Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from Either
Speaker 1: and Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm
Speaker 1: joined in the studio once again by my buddy Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: UH co worker, a colleague, co host of Forward Thinking, Uh,
Speaker 1: Poopy Food. How you doing, Joe? I'm great, Hi everybody.
Speaker 1: So Joe you you know I always like to ask
Speaker 1: my potential co hosts what they would like to cover
Speaker 1: in any given episode. And Joe, you had a really
Speaker 1: interesting idea that that honestly had not occurred to me
Speaker 1: to cover before. Well, I didn't know if we would
Speaker 1: make a good episode, and I guess at this moment
Speaker 1: I still don't know, but I guess we will. In
Speaker 1: exactly we'll figure it out. But it was an idea
Speaker 1: that came to me because I like to think about
Speaker 1: ancient time times. So when I come on other shows,
Speaker 1: I like to be able to look to the past sometimes.
Speaker 1: So Jonathan, I want to talk to you about Lake Vostock.
Speaker 1: All right, So what is Lake Vostock. You've never heard
Speaker 1: of it. I know Lake Lanier. Is it near Lake Lanier?
Speaker 1: It's pretty close. No, it's a lake in Antarctica. But
Speaker 1: it's not just any kind of lake. It's a sub
Speaker 1: glacial lake, the biggest one in the world actually. So
Speaker 1: it is a lake that is under a glacier, a
Speaker 1: giant sheet of ice, and that glacier is really thick.
Speaker 1: I've seen estimates from about two miles thick to about
Speaker 1: four thousand meters of glacial ice over the lake, which
Speaker 1: would be like two and a half miles. I guess
Speaker 1: they're probably different segments where the ice is a different thickness.
Speaker 1: And it's been buried in ice for millions of years,
Speaker 1: all right. So in recent decades, scientists have been drilling
Speaker 1: samples of the ice above this lake to study what's
Speaker 1: down there. Um. And whenever I picture this lake in
Speaker 1: my mind, this lake buried under ancient ice, it makes
Speaker 1: me think of Gollum's Lake under the mountain in the
Speaker 1: Hobbit in the mountains, Yeah, misty mountains. That What did
Speaker 1: the lake have a name or was it just where
Speaker 1: the yummy fishes. I don't think it had a specific name.
Speaker 1: If it did, it would have been a Goblin name.
Speaker 1: So I would be, you know, unpronounceable for the mere
Speaker 1: mortal that I am. Oh, I assume you speak Goblin.
Speaker 1: I know grish Nacht is fire. That's the only thing
Speaker 1: I can I can rattle off off the top of
Speaker 1: my head. Well, anyway, when scientists drill down into this deep,
Speaker 1: deep Antarctic Golem lake below the ice, one of the
Speaker 1: craziest things is that they've found d n A and
Speaker 1: evidence of microbial life. And I remember there were stories
Speaker 1: about how some ice samples indicated there might even be
Speaker 1: more complex life like fish and arthropods in that water. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: I know that was highly controversial at the time. I
Speaker 1: just recently looked it up again to see if there
Speaker 1: were there were any developments on that. I found a
Speaker 1: piece of coverage from Nature News at the time throwing
Speaker 1: some serious doubts on the on the live fish and
Speaker 1: arthropods claim. So that's I'm sure not all that widely accepted,
Speaker 1: but just the idea of it is so cool that
Speaker 1: you have this completely sealed off ancient alien life in
Speaker 1: this lake below a mountain of ice, and things like
Speaker 1: that make me think about deep time, like how ice
Speaker 1: is a cross section of geological time on Earth right,
Speaker 1: like that there is layer upon layer of evidence of
Speaker 1: what has happened in the past. Yeah, and and just
Speaker 1: in case people are curious, like, how could a subglacial
Speaker 1: lake remain Why would you call that a lake? Why
Speaker 1: would that not just be another part of the glacier.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't that just be ice. Geothermal heat actually counteracts
Speaker 1: the freezing action of the ice above it all in
Speaker 1: the lake to remain liquid. Oh I actually didn't know
Speaker 1: why it was liquid. Oh yeah, it's because of geothermal
Speaker 1: geothermal vents that continue to keep the temperature of the
Speaker 1: lake above freezing. So yeah, that's why, uh, there can
Speaker 1: be a lake, a sub glacial lake, because otherwise you
Speaker 1: would say, like, well, wait a minute, how could it
Speaker 1: still remain How could it remain unfrozen unless there were
Speaker 1: some other chemicals in the lake that would uh lower
Speaker 1: its freezing point below that of water. That's fascinating. Yeah, well, okay,
Speaker 1: you might be wondering, wait a minute, what does this
Speaker 1: have to do with technology. Well, we're getting get there
Speaker 1: in just a second. So when you think about glaciers,
Speaker 1: I guess at the polar regions, how do things like
Speaker 1: that form. It's actually a pretty simple process. Every year
Speaker 1: it snows, it'll it'll snow, and you get heavier snows
Speaker 1: in the winter and lighter snows in the summer, right,
Speaker 1: But in some places in the world, unlike probably wherever
Speaker 1: you live, if it snows around your house or your yard,
Speaker 1: eventually that snow melts, right, right, you get to a
Speaker 1: point where the season's warm, the snow starts to uh
Speaker 1: to to melt away, and then eventually you have no
Speaker 1: more snow. But there's some regions where either the snow
Speaker 1: accumulation is so great that it never completely melts, or
Speaker 1: the temperature never rises above freezing and therefore it just
Speaker 1: continues to accumulate. So every season you get a new
Speaker 1: layer of snow. Right. What happens when a new layer
Speaker 1: of snow goes on top of the old layer of snow, Well,
Speaker 1: eventually it gets kind of heavy. Yeah, it compresses into
Speaker 1: the point where the lower layers of snow are compressed
Speaker 1: into ice. So then you get layers of ice. And
Speaker 1: if you were able to look at these layers of
Speaker 1: ice collectively, you can start to draw some conclusions about
Speaker 1: what had happened the years when that snow first accumulated.
Speaker 1: And this is what leads us to the practice of
Speaker 1: drilling down into ice sheets and glaciers to retrieve samples,
Speaker 1: to kind of get a look back into the geological
Speaker 1: past of the Earth. Yeah, exactly. So, ice core drilling
Speaker 1: is a way of getting at this cross section of
Speaker 1: geological time that we can see in the ice layers
Speaker 1: of glaciers, right, and a lot of it's going to
Speaker 1: be you know, in places like Greenland or in Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Those are the two chief sites for ice core drilling,
Speaker 1: where people have to come up with these huge vertical
Speaker 1: samples of ice that might be miles thick, right, And
Speaker 1: what I wanted to know was, how on Earth do
Speaker 1: they do that? It can't be all that easy, can
Speaker 1: it is? It's well easy, It is not simple. It
Speaker 1: is similar than I would have expected. Actually it is.
Speaker 1: It is a simple method in the sense that it
Speaker 1: doesn't require tons of complex machinery or techniques. But it
Speaker 1: is not easy to do because it is difficult to
Speaker 1: reach to access the areas, and the methodology can often
Speaker 1: require people to essentially live on an ice sheet for
Speaker 1: a very for you know, like like a month at
Speaker 1: a time, depending on how deep they want to drill. Right. So, uh,
Speaker 1: within each of those layers of snow that have turned
Speaker 1: into ice, there are records of things of the past,
Speaker 1: like the you know, ice can trap chemicals. For example,
Speaker 1: precipitation can trap chemicals, and as that precipitation in this case,
Speaker 1: snow hits the ground, then you have a record of
Speaker 1: what the chemical composition was at that given time, and
Speaker 1: then other layers will pack on top of it and
Speaker 1: they will have their own kind of, you know, unique
Speaker 1: chemical fingerprint if you will. The layers don't just show
Speaker 1: you a cross section of time. Each layer has data
Speaker 1: from the time it comes from. It might even have
Speaker 1: like ash from a volcanic eruption. You can see kim
Speaker 1: iCal data like you were just talking about the concentrations
Speaker 1: of different gases in the atmosphere that become dissolved in
Speaker 1: little bubbles in these layers, or you can see exactly
Speaker 1: ash from volcanic eruptions. You can even discern things about
Speaker 1: the local weather patterns where the glacier was at certain
Speaker 1: times in the past, and you can see like there
Speaker 1: was heavy snowfall this year and light snowfall the next year,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk more about that, get more into detail
Speaker 1: and a little bit. Another thing that I think is
Speaker 1: kind of cool with the volcanic ash layers is that
Speaker 1: it lets you compare one sample against another sample that
Speaker 1: was gathered somewhere else and not necessarily justin ice. There
Speaker 1: are other core uh coreing methods like that, going through
Speaker 1: peat bogs, for example, And if you find a layer
Speaker 1: of ash that corresponds to another layer of ash and
Speaker 1: a completely different sample, you can say, oh, well, these
Speaker 1: both came from that same eruption. That allows us to
Speaker 1: to corus correlate these two dates together by the chemical
Speaker 1: composition of the ash and the two layers, because the
Speaker 1: chemical composition is going to be unique each eruption. So
Speaker 1: that way you can actually start to build a global
Speaker 1: view of what had happened during any given you know,
Speaker 1: uh year or span of years in Earth's past, which
Speaker 1: is really interesting. I think, Yeah, it's way cooler and
Speaker 1: more full of creepy ancient power than you would have
Speaker 1: imagined ice drilling to be. But I want to hear
Speaker 1: about the drilling itself. How do they get these cores
Speaker 1: out of the glacier? Okay, well, there are two basic
Speaker 1: categories of drills, and then there are are of you know,
Speaker 1: different examples of each category. So the first big one
Speaker 1: are mechanical drills. Now, these are drills that drilled down
Speaker 1: into the ice through mechanical action essentially rotating. Right, But normally,
Speaker 1: when you think of a drill that's making a hole
Speaker 1: in something, you are not removing any section of that
Speaker 1: substrate intact. You're just making a hole. I'm drilling in
Speaker 1: the wall. Well, it's gonna be this sort of like
Speaker 1: you know, cylindrical object that's got screw thread kind of
Speaker 1: things on the outside to move the shavings out of
Speaker 1: the hole as it goes deeper in. It's just a
Speaker 1: solid shaft. Yeah, it's not gonna give you a cross
Speaker 1: section of the wood. So how do you get that?
Speaker 1: So in order to do that, you have to have
Speaker 1: a drill bit that is an actual hollow cylinder right
Speaker 1: the middle of this. Instead of it being a solid shaft,
Speaker 1: it's a cylinder that has cutting teeth on one end
Speaker 1: of it, so that when it rotates, it creates this
Speaker 1: the the the actual drill itself rotates around a column
Speaker 1: of ice, It creates a column of ice cuts away
Speaker 1: so that you know the center of the drill bit
Speaker 1: starts to accumulate this ice. It goes straight down until
Speaker 1: you get to the length of the drill itself, and
Speaker 1: obviously then you can't go any further because you hit
Speaker 1: the cap like the top of the drill, and that's
Speaker 1: where you would have to stop and try and retrieve
Speaker 1: the ice that you've just drilled. Right, So you might
Speaker 1: think about it kind of like this. Imagine like a
Speaker 1: tin can or like a pipe, and then the lip
Speaker 1: of that pipe is sort of like a circular saw blade.
Speaker 1: It's got the blade is parallel to the length of
Speaker 1: the pipe obviously, so it can screw down in right.
Speaker 1: And it's also the teeth are usually adjustable, like you
Speaker 1: can either uh extend them or attract them a little
Speaker 1: bit depending upon the nature of the ice that you're
Speaker 1: cutting into. So, for example, if they are if the
Speaker 1: if the teeth are retracted too far, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: really hard to get purchase on the ice. It's gonna
Speaker 1: kind of skitter around. Anyone who's had any experience with
Speaker 1: ice nos it's slippery, and so you'd have to have
Speaker 1: the teeth be a little bit longer. If they're too long,
Speaker 1: then they're going to get caught in the ice, so
Speaker 1: it'll make it more difficult to turn the drill and
Speaker 1: drill down into the ice. So you have to find
Speaker 1: that that sweet spot, and that's usually why the the
Speaker 1: teeth are adjustable so that you can make it the
Speaker 1: perfect length for whatever conditions you encounter. You when you
Speaker 1: turn the drill the proper way, it cuts into the
Speaker 1: ice and it and it pulls in that cylinder like
Speaker 1: we were talking about. Now, there's also gonna be some
Speaker 1: waste product from this drilling in there. Yeah, chips of
Speaker 1: ice obviously are going to accumulate. So often these drills
Speaker 1: have treads on the outside of them which will put
Speaker 1: push chips up to the surface. Some of them have
Speaker 1: chambers that will hold chips to keep it away from
Speaker 1: the ice core sample because obviously, if you're looking at
Speaker 1: at creating a sample for you to study in the lab,
Speaker 1: you don't want to end up mixing that material all up,
Speaker 1: because then you don't have an accurate representation of what
Speaker 1: happened over any given length of time. Right, You've you've
Speaker 1: corrupted your sample. So most of these have a method
Speaker 1: of funneling chips up into a chamber. Uh, and you
Speaker 1: are the The simplest of these mechanical drills are the
Speaker 1: hand powered augers. You actually move these by hand. It
Speaker 1: it looks like a kind of like a very long can,
Speaker 1: right and the top of it has like a t
Speaker 1: junction handle and like in cartoons when people have a
Speaker 1: dynamite box and they push it in the right handle
Speaker 1: like that or like a jackhammer, you know that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. And except of course, instead of going up
Speaker 1: and down, you're twisting this in order to create the
Speaker 1: rotational force. This translated into lateral force because the drill
Speaker 1: is kind of like a the inversion of a screw, right,
Speaker 1: so you're you're drilling down that way. And you might think, well,
Speaker 1: you were talking earlier about how some of the UM
Speaker 1: the core samples. We look at our our kilometers long.
Speaker 1: How could you possibly get a sample that's that long
Speaker 1: using a handogger? Well, first of all, you can't, but secondly, uh,
Speaker 1: when we talk about these core samples, Yeah, the entire
Speaker 1: sample might be several kilometers long, but that made up
Speaker 1: of segments. So depending upon the drill you're using, your
Speaker 1: segments maybe between one and six ms long, right, So
Speaker 1: that's between like, uh, you know, around three ft two
Speaker 1: around twenty ft long roughly, um And in order for
Speaker 1: you to create a full uh core sample, than what
Speaker 1: you would have to do is lower the drill back
Speaker 1: down into the borehole that you've started until it reaches
Speaker 1: the bottom and you have to use extenders to come
Speaker 1: up out of the borehole so you can continue to
Speaker 1: drill downward. That sounds like you pretty quickly reach a
Speaker 1: sort of maximum depth for these hand operated versions. You
Speaker 1: absolutely do, yeah, because eventually you're not going to the
Speaker 1: the amount of rotational force you'll have to create to
Speaker 1: rotate the entire thing, the the drill and all the
Speaker 1: extenders will exceed the strength and flexibility of that device,
Speaker 1: So you can't you can't indefinitely use a hand dogger.
Speaker 1: It would also just seem to be that that combined
Speaker 1: with whatever you have to hang it on to get
Speaker 1: it deeper and deeper, would get really heavy. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you keep in mind like you're talking about
Speaker 1: lifting up six meters of ice. Uh, And of course
Speaker 1: the diameter of this depends upon the drill to write
Speaker 1: the drill. The drills diameter will determine the diameter of
Speaker 1: the core sample. But you're still talking about lifting all
Speaker 1: that ice, which is heavy lifting the drill itself, which
Speaker 1: is heavy lifting all the extenders which are heavy. So
Speaker 1: eventually you get to a point where you know you're
Speaker 1: just not gonna have the integrity to keep that all together,
Speaker 1: which is when you need to look at possibly switching
Speaker 1: to something else. So your typical handoggers can go pretty
Speaker 1: darn deep. I mean we're talking twenty to thirty meters,
Speaker 1: that's like sixty six to ft. That's deeper than I
Speaker 1: would have expected. Yeah, me too, And according to some
Speaker 1: of the things I read, it's more like fortys is
Speaker 1: the maximum. Twenty to thirty tends to be what people
Speaker 1: limit themselves to, but I think the record was somewhere
Speaker 1: around forty, so it's even further other than that. Um
Speaker 1: So what do you do when you reach that that
Speaker 1: limit where you can't use the handoggers anymore? Well, that's
Speaker 1: when you try try kind of. You're using the electro
Speaker 1: mechanical drills. These are suspended on a cable, so instead
Speaker 1: of it having like a physical um turning mechanism that
Speaker 1: extends all the way up to the surface there, they
Speaker 1: they are actually suspended by cable lowered into a borehole
Speaker 1: and they consist typically of two barrels. You have an
Speaker 1: external barrel that remains uh motionless, it is, it does
Speaker 1: not turn all right, So the external barrel is uh,
Speaker 1: just a stationary holding device. Then the inner barrel is
Speaker 1: the one that can rotate, all right, So the cable
Speaker 1: that suspends an electro mechanical drill, the cable doesn't move
Speaker 1: at all either. It's just there to supply the suspension
Speaker 1: mechanism and the power. So it's it's got the power
Speaker 1: lines that go down to power the drill. The inner
Speaker 1: barrel will rotate in the proper direction to continue drilling down.
Speaker 1: And the inner barrel also has treads on the external
Speaker 1: side of it, right, so those are going to be
Speaker 1: like the threads on your your drill bit that are
Speaker 1: getting the shavings out of the wall, and the excase,
Speaker 1: they're transporting the ice chips up along the length of
Speaker 1: the drill. That's right. And so you would use this
Speaker 1: the same way you would use your handogger, except of course,
Speaker 1: in this case it's an electrical uh action, electro mechanical
Speaker 1: action that is causing it. So it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a little bit easier on the people who
Speaker 1: are operating it. They just have to make sure that
Speaker 1: they're lowering it properly and then it's at the correct depth.
Speaker 1: All of that kind of stuff and and that the
Speaker 1: teeth are at the right length. It's just like the handdoggers.
Speaker 1: You've got to make sure that those those teeth are
Speaker 1: are proper so that they can cut into the material
Speaker 1: to ice properly. Uh So, Usually you also have another
Speaker 1: cool mechanism literally to hold the ice in place. Once
Speaker 1: you've reached the point where you're ready to lift up
Speaker 1: the next segment. They have spring loaded lever arms inside
Speaker 1: that inner barrel that think of it like little pincers
Speaker 1: that come in and hold that core in place because
Speaker 1: you want it to be really steady when you're lifting
Speaker 1: that drill up. You know you're talking forty or more
Speaker 1: up a borehole. You don't want to lose the grip
Speaker 1: on that ice core sample because that would be bad.
Speaker 1: So the spring loaded lever arms hold them and they
Speaker 1: are called something that I love, core dogs. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like going to the county fair and get yourself
Speaker 1: and a couple of core dogs. I like to go
Speaker 1: to Polucaville to get my core dogs local establishment here
Speaker 1: in Atlanta. Now there is another type of drill that
Speaker 1: I love. Yeah, I think this is excellent. I love
Speaker 1: looking at the picture. I was looking at a picture
Speaker 1: of this before I read about what it was, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't understand how it cuts because
Speaker 1: it just looked like a pipe with kind of a
Speaker 1: strange lip. It didn't have any teeth, right, And then
Speaker 1: I read about it and I was like, oh, I
Speaker 1: see it doesn't thermal drill. Yeah, so it's using heat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So imagine sort of a pipe that on the end
Speaker 1: of the lip of the pipe has a heating element
Speaker 1: and it gets hot, melts straight through the ice and
Speaker 1: just sinks on down there. Yeah. Yeah, until you get
Speaker 1: to again to the end of the capacity of the drill,
Speaker 1: and then you have to lift it back up again.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's really I love that idea, the idea
Speaker 1: of of of let's just use heat to work our way.
Speaker 1: I mean, come on, it's ice, let's use heat to
Speaker 1: melt away down there. Yeah. That actually does seem like
Speaker 1: it would have some limitations though, and it does. In fact,
Speaker 1: you are you're more likely to use that when you're
Speaker 1: using ice that is above minus ten degrees celsius, for example,
Speaker 1: you don't know, which is fourteen degrees fahrenheit. By the way,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't use that in older areas because the melt
Speaker 1: off the water that you would be creating. As the
Speaker 1: heating element melts, the ice would likely start to refreeze
Speaker 1: and that would become a problem. So you are more
Speaker 1: likely to use it in uh in quote unquote warmer situations,
Speaker 1: it will still be really cold. Um And then if
Speaker 1: you were to encounter those colder situations, you would use
Speaker 1: electro mechanical drill. And in fact, there are plenty of
Speaker 1: ice core drilling projects that that will switch out the
Speaker 1: drills based upon whatever the current conditions happen to be
Speaker 1: as they are drilling. So it's not like some only
Speaker 1: used one and some only use the other. Most will
Speaker 1: rely on whichever one is the best fit for that
Speaker 1: particular set of conditions. Now, I would imagine that once
Speaker 1: you get down to a certain depth, the whole enterprise
Speaker 1: sort of changes. I mean, once you're getting two thousands
Speaker 1: of feet down, you're going to start dealing with the
Speaker 1: ways that ice behaves kind of like a plastic and yeah,
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean. Yeah, you got to
Speaker 1: remember this ice is under a lot of pressure. I mean,
Speaker 1: just from Waight alone, it's under a ton of pressure.
Speaker 1: But there's also there are other elements there too, there's
Speaker 1: glacial flow, right, Glaciers move, they don't move very quickly,
Speaker 1: but there is this pressure from glacial flow where the
Speaker 1: glacier is potentially moving in a specific direction, which means
Speaker 1: that's putting pressure on the borehole too. And if the
Speaker 1: pressure is too great, that borehole can close, and by close,
Speaker 1: we've pretty much bean collapse in on itself. Like closing
Speaker 1: sounds pretty gentle, it's not a gentle thing. Well, whether
Speaker 1: it's gentle or not, it's a big problem for your
Speaker 1: research project exactly. So, Uh, there are times where you
Speaker 1: will have these these projects where they will start pumping
Speaker 1: liquid down the hole, and there's a couple of different
Speaker 1: reasons for this. Some will pump anti freeze liquid down
Speaker 1: the whole in order to make sure that any melted runoff,
Speaker 1: for example, if you're using a thermal drill doesn't refreeze,
Speaker 1: but then you may need to put down a different
Speaker 1: type of liquid, another one that would be less likely
Speaker 1: to freeze, in order to equalize the pressure from inside
Speaker 1: the hole to what is outside the hole. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: read somewhere that the drill fluid that they would normally
Speaker 1: use can be something like kerosene, like a petroleum derived fluid. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it just basically has to have the right freezing point.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to be of a certain thickness right
Speaker 1: right because they have to you know, if it's if
Speaker 1: it's too thin, then it's not going to create the
Speaker 1: pressure that they need in order to keep the whole stable.
Speaker 1: And if the freezing point is too is too high,
Speaker 1: then it's going to just end up mucking everything up anyway.
Speaker 1: So it is a delicate balance. There's one project in
Speaker 1: particular I wanted to talk about the kind of give
Speaker 1: an idea of what it's like to work on one
Speaker 1: of these. Again, it all depends upon how deeply you
Speaker 1: need to go when you're retrieving the ice core sample.
Speaker 1: You know, how far back are you going to be looking. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's one called the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Project,
Speaker 1: which is a recent effort by the United States in
Speaker 1: which an ice core that was three thousand, four d
Speaker 1: five meters long, so three point four kilometers long, was
Speaker 1: retrieved over the course of six field seasons. Now, they
Speaker 1: defined a field season as approximately forty days of drilling.
Speaker 1: The actual drilling took place six days a week, so
Speaker 1: obviously more than um uh since you're not drilling seven
Speaker 1: days a week, forty days of drilling is you know,
Speaker 1: you've got to divide that up properly. But twenty four
Speaker 1: hours a day, three shifts UH for drilling per day
Speaker 1: with three project workers per shift, so nine people working
Speaker 1: for six days a week and drilling is going on
Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day. I'm sure that's not an
Speaker 1: easy job, but I would kind of like that job
Speaker 1: just to be able to say I drilled cores of
Speaker 1: ancient ice at one of my past jobs. But you might,
Speaker 1: you might have some interesting stories to tell about the
Speaker 1: the the quirks of the two shift workers you shared
Speaker 1: all that time with, and whether or not you ever
Speaker 1: want to see that person ever again. Right to the
Speaker 1: two am to ten am shift is kind of rough
Speaker 1: in Antarctica. You can also just be like, I will
Speaker 1: never not hear the sound of ice being drilled. That
Speaker 1: is just gonna go through my head through the rest
Speaker 1: of my days. But anyway, Yeah, it's it's a really
Speaker 1: serious endeavor and it's very important scientific work. And so
Speaker 1: because it's important, and because this is something that you know,
Speaker 1: once you once you have retrieved the ice core sample,
Speaker 1: you've only just started you have to make sure that
Speaker 1: you can store them properly so that you have the
Speaker 1: chance to actually examine them later. Right, So you've got
Speaker 1: these cylindrical segments of you know, essentially priceless scientific data, right,
Speaker 1: that are just in containers. And yeah, and it's perishable.
Speaker 1: It's perishable. There's something that's beautiful about this to me,
Speaker 1: the fleeting nous of it. How you know, this is
Speaker 1: something that could be millions of years old, but it's
Speaker 1: frozen bran. It could melt if the power goes off,
Speaker 1: you know. Now, to be fair, if you're getting them
Speaker 1: from Greenland, I think the oldest we've looked at it
Speaker 1: is a hundred thirty and Antarctica it's more like eight thousand,
Speaker 1: so not quite millions, but still well before human history
Speaker 1: was ever recorded or potentially even possible to record. You know,
Speaker 1: we're talking way back. We're talking back when Cathulu was
Speaker 1: running rampant. Probably not, but at any rate, they would
Speaker 1: that be detectable from the ice we see dissolved particulates
Speaker 1: of I don't know. Yeah, just like there's there's one
Speaker 1: of the chemical constituents of the old one, right, you
Speaker 1: can be like, well, there was a frozen sugar right
Speaker 1: that right around this level, so we're pretty sure it
Speaker 1: was around this time at any rate. So we have
Speaker 1: we have to store these things obviously until they can
Speaker 1: be examined by various scientists, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: ice cores when they are stored like there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different research facilities that want to have a
Speaker 1: chance to to examine this stuff, so they have to
Speaker 1: go to a special facility to do that. One of
Speaker 1: those is the National Ice Core Laboratory, which stores more
Speaker 1: than seventeen thousand meters of ice, that's incredible, and its
Speaker 1: main archive freezer is fifty five thousand cubic feet in size,
Speaker 1: that's one thousand, five fifty seven cubic meters, And so
Speaker 1: incoming ice has to first reach a thermal equilibrium with
Speaker 1: the temperature inside the freezer, which is minus thirty six
Speaker 1: degrees celsius or minus thirty two point eight fahrenheit. And
Speaker 1: the reason for that is obviously you don't want to
Speaker 1: start handling the ice before it's reached thermal equal equilibrium
Speaker 1: for fear of damaging the sample. Right, So once it's
Speaker 1: reached that thermal equilibrium, that's that only then can you
Speaker 1: actually unpack it and then label it and and racket
Speaker 1: categorize it. I've seen pictures of these storage facilities. It
Speaker 1: looks like kind of like a National Film Archive or
Speaker 1: something that's got these silver cans and the shelves going
Speaker 1: to the ceiling. Though, I do wonder that if there's
Speaker 1: a temptation for people working in these places every now
Speaker 1: and then to get a little cheeky and make themselves
Speaker 1: a highball, just just an ancient on the rocks, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: on the ancient rocks. I guess then again, you may
Speaker 1: be unleashing microbes into your into your body that you
Speaker 1: have no natural defenses. Again that that, Yeah, I see that.
Speaker 1: We're kind of starting to mix up movie genres too,
Speaker 1: because this is kind of a rolling emeric, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of into the world derivative, right, and then and
Speaker 1: then Judd Apatel where you get like the kind of
Speaker 1: stoner comedy of so you get like the stoner character
Speaker 1: who's just trying to make a drink, and then unleash
Speaker 1: is the terrible super flu Hey this this this this
Speaker 1: particular bacteria or virus or whatever has been in suspended
Speaker 1: animation for hundreds of thousands of years now, has been
Speaker 1: unleashed on the planet. There's money in this, Joe, I
Speaker 1: think we need to develop it. But before that we
Speaker 1: have to finish this podcast. So wait a second. Okay,
Speaker 1: So once they've got the ice, Yeah, you have this
Speaker 1: priceless repository of ancient data. How do you analyze it
Speaker 1: and what can you learn? Well, the first thing you
Speaker 1: can do is look at it. I know that sounds silly.
Speaker 1: You are a man of many insights using your eyeballs, so, uh.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing about an ice core sample is you
Speaker 1: can actually see the passage of time just by looking
Speaker 1: closely at the ice core sample. Yeah, you should look
Speaker 1: up an image of this if you're listening on a
Speaker 1: computer or device where you can have internet access. It's cool.
Speaker 1: It's got stripes, yeah, and those stripes represent summers and winters, right.
Speaker 1: So winters are darker because you usually have much greater
Speaker 1: snow accumulation during the winter. Summers are lighter because you
Speaker 1: have less snow accumulation. So you get these dark bands
Speaker 1: separated by light bands, and together those represent a year's
Speaker 1: passage of time. Right, You've got the summer and winter there,
Speaker 1: and so you just start counting backwards. It's like rings
Speaker 1: on a tree, except you'd be counting vertical stripes rather
Speaker 1: than the concentric circle exactly. Yeah, so you count that
Speaker 1: backwards and you can actually say, oh, well, this particular
Speaker 1: year is such and such because it's so many far
Speaker 1: back from the surface, and then you can start or
Speaker 1: at least you can estimate, like within a reasonable degree
Speaker 1: of certainty, what year that represents. And in fact, uh,
Speaker 1: they have done tests, they being scientists, have done tests
Speaker 1: to make sure that this is the case by looking
Speaker 1: at various layers, identifying what year that lay or should represent,
Speaker 1: testing the chemical composition of that particular layer of the ice,
Speaker 1: and comparing it to data that we have from other means,
Speaker 1: other means like and we're talking like around the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: like looking at the nineteen fifties, so counting back until
Speaker 1: you hit to nineteen fifty on the ice core sample
Speaker 1: and then testing it to see if it actually matches
Speaker 1: the other records we have, and they match, so it
Speaker 1: shows that this actually does work. Now, however, that being said,
Speaker 1: when you start going to deeper levels, it starts getting
Speaker 1: more and more difficult to differentiate. Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: was seeing various concerns about how factors in the physics
Speaker 1: of the glacier can change what happens to these levels.
Speaker 1: I mean, number one, you just have that more pressure,
Speaker 1: but I think the glacier flow can also change how
Speaker 1: the levels are represented, right, yeah, yeah, I mean if
Speaker 1: you if you think about like, these glaciers don't necessarily
Speaker 1: all move. It's like one big solid unit. Keep in
Speaker 1: mind that this is this is a solid form of
Speaker 1: a fluid, but it still has some fluid mechanics to it, right,
Speaker 1: It's not not not all of the glacier is necessarily
Speaker 1: moving as in concert with itself, right, So you could
Speaker 1: have sections of the glacier that are moving that could
Speaker 1: end up changing a little bit of what you would
Speaker 1: expect to find as you're counting back to a certain depth.
Speaker 1: And so it's one of those things where, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you have to after at some point you have to
Speaker 1: start looking at alternative means of dating that particular part
Speaker 1: of the ice core sample, and that could involve doing
Speaker 1: something like performing some geochemistry on it. So you look
Speaker 1: to see what materials are in that layer and how
Speaker 1: does that correspond with the records we have about our
Speaker 1: geological history. So it's usually mass spectrometry that we use
Speaker 1: where we try and see what chemicals are represented within
Speaker 1: that layer and kind of map that to what else
Speaker 1: we know about our history. Um, there's also that layers
Speaker 1: of ash. So if we find layers of ash, then
Speaker 1: we know that this is, uh, you know, a mark
Speaker 1: of a volcanic eruption, and based upon our records we
Speaker 1: can kind of date it from that point. Or it
Speaker 1: could be just another emergence of hexus, could be could
Speaker 1: be likely a volcanic eruption, but could be electrical conductivity
Speaker 1: because again, depending on what the what materials are dissolved
Speaker 1: within that ice, it's going to be either more or
Speaker 1: less conductive. And so by doing that we can make
Speaker 1: determinations of what materials are in there and thus kind
Speaker 1: of get an idea of how where in the the
Speaker 1: timeline that particular part of the ice core sample falls.
Speaker 1: Numerical flow models which help us correlate age to depth.
Speaker 1: This is what we were talking about just a second ago, Joe,
Speaker 1: the idea of the glacial flow and how that can
Speaker 1: can make things a little more complicated. Uh, having those
Speaker 1: numerical flow models, which essimpially that's a simulation of what
Speaker 1: must have happened within a particular body of ice over
Speaker 1: a given amount of time, and by modeling it and
Speaker 1: trying to get that as accurate as possible, we can
Speaker 1: try and correlate, all right, at what would we consider
Speaker 1: like how how far down would we go before we
Speaker 1: hit I don't know, two years for example. This is
Speaker 1: the kind of I'm just throwing that out there as
Speaker 1: a off the top of my head example. And also
Speaker 1: radiometric dating dating, which is a not away for nuclear
Speaker 1: physicists to know, hang out and find that special someone.
Speaker 1: They use tender just like everybody else. It's more about
Speaker 1: actually looking at um radioactive decay. Not every layer of
Speaker 1: ice has anything in it like that, but some layers
Speaker 1: of ice do have trace amounts of uranium dust, and
Speaker 1: that would might be a way that we could date
Speaker 1: certain types. This is pretty deep in the Antarctic ice usually.
Speaker 1: Um As for what we can learn, we can learn
Speaker 1: lots of stuff, right, I mean, like it's really important
Speaker 1: information that tells us about the way our world has
Speaker 1: changed over huge expanses of time. Right, Well, I know
Speaker 1: one of the main things that scientists are looking at
Speaker 1: ice cores for these days is to help understand what
Speaker 1: past climate systems look like and to help predict what
Speaker 1: changes will be brought about by the current climate change
Speaker 1: we're observing, right right, And of course you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you can't really make predictions without necessarily understanding what has
Speaker 1: happened in the past, right, You need to have that
Speaker 1: model there so that you can have something to base
Speaker 1: your predictions upon. So one thing you can easily see,
Speaker 1: and by easily I mean I described looking at those
Speaker 1: layers and seeing the summer and winter. You can easily
Speaker 1: see the general precipitation trends year over year by the
Speaker 1: thickness of those layers. Right, So if one summer winter
Speaker 1: layer is very thin compared to the next one below it,
Speaker 1: you could say, well, there was a year where there
Speaker 1: was a relatively heavy amount of precipitation followed by a
Speaker 1: year where there was very light precipitation. Then you could
Speaker 1: go and start doing more studies to see, like, while
Speaker 1: there are other elements inside this ice core could indicate
Speaker 1: why that might have been the case, What what was
Speaker 1: going on in the atmosphere that would have made one
Speaker 1: year particularly heavy with precipitation and the following year light. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see, So maybe you could just for example, look
Speaker 1: at concentrations of different atmospheric chemicals in the layers preceding
Speaker 1: the layers that have more precipitation, So like, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: it's strange there was more nitrogen in the atmosphere the
Speaker 1: past three seasons before we had these heavy precipitation seasons.
Speaker 1: Or it might be look here, that up, that's not
Speaker 1: a real result. And then you can also look and say, oh,
Speaker 1: look at the concentration of carbon dioxide for example. Now
Speaker 1: you've gotta be a little careful with this, particularly with
Speaker 1: the green Land examples, because carbon doox i can get
Speaker 1: dissolved in water and sometimes they're they're also melting layers.
Speaker 1: Melting layers are where, uh, you know, the temperature got
Speaker 1: high enough so that some snow had melted. The water
Speaker 1: can trickle down into the snowpack and you get these
Speaker 1: kind of bubble free areas of ice. That's a melt layer,
Speaker 1: which can still be have a lot of useful information
Speaker 1: in it, but it also means that sometimes water that
Speaker 1: has carbon dioxide dissolved in it can set down into
Speaker 1: older layers and thus change the composition of them, giving
Speaker 1: you a false positive that there was more common carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide in a layer than there really was. Fortunately scientists
Speaker 1: are aware of this. And uh and like I said,
Speaker 1: that's more prevalent in Greenland and Antarctica, you don't tend
Speaker 1: to see that same issue. But uh, you know, you
Speaker 1: can also look at things like, um, the chemical composition,
Speaker 1: which will tell you more about the concentration of greenhouse
Speaker 1: gases uh in any given year, and you can look
Speaker 1: for trends. Right, you can actually look and see like
Speaker 1: it may not be uh, this love layer was thick
Speaker 1: and that layer was thin. It maybe we're seeing a
Speaker 1: gradual decrease in layers over a really long time, followed
Speaker 1: by uh, a period where they were very very thin
Speaker 1: layers for a long time, and then very thick layers
Speaker 1: as another ice age started coming on. You could actually
Speaker 1: see these big trends, because that's really what we're talking
Speaker 1: about with climate. Right. Climate isn't weather. We often, like
Speaker 1: the people often will conflate the two. Right, climate influences weather, right,
Speaker 1: and and climate is like you know, a weather is
Speaker 1: this is this localized, regional, temporal thing, like it's happening
Speaker 1: in a very small time span. You're talking like, while
Speaker 1: the weather is terrible today, climate is long reaching. It
Speaker 1: can it's a global thing. It's not or at least
Speaker 1: a much larger regional thing. Um and it it is not. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not as mercurial you could say, as weather would be,
Speaker 1: because weather can change dramatically day to day. Climate are
Speaker 1: these long trends. Describing climate would be like describing Jonathan's personality.
Speaker 1: Describing weather would be like, can you believe what Jonathan's
Speaker 1: said this morning? Yeah? Well, put so. Uh. By looking
Speaker 1: at this, we can say, all right, during this period
Speaker 1: of time where we know there was a greater concentration
Speaker 1: of greenhouse gasses because it was trapped in the ice,
Speaker 1: we have we have uh, we've analyzed the ice. We
Speaker 1: know what the concentrations are. We can see from the
Speaker 1: following layers how that affected climate over a great span
Speaker 1: of time. So, because our records don't stretch back that far. Heck,
Speaker 1: our our weather records don't stretch back far at all,
Speaker 1: we're talking like a century or so, and otherwise we're
Speaker 1: we're relying upon things like the recollections that people had
Speaker 1: written down and either letters or or you know, just
Speaker 1: the general language used by people who are writing at
Speaker 1: the time what the weather might have been like. This
Speaker 1: is an actual way for us to look back and say,
Speaker 1: here's what the climate was a hundred thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and here's what here's how the climate changed over a
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years span. I mean, it's a big picture
Speaker 1: look at something that otherwise we would just be making
Speaker 1: wild guesses about. And that's really interesting to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's obviously incredibly useful. I have to say again how much.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's just me, but anything that's that old gives
Speaker 1: me this very cool, mysterious feeling. I get a little
Speaker 1: teary about it. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's neat
Speaker 1: to know that there there exists a record where by
Speaker 1: applying careful scientific, careful scientific approach to analyzing that material,
Speaker 1: we can draw very very uh, very interesting conclusions about
Speaker 1: what the Earth was like well before humans were walking
Speaker 1: around and being human ish. You know, it's really kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. And again, shuck ups. So well, Jonathan, thanks
Speaker 1: for helping me look into this totally random question. This
Speaker 1: was this was interesting. I'm curious too because we have
Speaker 1: love listeners who have done a lot of different things
Speaker 1: and including people who have worked on really interesting scientific projects.
Speaker 1: So if any of you out there have ever worked
Speaker 1: on something like this. If you've ever used like an
Speaker 1: ice drill an auger in that sense, I would love
Speaker 1: to hear about your experience and what it was like. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know a lot of you guys out
Speaker 1: there and probably used augers in one way or another.
Speaker 1: Buzz specifically talking about ice drills in this case. Uh.
Speaker 1: If so, you should let me know, send me an
Speaker 1: email message, and if you want to hear a podcast
Speaker 1: about a specific topic something else about technology, whether it's
Speaker 1: how something works or a bigger picture on a particular
Speaker 1: company or personality, let me know. That email address is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can drop me a line on Facebook, Tumbler, or Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle at all three is tech Stuff H s W.
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