Caltech.

Oh, I was thinking it was Killa Cam.

No.

From Dipset.

No, no, it's named for scientists.

Oh, okay.

In this area.

And so Kamb Ice Stream is this, is this actually beautiful example of a natural experiment that we have playing out for all of this.

And so there's this large area of Antarctica, an ice shelf, the floating extension that's known as the Ross Ice Shelf.

It's about the size of Texas.

Wow.

Right?

That's insane.

Yeah.

Texas-sized slab of ice, okay.

Floating on the ocean.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

So flowing into Ross Ice Shelf and from the east side of it, there's this line of glaciers going from south to north.

Kamb Ice Stream sits in the middle of this group of glaciers.

So it's a glacier that was flowing at least a meter per day.

Wow.

Up to a few hundred years ago.

And about roughly 200 years ago, it started to freeze itself.

To the bed in this process that we're talking about.

And over the course of just a few decades, it managed to completely stagnate.

So Kamb Ice Stream is really no longer flowing.

It's moving at just a few centimeters per year, just due to the viscous flow, the honey-like properties of the ice, right?

That's all that's happening.

It's not sliding along its bed anymore.

So how, you know, this isn't fluid mechanics exactly, Is it?

Like, what is the science of this stuff?

Because, you know, ice motion.

Yeah, well, it's definitely an application of fluid dynamics.

It is?

Yeah, so the viscous flow— A compressible fluid though, right?

Incompressible.

Wait, ice is incompressible?

To a very good approximation, we can treat ice as incompressible, which simplifies things quite a bit, right?

Okay, yeah, absolutely.

And so then, you know, we can narrow everything down to, yep, a system of 5 coupled partial differential equations, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, you know how to solve this.

That's hard.

Yeah.

It's hard, but it's not impossible.

It's not impossible.

Absolutely not.

Right.

Yeah.

One of the nice things actually is that glaciers are, have a very high viscosity and they move very slow.

Yeah.

And what that means is then we can treat them differently than we have to treat the atmosphere or the ocean, right?

Which has a very low viscosity and moves very fast.

And under those conditions you get turbulence.

Right, right.

You get chaos.

Yeah.

You have a Reynolds number.

You have a Reynolds number.

Whereas the Reynolds number in glaciers is really, really small.

Yeah.

And so we can treat the flow as laminar.

And what that means for the audience is that the flow lines, you know, a parcel of ice that's flowing next to a parcel of ice will just continue flowing next to it.

They're not gonna mix in together.

They're not gonna do any of these crazy things.

There's no little whirlpools of ice.

That's right.

That's right.

So from a fluid dynamics perspective, most of the equations are quite manageable.

You get into these complexities because the viscosity is quite complex.

Yeah.

And then you also have glaciers also move you into solid mechanics.

So we've seen pictures of calving fronts of glaciers, right?

Icebergs that break off.

You have all these different bits.

So that's the brittle properties of ice that are taking place.

And so one of the fascinating things about ice, of course, is this question of the, when is it flowing as a viscous fluid and when is it breaking like a brittle solid?

And how do you do that transit?

How does the material do that transition between these two things?

That sounds tough.

I mean, it is absolutely fascinating.

Yeah.

Using the standard scientific euphemism, fascinating means hard.

Exactly, exactly.

And just like that other standard euphemism, It is trivial to show that, which means it's virtually impossible to show that.

That's right.

So— It can be shown.

It can be shown.

Exactly.

With enough computational power.

That's right.

So these thermosiphons.

So how many would you need to do your first prototype test area?

Oh, the first prototype test would be, you know— Not one.

Don't tell me one.

You want an area to freeze, right?

Yeah.

I mean, obviously we would start with one.

And so one of the, so I also co-founded and I serve as chief scientist of a nonprofit called Arête Glacier Initiative that we put together precisely to start to answer some of these questions and to, you know, raise philanthropic funds to fund research and so forth.

And so the first grant that we issued from Arête Glacier Initiative was to build an artificial glacier in the laboratory that allows us to test these kinds of things.

So artificial glaciers are great, right?

They're really useful.

Anytime that you can do something in the laboratory that really helps you understand.

What's the scale of an artificial glacier?

So in this particular case, it's roughly the size of a room, the whole thing, a small bedroom.

So you just order a big block of ice and put it into a press over some material under the bottom?

Yeah.

Basically.

Although you don't need to order the ice, you just freeze it in place.

But—That sounds expensive.

Like the, you know, a big volume of ice is a lot of energy to suck out, a lot of heat to suck out of that ice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, but it's manageable, you know, it's a, you know, much smaller amount of ice than like a restaurant is going to produce on a daily basis.

So it's not too bad.

Yeah.

This whole machine, it's basically just a big drum, 60 centimeters in diameter.

In this particular case.

And it's a donut, so it's hollow in the middle and you have this kind of outer edge.

And this particular one is being built in Wisconsin.

And so the nice thing about Wisconsin is that dirt that looks a lot like the dirt at the base of West Antarctica is just right outside your door.

So essentially you just go out there and you scoop up some dirt that's just outside.

You bring it in and you fill it into this thing and then you fill it full of water and you let it sit for a few days in a walk-in freezer.

And then you have this drum with some, with some wet dirt and a frozen block on the top of it.

And then you do exactly what you said.

You put, you put this gear on top that has some teeth on it and you pull it down real hard with a hydraulic ram to simulate a mile of ice that's sitting overhead.

And then you drive it in a circle.

So you just go around in the circle and you drive it and then you can, you can really look very closely at what's happening at the bed of a glacier, how these slide-on processes happen and so forth.

So there's one of these in the world right now, and we funded the second one.

Oh, wow.

That will allow us to drain water out, to cool down the bed, to sort of test these things in the laboratory.

So rapid prototype and testing in the laboratory, which also, important to point out, helps us to understand the glacier as it naturally is as well, right?

So what we learn to better understand these interventions will also help us understand how fast sea levels are going to rise so that we can help coastal communities around the world plan.

So what you learned from the Ross Ice Shelf is that by being strategic in where you pin this thing down, you could have a big effect at slowing its rate of progression.

And so by putting these thermosiphons in proper locations, over a time period of 2 or 3 decades, you could potentially freeze the bottom such that what type of— do you think get it to zero or just like remove a lot of the velocity that it has?

So eventually, in theory, you could get the rate of sliding, how fast the glacier's sliding along the mud and spit.

Yeah, the slide.

You could set that to something close to zero.

That's what the natural analogs tell us.

Okay.

You know, how long it would take to get there for Thwaites Glacier as opposed to the other ones is still an open question that we're working on, but a few decades.

But I think that, you know, we don't want to necessarily define success as zero.

Right, absolutely not.

Right, slowing things down, which would have the effect of reducing the sensitivity of the ice sheet to to further warming, right?

So warming is still going to continue no matter what we do.

But the better that we can, the more resilient we can make the ice sheet.

Right.

To that warming, then the better able we are to keep it.

And this is also one of those situations where the interest of the natural environment, which is to say maintaining the ice sheet, keeping the ice sheet where it is, is also in the best interest of the coastal communities around the world.

Right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because if the ice leaves the ice sheet, it's going to go as water to coastal communities around the world.

So do you have like a 5, 10, 20-year plan?

Absolutely.

Oh, nice.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we have all these things laid out.

So our current plan is it'll take roughly 10 years or so to do the research and development to get to the point where we have a detailed plan for a full-scale deployment.

For those who speak NASA's technology readiness levels— Yeah.

TRL.

It would be TRL 8.

Okay.

So 10 years to TRL 8 at our current path.

There are, of course, ways to accelerate this, but that's our current kind of thinking.

And then TRL 9, the actual deployment, could play out, given our current understanding, over roughly 10 years or so.

And then the effects would be felt within the first few years of the start of that deployment.

And so, you know, we could start seeing the effects of this and start understanding whether or not we're really stabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Thwaites Glacier in particular by, you know, mid-century, 2050.

Do you have that amount of time?

We do, actually.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the mass loss from West Antarctica out to sort of the middle of the century for the next 25 years or so is gonna look like approximately like an extrapolation of the current trends.

And so even if you extrapolate those current trends, you're still on the relatively flat part of the exponential.

Okay.

You don't really hit the exponential acceleration until the second half of the 20th— 21st century.

I feel like the last decade has been a lot of "these effects are happening faster than we anticipated," right?

That is true.

So how do you know that, you know, there's like, there's some unknown parameters that you're, that could affect things?

So, well, a couple of things.

First, we don't know for sure, but what we do understand about the system is some characteristic timescales of the response.

Right.

So ice is very viscous, for example, and viscosity has a timescale associated with it.

And so there's there's going to be some response timescale based on that.

There's going to be a timescale of basically how long it takes to move, you know, essentially an ice cube from upstream to the ocean.

Right.

That's going to have some timescale that's based on the geometry.

Well, I guess the question is, are there parameters surrounding it, environmental parameters that are changing?

Right.

So the ice viscosity is what it is.

Right.

But the environment is changing all around The atmosphere is changing, the ground is changing, the ocean is changing.

Yeah.

Could those changes modify those characteristic timescales in a meaningful way?

They're not going to change those timescales in a meaningful way because at least those effects are bounded.

So, you know, under any reasonable warming trajectory going forward, even under the extreme scenarios, West Antarctica still stays pretty cold.

Okay.

If West Antarctica gets to the point where it starts looking like Greenland, where it's melting everywhere, we have big problems, right?

That's quite a bit more warming than we anticipate in the 21st century.

Same thing with the ocean.

The ocean is starting to— basically, the way the winds change around Antarctica, it's moving warm, deep ocean water and bringing it into contact with the ice sheet.

But there's a bound on that.

Okay.

So in the actual physical, if I go step back a bit, in the actual physical implementation, you essentially have a tube from the surface down to near the base.

That's right.

And I think I heard you say that this ice is something like 2 kilometers thick?

At the thickest part that we'd work in.

The thickest part.

It's about 2 kilometers thick.

So, and we mentioned that there's differential flow rates from top to bottom.

And you also mentioned you can't get to the very bottom because there's shearing.

That's right.

So I imagine you need some amount of clearance because it could erode away and what wasn't the bottom is now the bottom.

That's right.

Yeah.

And then, you know, does it have to be flexible?

Like, tell me, like, how long are these tubes?

Tell me more about the tubes.

Yeah, that's a very astute question.

And so definitely you would want to put them off of the bed so that you don't melt off the bottom and they end up dragging on the bed.

That's a first failure mode that you want to avoid.

And that sort of actually comes out of the efficiencies of the system as well.

So there's a trade-off between how far you are off the bed, your area of influence of cooling, right?

You can think about the cooling as radiating out like a cone.

The higher you are, the larger the radius of that effect, but the longer the time it takes to have the effect.

And so there's a trade-off in terms of getting it at the right level.

And so the right level is probably of the order of kind of like 10 meters or so, somewhere around in there.

That's what our modeling works out.

And at 10 meters off the bed, we're not going to melt away and then end up dragging the bed.

Okay.

And then within the ice itself, so as you start to— as the glacier starts to freeze to the bed, as it starts to have the effect, it starts to grip the bed even more, which causes a little more shearing within the column of the ice.

And so that's why you want to have some flexible tubing that could deal with that shearing.

Over at least the timescale that is relevant for this problem.

You know, we want these things to last 20 to 30 years, right?

And so you just build this expectation of what that shearing is into the design.

Whenever you drill your first few holes in the area to understand, you put sensors in that.

And so you start to get a sense of what that tilting is.

What it's doing now.

—And so forth.

And so do you have to replenish the carbon dioxide from time to time?

Nope.

Ideally, they're zero maintenance.

Oh, wow.

Just like in your refrigerator at home or, you know, the air conditioner in your house or whatever the case may be.

When it's functioning correctly, you never need to replenish the fluid.

That's right.

All you're doing is you're just changing it from, in our case, you know, from a liquid to a gas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you're moving the gas and you're turning it back into a liquid.

Right.

And fluids can do this indefinitely.

Right.

Right.

The fluid itself loses nothing in this phase change process.

So as long as the tube's not leaking, we're good to go.

Like the idea of drilling a foot-wide hole into, you know, a kilometer down or something.

Right.

I mean, that's not big enough to fall in, but you could drop your cell phone in there.

You certainly could.

Yeah.

Have people done stuff like that?

Oh, you know, they have.

Wedding rings?

Like— Oh, all matter of things.

There's some very interesting groups around the world that do glacier archaeology, right, effectively, because people from time immemorial have dropped arrows or they've dropped shoes, or in some cases, you know, travelers across the glacier didn't make it themselves.

And so people find all of these.

But is that kind of dangerous?

Like if you're at the calving end of a glacier?

I mean, is that how you do it?

You go to like the the end of the glacier and say, okay, what do we have here?

Well, we would love to be able to go to the end of the glacier, but that is in general entirely too dangerous.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right, you know, the crevasses will swallow you up.

You can go in from the ship, but you know, similar, if a big iceberg breaks off.

You know, the icebergs that calve off of places like Thwaites are the size of small cities.

Oh boy.

You know, I mean, they're big honking things, and then there are smaller icebergs that break off.

So people do try to get as close as they can.

And a few places, some places are safer than others.

But as a general rule, at least for like thermosiphons, we would operate upstream.

That's right.

So I saw something earlier this year where there were these containers that were on a slab of ice that broke off from Antarctica.

They were waiting to pick up the trash or something along those lines.

Yeah.

How often does something like that happen?

You unload your truck and then the iceberg breaks off.

Yeah.

Well, in our case, it wouldn't happen because we'd be far enough inland that we wouldn't need to worry about that.

But it does happen.

So actually, when I was a postdoc at the British Antarctic Survey, there was this incident where one of the main research stations known as Halley Research Station was on one of the floating ice shelves in Antarctica that's called the Brunt Ice Shelf.

And ice shelves are really interesting.

You know, part of the reason why they're interesting is that they have these kind of full-thickness fractures that propagate across the ice shelf.

And there was this fracture that had been sitting there doing nothing particularly interesting since the 1970s.

And then, you know, just before I showed up as a postdoc at the British Antarctic Survey, this fracture started propagating again.

And its most probable line of propagation would cut between the base and the mainland.

Oh, geez.

So the base would have ended up on an iceberg floating away in the ocean.

And obviously that's not the preferred configuration for a research station.

And so they spent a lot of logistical support that year to go down and tow their research station to closer to the ice shelf.

But then, you know, what was one of the things that ended up being really fascinating about this from a human interest side, because nobody got hurt, They docked in this area and people moved across the ice and then a huge fracture within about, I think, a week or so after they moved people across, this huge fracture just tore through that part of the ice shelf.

So a fracture that wasn't there showed up the next day.

It was 70 kilometers long and, you know, 200 meters wide, you know, 300 meters thick of ice.

Geez.

Enormous energy release whenever this fracture went.

So—Man.

Yeah, that is something.

I remember that video that went viral many years ago where it was just like ice shelf breaking and just rolling over.

Oh yeah.

Described it like the size of Manhattan or something.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

When you, when you put Manhattan's one of our, one of our usual sort of length scales, you can put it on a map.

It's very handy.

Yeah.

Everybody's walked down the street of Manhattan and felt how big it feels.

And then you put that on a map against some of these icebergs.

And it's tiny.

Wow.

You know, some of the icebergs that are coming off this thing, you could fit 10 Manhattans on comfortably.

Geez, man.

Well, you know what?

I'm glad you brought up your postdoc experience because, you know, one of the things that happens when you talk to scientists, people think you were born a scientist.

You know, you've been a scientist your whole life.

That's right.

Yeah.

You know, but I love to get into people's lives a little bit.

Are you okay talking about your pathway from?

Absolutely, happy to.

From the womb to the university.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

First they cut your umbilical cord.

Let's start there.

And my mom might like us to skip ahead, a few years.

Let's start when you're 4.

Yeah, so I was born, um, southeast of Houston, so I was born in Pasadena, Texas.

Yeah, yeah.

Again, endless source of confusion now that I work in Pasadena, California.

Very different Pasadena.

Very different.

So how were things in East Texas?

You know, they were good.

It was a good way to grow up.

You know, I sort of grew up, you know, working class on both sides of my family.

On my mom's side, you know, my grandfather on my mom's side worked at chemical refineries.

So tell me this then, did you have scientific experiences as a kid at all?

Or, because you know, working to fix everything around your house, type of thing you have to do is real engineering experience.

That's right.

I would say, right?

Yeah.

Did you have any scientific like influences or experiences?

Of course.

I was going to grow up to be an astronaut, if you can believe that.

Same.

Yeah.

Same.

One of the only kids to have this idea.

And so, you know, these were the pieces I was fascinated by astronomy and whatnot, the usual bits.

And my mom worked at the Johnson Space Center when I was young.

And so I used to get to go there every now and then.

Did they have a rocket garden?

They did.

Yeah.

And so back then, the Saturn V rocket was just sitting out there on a stand and you could walk over to it and you could look at it.

And when you would go to lunch at the cafeteria, there'd be a rocket engine sitting there and you could play with it.

And sometimes the astronauts would come in and eat lunch while you were there.

That's amazing.

My mom worked in the building with the space shuttle mockup.

And so occasionally as a kid, you know, you get to go in there and be in the mockup and, you know, you'd be like, oh, the astronauts are coming in.

So, you know, we need to— we need to skedaddle out of here.

It was— yeah.

So what was your relationship with math like in those days?

You know, so I always loved math in the sense that, well, I had a love-hate relationship with math growing up, I guess.

It always seemed pretty easy.

Yeah.

And it wasn't clear to me what the applications were.

So full, you know, full disclosure, I was a pretty terrible student in high school.

Okay, good to know.

Good to know.

No, I get it.

Yeah.

So for those of you out there who are curious and, you know, technically minded— But why was that?

Were you not interested?

I was bored.

Bored to tears.

Got it.

In high school.

Yeah.

And, you know, the idea of going to college never really, I don't know, resonated with me.

Same, man.

When I was, when I was young, it just didn't.

I knew that it was a pathway that was available.

It just didn't feel like that was the trajectory.

Let me tell you my, how I thought about it.

Yeah.

Right.

Tell me how you thought about it.

I knew you went to college to be one of 4 things, a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, or an engineer.

Yeah.

Right.

So, so doctor to me at that time sounded like president, like, technically it's possible, but— That's right.

It probably is not happening.

Just the sight of a Martian, you know, as a career path.

Engineer.

I have no idea what that is.

All right.

I know about the kind that drives a train, but outside of that, I don't know what that really means.

Right.

Uh, teacher.

Uh, don't seem that cool to me, you know?

And lawyer.

Ain't that evil?

Right.

You know, so I was like, there's no place.

So some buddies had to convince me.

To go to college after I got out of the Navy.

Yeah, right.

And so you have military service.

I do.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

So I joined the Marine Corps when I was 17.

Wow.

Yeah.

My senior year of high school.

DEP.

Yep.

Delayed Entry Program.

That's right.

Yeah.

I turned 17 in March of 1984, and in May I joined DEP.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's good.

Yeah.

You joined a little sooner than me.

I was— I joined I joined in September of '95 when I was 17 years old, just a few months shy of my 18th birthday.

And I went to boot camp shortly after high school graduation.

Where'd you go?

I went to MCRD San Diego.

No way, that's where I went.

Oh yeah?

I was in ROTC San Diego.

Oh yeah, you remember being there by the, right by the airport.

Right by the airport.

Every time they fly over, you shut up.

Oh yeah.

Let it go over and then you go right back.

That's right, blow the plane out of the sky.

You remember that from the drills.

Our drill instructors would always yell, "Blow that plane out of the sky!"

No, I never heard that.

And so, yeah, it's actually an interesting psychological trick that the Marines do because you're just separated from the runway by a chain-link fence, right?

Yeah, that's right.

It's really loud and you can't hear any other commands.

And so, you know, the drill instructors oftentimes when an aircraft was taking off and it was starting to get loud, they just say, "Blow that plane out of the sky!"

And your job was to stand there, you know, sort of like clench fist, you know, put everything you have into it and just like yell, yell loud as you can.

And that's a good psychological trick because it sort of instills in you that mindset that the Marine Corps is going for, that if you don't know what else to do, do something.

Wow.

Push forward.

Right.

You know, move forward.

So you go to the Marine Corps.

Mm-hmm.

And how long do you find yourself staying in the Marine Corps?

Almost 8 years.

8 years.

—on active duty.

On active duty.

And so do you go around the world, do you?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, so I, one of my first assignments, you know, you go through, you know, a year and a half or so of basic training.

Yeah, you know, all told, not just boot camp, but all these other kind of things.

And I, you know, I was fortunate I got to do things like go to SERE school, which was a great experience.

SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.

So I got to go to SERE school and do all these things.

And that's, you know, more than a lot of other training that'll really teach you what you're made of.

Yeah.

So, I mean, that bit, that's one of the things that really attracted me to the Marine Corps.

I was sort of obsessed with this question of like, what am I actually made of?

And again, the scientific mindset, you need data, right?

I really wanted to understand this when I was young.

What I really wanted was to— I wanted to believe that I was that guy.

You know, where, you know, there's a fire burning and, you know, people need help.

Like, am I that person that can muster, you know, the wherewithal and the personnel to push forward, right?

And to go help people and whatnot.

And I really wanted to know if I was that person or if that's just something that I believed, if that was just an idea, right?

And so I went in and I did that.

Sort of unfortunately, fortunately and unfortunately, it's a bit of both.

My first assignment was with Marine One.

So the helicopters that fly the president around.

So, you know, I landed in the helicopter on the South.

People, just to, you say that kind of quickly, just to make it clear to everybody, there's Air Force One, which is the plane the president flies on.

That's right.

And there's Marine One, which is the helicopter.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's right.

And so people have all seen the president getting onto a big green helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House, and there's that person there in their Marine dress uniform.

And so I did roughly 4 years with that.

We travel all over the world.

There are always Marines around whenever the president travels somewhere, and so we moved around.

And that was a great experience.

You get to be around the power center of the world in many cases.

So I often like to joke that my military career was a lot like Forrest Gump, you know, just in the background of like these major historical events.

Wow.

Right, always there.

And so like we flew Yasser Arafat to Camp David for the last time that there were meaningful peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

From where?

Oh, we picked him up at Andrews Air Force Base and flew him out to Camp David.

I was at the Pentagon on September 11th.

What?

And you sort of like go down this list, these like big historical events that played out during my career.

So you said you responded to the Pentagon on September 11th?

So you were in the D.C.

area, and so when the plane comes in to hit the Pentagon, you left.

You weren't already at the Pentagon.

No.

You had to—That's right.

Get there quickly.

We deployed.

Yeah, I was one of the Marines who was sent in to help evacuate the Pentagon.

Tell me about that event if you don't, if it's fine to do so.

Sure, sure.

I was I was stationed at Quantico at that time.

So Quantico, Virginia.

Yeah.

So we're roughly a 20-minute flight or so south of the D.C.

area.

By helicopter?

By helicopter.

Yeah.

So I was there with, with HMX-1.

That's the Marine One aspects, right?

The helicopters that fly the president and other dignitaries.

And so it was a Tuesday.

We were down at Quantico kind of minding our own business.

Working on some different pieces.

And I was transitioning out of that unit and I was on my way to the fleet, which is sort of the real Marine Corps to some extent.

And we get this call to come over to headquarters, effectively, the leads to come over there.

And so I went over there and we go in and we get this quick briefing about how an aircraft of unknown origin had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

And there was nothing for us to do necessarily, but command wanted us to get our thoughts in order.

We might be sent north to assist with search and rescue operations or, you know, some sort of mass casualty event.

We're organized and we're prepared for this kind of thing.

And so we start, you know, started getting our thoughts in order.

They dismiss us.

We walk out.

And I was maybe 50 paces outside of the room when they yell back out of the room to everybody to get back in there because the second plane had just hit the other tower of the World Trade Center.

And so the response, obviously the response here is we are under attack.

And so now we need to prepare for this.

We're on the East Coast.

We're a detachment of Marines.

It is our job to be up and ready to respond.

Not clear what the response would be at this time.

Right.

But we're going to be ready, right?

We're Marines, right?

We're an expeditionary force in constant readiness.

Right.

And so, so we kind of go through and we're starting to put the pieces together.

And I'm back and delegating things to different Marines to make sure everything gets done.

You know, the corporals are driving things and getting things moving.

And I'm hearing over the radio, the Washington, D.C.

radio, where people are calling in and reporting that there's smoke coming from the Pentagon.

Oh boy.

And so, first thought, of course, is that people are panicking, right?

They have heard about what's happening in New York and they're calling in these reports.

But the person on the radio is like, "Well, we're getting a lot of calls that are coming in," and so forth.

And the next thing I know, phones are ringing off the hook, right?

The Pentagon's been hit.

Geez.

Grab all of your gear and get online right now.

We need to be ready to go.

And so you grab your stuff and everybody's just running for the helicopters, right?

You got to get ready.

And so we sort of get everything going and fire up the helicopter and the blades are spinning and all this.

And we get this report that there's another aircraft that's inbound to the DC area.

And so we need to hold on the ground.

That's the one that fell in the field?

That's right.

Yeah.

So that was Flight 93.

And so we're listening to all this over the radio.

So AWACS, the control aircraft, is overhead now at the moment, and they're calling in these different pieces and they're telling us to hold and hold because the fighters had scrambled and gone off over the Atlantic, right, with the expectation they were following their SOP, right, intercepting bombers.

They didn't expect that it was a threat coming from within.

And so they were supersonic heading back in, right?

Trying to potentially intercept this aircraft.

And so we waited for what seemed like an eternity.

And eventually we get the call over the radio that just said that the aircraft was down.

You're clear to launch.

Right?

And so we took off and we, I remember this moment, you sort of take off from the ground and the sitting at Quantico and you look to the north toward DC, you see just a bunch of really tall trees, right?

This is Virginia, right along the river.

And so you take off in the helicopter, and I remember this moment of clearing the trees, and you could see the smoke.

Oh boy.

It was filling the sky, right?

And so at that moment, it becomes real.

And there was just this deafening silence among everybody, you know, in that particular moment.

And so then the pilots do the helicopter equivalent of just like flooring it, right?

And you can see that, you know, feel the whole helicopter surge forward.

And so prior to this, I know you went to Iraq.

Had you been in battle zones prior to this?

No, no, no, no, no.

This is all new experience.

Your first battle zone was your home country.

You bet.

Yeah, the Washington, D.C.

area.

And so, you know, we cleared the distance in record time between Quantico and D.C.

It didn't take 20 minutes that day.

So normally you would meander along the river, right?

But that day we just went straight overhead, regulations be damned.

And so I remember it was coming in and the traffic was stopped on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge that crosses that area.

And we have to— yeah, people are out of their cars and, you know, looking at this whole thing.

I passed by the Pentagon every day for 3 years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's right there.

And so we went blasting by there and, you know, did kind of a half circle to get a general sense of the area.

And then we landed on a grassy field close by.

Our job, because we were coming from the Presidential Helicopter Squadron, all of us, they were sort of on this team.

We all have very high security clearances.

By virtue of working next to the president, you have the same clearance as the president, more or less.

And our job as part of that is to do evacuations of, you know, important folks, if you will.

And so we landed and our job was to get people out out of the Pentagon that were necessary in order to sort of keep the government operating.

And remember, George W. Bush is down in Florida at this time.

Right.

At the school.

Reading books to young children.

So we're mobilized and trying to get the essential personnel out of the Pentagon and get them going.

Some of them, famously, like Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to stay and help people.

But when you're the Secretary of Defense, That's not your job.

Your job is to go be the Secretary of Defense.

Right.

Right.

Right.

And so we sort of effectuated these evacuation plans that had been around for a while for sort of related scenarios and whatnot.

And so we took a number of loads of people out of the Pentagon and into secured locations to ensure continuity of the government.

Seemed like we were about to get shot down by an Air Force fighter at one point in time.

But, you know, we managed to narrowly avoid that.

There's just some miscommunication— —a lot of confusion at the time, right?

There was a ton of confusion.

Yeah.

So we have this story that I think is funny.

We're flying back in after dropping off a bunch of people from the secure site and we're flying back into the D.C.

area.

And by this point, all commercial air traffic had been grounded.

Right.

And so we're listening over the radio and And we're hearing one of the fighters reporting in that there's an unidentified non-responding aircraft inbound to the DC area.

And of course our response is like, "Another one?"

Like, "That's crazy."

Everything's supposed to be down and landing.

And so they're calling it in and calling in general coordinates.

Like, "Jeez, that's right by us."

And so everybody's looking— Coincidences are piling up.

Everybody's looking around and looking around, and finally it dawns on you, it's like, oh, they're talking about us.

Oh boy.

So, you know, we managed through a series of communications to not get shot down, obviously.

So that was a great thing.

But, and then after that, you know, I stayed on duty for 5 days or so after that.

In the area?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we'd fly in and we would get a call that there needed to be, you know, some documents, let's say, delivered to a particular area.

And so we'd fly in and do that.

And I had the privilege of flying what we call Missile Magnet for Dick Cheney as well.

So we had to get Dick Cheney out of there because he was in the D.C.

area.

So you need to take Dick Cheney to a secure region.

Wait, was that his code name?

Missile Magnet?

No, no, it was us.

Oh, that was a joke about ourselves, a self-deprecating thing, because you're flying this formation and nobody has any idea what's going on.

But what if?

There's somebody on the ground with a shoulder-fired missile or something like that, right?

You can't have them shooting down the Vice President of the United States in this particular situation.

And so, you know, the Marine Corps in its infinite wisdom, you know, says that, well, Dick Cheney is very important, we can't have him shot down, but you can get shot down.

And so, you know, you fly this sort of blocker, which will tell you where you fit in in the world, right?

You've been entrusted with this duty.

Yeah, that's right.

Somewhere between an actually important person and the danger.

That's your role is to take one for the team.

Important for now.

Yeah, that's right.

Right.

Those, they cycle through those roles.

Yeah, that's right.

But yeah, that was kind of my overall experience, which was, you know, obviously I was 23 years old— Wow.

When this happened.

And, you know, so this, so, you know, there's this weight of responsibility.

But again, it sort of harkens back to this idea that, like, similar to my own research, like, if I could wave a magic wand and make that not happen—Right.

I would.

Yeah.

But that wasn't an option.

That's not power that I have.

But if it was going to happen, I feel so honored and privileged that I could be there, right, to help out.

And one of the things that I often say about my time in the Marine Corps is that it it contained the best and the worst days of my life, right?

But I wouldn't trade any of it for anything.

How did it prepare you and how did it— well, did it play a role in motivating you to do what you do now?

Absolutely.

You know, it's hard to separate the initial motivation to go in and join the Marine Corps from what the Marine Corps gives you in that bit.

But, you know, coming out of the Marine Corps, you know, I went on and served a number of years post-September the 11th.

And so did a few deployments and whatnot.

They were, you know, different experiences for sure from the first bit.

But I certainly left the Marine Corps with a really strong desire to continue to serve.

One of the things that the Marine Corps was really good at for me was almost providing me with a sense of deeper purpose.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Right.

You had a role to play.

That's right.

You know, you, you, you were all these bits.

You had this, you, it was an identity.

It was all kinds of things.

And I think that when I got out of the Marine Corps, it was not that anymore.

And it was very confusing, right?

And it was hard to find a sense of purpose again.

I figured out pretty quickly that what I needed for the transition to be able to effectively transition from the military to civilian life was a new mission.

Right?

And that mission needed to be something that was sort of imminent.

Yeah, you know, there was some big problem that was going on.

There was something that was unique about me that I thought that I could really contribute to this particular problem.

It needed to be hard.

Yeah.

And, you know, it needed to be, you know, have this like sense of adventure.

It must be a Gen X thing.

So let me tell you, let me tell you, so when I left graduate school, I went to Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

And I went into this program for the hotshots.

Yeah.

And you, and you did rotations through 3 different parts of the company before deciding.

Yeah.

And what was my decision maker?

What is the technically most difficult process in semiconductor manufacturing?

That's what I want to do.

Right.

Right.

That's exactly right.

I mean, there's, there's so much, there's so much there in the, the, you know, the fulfillment of really tackling a hard problem.

And then to do that in a way that is, you know, has some tangible connection to the greater good.

Well, I guess the question I have is, did you start that process of thinking that through prior to leaving, or did you leave and then have to find your footing?

It was a little bit of both.

So I left the Marine Corps with this idea that I would probably go to college.

Okay.

You know, have educational benefits, but I wasn't I wasn't sure what direction I was gonna go with that.

And so I got out and I started at community college.

So also, you know, another rarity, not too many professors at Caltech and MIT went to community college.

I can imagine.

Well, not to get their education.

They might have gone there to do outreach.

That's right.

So, you know, I got out, I went to community college for a little while and then I moved up and I started as a physics major.

And so I was obviously very excited about physics.

And, but at some point, you know, it's sort of— So let me ask you, so you say you go to college.

Yeah.

So you were an enlisted man.

That's right.

And so when you went to college, you're basically in there with 18-year-olds.

You bet.

And you're like 27 around?

I was 26.

26.

Okay.

I was 26 and about, I don't know, 7 weeks off of a combat deployment.

Oh, wow.

When I walked into a college classroom.

How did that feel?

Uh, alien.

Yeah.

You know, it was just— it was, it was, it was so completely different than, than anybody else that's in there.

You know, you kind of, you just have this fundamentally different experience.

Yeah.

So I went forward and, you know, I was still excited about being an astronaut, still trying to find all these things.

And so I majored in aerospace engineering.

I got my degree, my bachelor's degree in aerospace in 2008.

Not the best time to graduate from college.

Not a lot of jobs available.

No, no.

It was a great time to— It was a great time to stay in and use your educational benefits from the military.

And so I did that.

And then that's when I went to a seminar and discovered that people were using this observational technique that we now use to study the flow of glaciers.

And I thought that that was one of the most fascinating things ever.

Nice.

And so I, you know, finagle an internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

I happened to meet the person who would become my PhD advisor walking down the hallway.

He sort of persuades me that you can make a living as a scientist.

This is not something that had ever occurred to me as a career path.

Again, these are like, sure, there are people in this world who do science for a living, but that person is not me, right?

That's, you know, it never even occurred to me as a thing to do.

So he talked me into applying for my PhD at Caltech.

I did.

I got in.

I'm so sorry to hear that.

Yeah, it's rough.

Do you need therapy now for that?

You got over it?

Yeah.

Well, if there are some tissues around here to get to catch my tears and the sorrow.

I will just say this.

I had this outstanding high school researcher.

That published before their freshman year at Caltech.

Right.

And for the next 4 years, every time I had a conversation with this person, at some part of the conversation, I said to them, "no, you are smart."

Yeah.

You are.

Now they're a professor, right?

They made it completely through, but they were like really taking a beating down there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a, it's a whole, it's a whole different world.

But I, I loved my time as a student at Caltech.

I'd love being a scientist at Caltech.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a wonderful place to be, and I'm very happy to be a professor there now.

You know, I certainly agree with Feynman's quote, right?

Where if you think you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room.

And so I sort of like enjoyed this idea, like I think I'm the dumbest person in the room, and that's great.

So you find yourself at Caltech now.

I do, yeah.

I find myself at Caltech, did my PhD there.

You know, I show up and— Did you do field work in your PhD?

I did.

I did in Iceland.

Beautiful.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

It's hard to beat.

Hard to beat.

It was one of my bucket list places right there with Alaska.

Yeah.

It's like a geophysicist's paradise.

You know, it's just wonderful.

Yeah.

So we were working on what was an experimental aircraft at the time.

So they had attached a radar to the bottom side of this aircraft.

And this is a business jet, an aircraft, a Gulfstream.

And it was flying around collecting these very precise measurements of glacier flow and all these things.

And this is the motivation to the high-altitude drones that we work on now, right?

So those high-altitude drones are the next step in this evolution.

But it really all started there.

And then PhD, I think toward the end of my PhD, again, my same advisor, I was not thinking in terms of a faculty position and he talked me into thinking about in terms of a faculty position.

And so I just didn't think that it was me.

But evidently it is.

Clearly.

And how long have you been a faculty member?

So I started at MIT in January 2018.

So yeah.

So going on— Another great timing on your part.

Yeah.

Just before the pandemic, right?

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

So I was in the UK for a couple of years before that.

A postdoc in the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.

This is something— there's something very poetic about this, man.

So, you know, I mean, it's like I could see a movie here.

You have this working class kid who becomes a Marine, right?

Then goes to studying a part of geology that turns out may have an answer for saving the planet, right?

Or a good part of coastal civilizations by deploying a technology that, you know, in a dangerous environment, right?

Essentially.

Yeah, it's a movie script, man.

So let me ask you one last question because, you know, I always tell the youth, I was like, hey, don't let us, don't let your parents, your teachers, your coaches fool you.

We were just like you when we were your age.

Oh yeah.

Right.

Now, there was a phenomenon I felt like where people used to feel in previous generations complete.

Oh, I'm 50.

I'm a, I can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I'm always working on myself.

Do you, do you have that?

Oh yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Always pushing forward.

Yeah.

You know, always finding new ways.

But even self, like conquering self is, is harder than, you know, discovering self.

I feel like it's harder than discovering what's external.

Right.

Conquering self is what's the hardest.

So, you know, here I am, I'm, I'm on the doorstep of 60 years old and I, and I'm still fighting that fight, you know?

And so do you feel that way yourself?

Do you feel like it's an ongoing, you talk about lifelong learning.

Yeah.

And I don't feel like perfection is the goal, but it's like a trying to be better every day kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Perfection is a decent target, you know, and sort of this thing off in the, off in the, the far field.

But absolutely, you have to continue to grow, you have to continue to, to learn, um, you have to continue to develop, you know, a can-do spirit, a tough mindset.

Yeah.

And so forth.

You know, as, as we all age, you know, we find new aches and pains and all these other kinds of things.

You just have to find a way to push through and to make peace with, again, this idea of kind of, I guess if you summarized it, it's this mentality of kind of looking problems straight in the eye that you're looking at, but then not just simply rolling over and accepting them.

And you push forward and then you find these things.

So always growing, always improving, always finding new ways to grow and improve.

Well, you just found a new way to grow and improve this podcast, sir.

This has been an amazing discussion.

This was so much fun.

I so appreciate you, man.

Thank you for stopping by.

It's been a blast.

Thank you.