Transcriber: Yanying Wu Reviewer: Emma Gon
Kids, kids, right? You know how kids are.
Everywhere you take them,
they are like, what’s that, or why is this here,
how did that come to be the way it is? Everywhere.
And... for the past 20 years
I’ve been studying the terrestrial ecosystems of Antarctica,
basically asking and answering those very same questions.
Tonight I want to talk to you about how curiosity-driven basic research
is shinning a light on and allowing us to understand
and address existential problems, like climate change.
But it’s also telling us something about biomedicine
and biological breakthroughs and human medicine
and also about the possibility of even finding life outside of Earth
and outside of our solar system.
So this is a high def [inition]
high resolution image of what is like in Antarctica.
Yeah, Antarctica is the highest, the driest
the windiest and the coldest continent on planet Earth.
And most of it looks like that,
about 98% of the continent is covered by huge ice sheet.
And the ice sheet is on average about two miles thick.
You have to drill down through two miles of ice,
before you actually get to the dirt that’s underneath that.
So my friends and I always joke about how the ski report at the South Pole is
like two miles pack, two inches powder.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
But it’s a continent.
So unlike the North Pole,
you got an ocean that’s over the North Pole.
The South Pole, you got a continent that’s down there
and it’s a big continent.
In this image superimpose the map of the United States
on top of the continent at the back Antarctica,
so you can see how big that continent is.
That continent is bigger than the United States
And across that continent runs a large mountain chain called
the Transantarctic Mountains.
And the Transantarctic Mountains prevent that ice cap
from coming over the other side of the mountains
and so on the leeward side of the mountains
you got these vast, ice free areas that are like large, polar deserts.
And that’s where I do most of my research.
In fact, my curiosity has taken me
throughout the Transantarctic Mountains.
In fact, in this place in northern Victoria Land,
about froze my fingers off
trying to study soil ecosystems, using sterile techniques.
And then way down here, closer to the South Pole,
actually fell into a crevasse one time trying to get from a glacier
to the soils that I was trying to sample.
Now, that was messed up, but most of the research
that I do takes place here in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest ice free area
of Antarctica and also home
of the long term ecological research program, a group that I work with.
And so in this picture,
you can see what my crib looks like
where I usually live when I’m down there.
So you can see my tent and you can see my backpack.
Excuse me, and you can see my sleep kit,
I might need a drink of water.
Actually, you don’t want to drink that.
Yeah, that’s not a water bottle, it looks like one.
That’s a pee bottle, right?
Because when you’re doing research in the most pristine environment
in the world, you can’t just go behind a rock and take a wee
because you’re going to ruin somebody else’s research
who comes by along later.
You have to think about it,
like this is the most pristine ecosystems on planet Earth.
They have never been jacked up by humans before.
There are no indigenous Antarcticans,
who lived there for thousands of years going around,
moving things around and burning stuff down
and pooping and peeing on stuff.
There have been no direct impacts by humans
on this part of the planet ever,
until now,
where humans thousands of miles away now by burning fossil fuels
and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
are changing atmospheric conditions,
which are then changing climate conditions,
which are now starting to have impacts on these ecosystems.
So they’re terrific places for us to try and understand
how climate change is affecting Earth’s ecosystems
in the absence of other human interventions.
So this is what prime real estate in the McMurdo Dry Valleys looks like.
Really nice, right? You’ll notice a lack of things like grass and trees, birds,
bugs, beetles, squirrels, mosquitoes, no mosquitoes down there.
Most of the life that exists there lives on the soils
and in the ephemeral melt streams
and in the permanently ice covered lakes that are there.
And you remember that life here
is limited by the presence of liquid water.
And most of the time the water down there
is locked up in a solid state, right? Ice.
But for a few weeks out of the year, that ice will melt.
It gets warm enough that ice will change state
from a solid to a liquid and then life happens.
And at this point, you’re saying like, all right, cool, man,
Wwhat kind of animals lived down here?
And you’ve all watched those nature shows on PBS.
Animal biodiversity and wildlife consist of a bunch of penguins,
maybe some seals, some killer whales.
Those are all super cool animals,
but they’re marine animal, they live in the ocean.
Those shows aren’t showing you
the totally awesome, charismatic megafauna of terrestrial Antarctica.
Right?
And so you want to know what those animals are, right?
Those animals got to be super tough.
Those animals got to be able to be freeze dried to a crisp
and then reanimate when they get liquid water again.
Or frozen in a block of ice and then come alive again
once they thaw out, super tough animals.
Tough animals like these,
tardigrades, right? Or rotifers or nematode worms.
All these animals are super tough.
You’ve heard about tardigrades being super tough before, right?
These are the animals that scientists took up into
the International Space Station,
and then they pushed them outside
and expose them to radiation in the vacuum of space
and crazy swings in temperature.
And then they brought them back to Earth,
added water to them, came back alive, right?
Awesome! And rotifers and nematode worms
these are some animals that have been recovered from Siberian permafrost
that’s 20,000 years old and you bring it into the lab
and you can revive these animals from that, right?
They come back alive. Totally awesome.
So when I go out and collect my samples
from that prime real estate in the McMurdo Dry Valleys,
and I put them under my microscope.
Right? Like, how cool is that!
To see these animals that have been in suspended animation
for who knows how long, come alive
right underneath your microscope.
That’s awesome!
But in addition to being super cool and beautiful and awesome,
these animals are also teaching us something about how terrestrial
ecosystems are responding to climate driven changes.
For example, my colleagues and I have done some experiments
where we show that some parts of Antarctica in response to warming
are actually probably going to get harsher.
They’re going to get drier and be less suitable for life, be more like Mars even.
But other parts of Antarctica
where it’s warming are becoming wetter,
and where it gets wetter and warmer,
the animals that have adapted to live in those environments now
are starting to expand their distributions
and their abundance across the landscape.
And those other animals that are adapted to the colder
and drier and saltier parts of the soils in Antarctica,
their abundance and distributions are starting to decrease
across the landscape.
Yeah. And another experiment that we’re really interested in,
a natural experiment, has to do with these lakes,
these permanently ice covered lakes, these lakes are closed basin lakes.
So they’re like bathtubs that don’t have a drain in them.
And as the climate warms, the glaciers are melting
and those streams are filling these lakes
and the lake levels are rising.
So my colleagues and I are really interested in understanding
the process by which dry land is subsumed by water
and terrestrial ecosystems are converted into aquatic ecosystems.
At this point you’re like whatever, well think about it,
that’s kind of a big deal given our future
and the rate at which ocean levels, sea levels are rising.
So understanding fundamental principles
about those concepts are going to be really important.
This is a picture of a site deep in the Transantarctic Mountains
where my colleagues and I collected some soil samples
that are the first that we know of ever found on planet Earth
that don’t have life in it.
Despite the fact that these soils have been exposed
to the atmosphere for millions of years,
life has not yet found a way to live there,
and this finding illuminates our ability
to identify the boundaries of life here on Earth.
But it also allows us and informs
our speculations about our ability to find life
elsewhere in the solar system and in the universe.
Pretty cool, right? Oh, yeah.
And remember those worms I was telling you about
dry them to a crisp?
Just add water, they come back alive.
Yeah I’ve got some colleagues who sort of borrowed that trick,
applied it to biomedicine, and made freeze dried blood for humans.
It’s a thing that is just not science fiction. It’s a thing. It’s legit.
And also consider this like
when a human heart is taken out of one person to be given to a recipient
that heart is good for about 5 hours and that’s it.
But imagine if we could take that trick
that that little nematode worm uses to be frozen in a block of ice
and then come back alive again.
If we could apply that trick to these human organs,
we could just freeze them and keep them on the shelf
until we got a recipient that’s ready for them.
How many human lives can we save with that trick?
Pretty cool, right?
All right. So up until now, I’ve been blathering on about
how basic curiosity-driven research can allow us to understand
and solve big existential problems like climate change.
And it’s providing these biomedical breakthroughs, and it’s telling
something about the likelihood of finding life outside of our planet.
But now I want to leave you with four important challenges
that are related to this.
And the first one has to do with extinction.
Currently, and this is a conservative estimate,
about 25 species go extinct every day.
And when they go, they take with them not just how beautiful they are
or their contributions to ecosystem structure and functioning.
But imagine this, if I wanted to take some cells
from a human or some tissues or organs
or maybe even the whole person and put them into suspended animation
and at some point in the future, like revive them again.
What if the trick to doing that
is locked up in the genomic architecture
of some obscure nematode worm somewhere
that like unfortunately just went extinct with 24 other animals today?
That’s messed up.
Like, what a missed opportunity, right?
Let's not do that anymore. Okay.
The second thing I want to talk about has to do with financing science.
There’s no company out there
that’s going to pay me millions of dollars
over a two decades to study worms in Antarctica. Right. Yeah.
That’s never going to happen because you can’t monetize that.
You can’t figure out what the balance is,
what the return of investment is on that until you’ve actually done it.
Exploratory research like this,
it’s like support for education or public support for the arts, right?
The investments in basic curiosity-driven scientific research
is probably one of the most hopeful things that we as humans do.
The third thing, all kids are brought into this world with
an innate sense of curiosity, a sense of wonder and awe.
And then as they start to grow up,
we adults just kind of beat it out of them.
That’s messed up too, right?
Because that generation needs that curiosity in order to ask the questions
and in order to solve the problems that we have run,
let’s nurture that curiosity in all of our kids
and in our in our friends and everyone, right?
That’s the start to the solution to the problem.
And then lastly, let’s empower our teachers.
Let’s give our teachers the support they need
to provide our kids with what they need
to answer the questions that their curiosity is driving.
That’s the greatest hope that we have for a better future.
Thank you.