bluedot 2018 | Tamsin Edwards: The Language of Ice and the Fingerprints of Fires

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you so much for that warm welcome thank you if you stayed on after Richard Dawkins is amazing to be on the stage after him and and before thalis indeed so I'm going to give what is actually quite a calm and Compton for to talk so it's an interesting kind of backdrop of music to go with it but if you can try to kind of tap into that serene side of of today then that will really help the arts and sciences in that capacity to draw new images into our lives continuously bring metaphors to our attention I found this quote in the text of a talk my father gave many years ago he was an art therapist so he constantly sought ways that images could help us make sense of the world he understood that science is another way to discover and create powerful new pictures so today will not be a scientific lecture of facts and figures I'll show images sounds and stories that are beautiful thought-provoking perhaps surprising that might spark new ideas and new ways of seeing the world to quote my dad again nothing of what follows has to be remembered but you may find that a few images or ideas stick in your mind even for no apparent reason if so make some sort of mental note and keep them at least vaguely with you an artist is someone who as this says sees the world and explores this picture is from the wall of an art studio in a primary school in Bristol where I ran a workshop about polar explorers and how we make sense of the world through art and friends a scientist is also someone who sees the world and explores the language of ice what do we think of when we imagine or say the word ice frozen not just below freezing but also static unyielding icy means impassive called unmoved but also brittle when pushed past its limit to shattering a repeating structure always the same barren unable to sustain life silent save the familiar gentle cracking as you pour your drink over ice cubes white passive these are some of the stereotypes some of the archetypal policies but ice is much richer than this I want to reveal some of its other sides which might contradict our expectations first silence [Music] [Music] [Music] the ice was here the ice was there the ice was all around it cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a swirl and swooned means fainting fit but in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner carolerich intends it intended it to evoke the ghostly spectral voices that they meet later so ice ice has a rather ferocious alarming voice whistling and planing it's not a cold silence but a cacophony and that voice comes from the structure of ice itself if ice was soft or liquid it could not crash and grind together if it were as hard as stone or metal it would not so easily frack their crack can fracture splitting is splitting ice contains these opposites it is both unyielding and brittle it lies on the boundary between and the structure of ice is unique it contains much more space than one would expect rather than rectangular boxes ice is a kind of honeycomb a series of caves it is a framework that holds space and if you haven't already seen it I highly recommend growing crops as serious forces of nature it had a slightly dreamy quality to it and I'm not referring to the professor's good looks the first episode was a beautiful exposition of how the symmetries we see in nature hint at the scientific and mathematical laws that lie beneath like the spherical shape of the planets which shows the gravity that pulls them together he explained how the six-sided shape of a snowflake is an expression of that underlying ice crystal structure the shapes of those ice caverns within which in turn arise because of the unusual way water molecules are attracted to one another a water molecule is a v-shape an oxygen atom holding hands with two hydrogen's these V shapes are attracted to each other in a way that encircles as much space as possible between them making hexagons here's Brian showing us and we find this symmetry aesthetic aesthetically pleasing but that symmetry that draws us to catch snowflakes is also a way in which ice reveals its nature to us and it's not the only way [Music] the large spaces in ice crystals mean it is very light it is the only commonly occurring solid that floats in its own liquid how interesting you might or might not think a curious scientific fact to store away for a future pop quiz but let me repeat it for its importance I said the only commonly occurring solid that floats in its own liquid this means that when oceans and ponds start to freeze they do so from the top down the ice acts as a lid insulating water so it remains liquid it means fish in the water can survive even when the air above is well below freezing so life on this planet as we know it can only exist because ice holds space and floats ice again as a boundary as a barrier and protection against the other elements but the sea ice in the Arctic forms another kind of barrier another kind of protect against the sun's rays this is a picture of the northern hemisphere looking down on Canada and North America northern Russia northern Europe you can see Greenland a big sort of oval here and in between the sea ice in the Arctic and you can see how bright it is just as bright as the snow on the land that ice reflect the sun's rays you already may know this helping to keep that part of the world cool and so the whole planet cooler and with global warming of course that sea ice is starting to decrease you see more of the dark ocean below and you the more of the sun's rays are absorbed and warm the planet so again ice as a kind of protection ice expresses its ambiguous nature both strong and fragile both space and barrier through its fearsome sounds the symmetry of a snowflake and through floating on water rather than silent and passive I speak to us with its own voice when we know how to listen to the language of ice we can hear whispers of its form now I'm so far given the impression of ices having a very uniform sort of structure and it does when it forms but ice in the real world is very far from identical and unchanging it takes on the characteristics of its environment what surrounds that the pressures exerted on it there is an incredibly diverse typology of ice and working with by geologists I've discovered just how rich this classification system is this language of ice sea ice is made from frozen ocean water the following quote is from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute at the onset of winter cold air chills the surface waters until a relatively large layer of water at minus 2 degrees Celsius has formed on the surface a soupy crystalline mixture known as frazil ice begins to form in the upper layer as the soup thickens a thin film of ice known as grease ice forms this film is front strong enough to support the weight of the sea bird and can ripple with the waves passing beneath [Music] as a surface temperature begins to drop the ice forms a solid layer and is then poured pack ice but between these stages are many more seafarers and glaciologists seem to have as many names for ice as the Inuit are said to have the snow shoe guys is a slush made of spongy white lumps pancake ice is just as you'd expect [Music] Annihilus ice is an elastic sheet an elastic sheet of sea ice that bends over waves without breaking and it's called dark Nilus or light nilus depending on its thickness one finger length or two and therefore how much of the dark ocean can be seen through it Nilus goes on to form young ice thick enough to break from the waves young gray ice if it is one hand span thick gray white if it is too if young mice persists it becomes first-year ice ranging from thin first year to white ice medium first year thick first year which is as thickness of man as tall and staying long it becomes second year a multi-year ice you can see here the smoother first year ice at the bottom the rougher multi-year at the top here this is nilus ice this dark blue patch is actually the Nilus ice the young gray white is this gray area here and second year ice in the bottom left [Music] flows flat pieces of sea ice maybe named small which are 20 metres across medium big vast or giant six miles wide and just as important for seafaring of course is how much of the ocean is covered open pack ice covers half the water surface with many of paths between the flows but as the ice closes in the pack the is called closed pepper or very close compact and finally consolidated when flows right over each other and merge it is called rafted ice when packed ice breaks up it is called brash ice and when honeycombed and near disintegrated it is known as rotten icebergs originated on land their vast chunks of ice that have broken free from glaciers and ice sheets and they can be described as tabular like this one blocky tilted tilted blocky dome shaped pinnacled weathered wedge or drydock so-called because you can park your boats in the middle and the shapes of icebergs hint at their history their formation their erosion that collision a medium-sized iceberg about the size of a house has the rather lovely name will of Bergy bit and a small iceberg the size of a truck or a grand piano is called a growler and the definition of a growler is big enough to sink your ship but not big enough to show up on your radar I'm sure we can all think of the growler or to you in our lights so not only does ice have a voice but it needs an entire vocabulary a language to describe its rich variety so why are the obsession well for explorers and scientists and the Inuit other indigenous people in the Arctic the type of floating ice is a matter of life and death losing Arctic sea ice as I talked about before is already having an impact on the local people a PhD student from Labrador in that area studying climate and glaciers and permafrost told me we use the ice to hunt fish and access traditional grounds Xion make bites reductions make that more difficult and current predictions are that the Arctic will be nearly ice-free each September that waxes and wanes with the cycles and as it ways that minimum in the September could become nothing before the middle of the century or around the middle of the century if we continue with business as usual or higher greenhouse gas emissions but someone else of course had the opposite problem Ernest Shackleton had too much sea ice in the Antarctic in his record of the his 1914 expedition as he struggled to navigate through the sea ice to reach the continent he unhappily roped pack ice might be described as a gigantic and interminable jigsaw puzzle devised by Nature is ship the endurance later succumbed to what he called the attack of the ice I cannot describe the impression of relentless destruction that was forced upon me as I looked down and around the flows with the force of millions of tons of moving ice behind them with simply annihilating the ship endurance then was a name given to the ship in hope hope of survival in the wilds of the ice four years ago for the centenary of the expedition I ran a primary school workshop at the same place I'd mentioned earlier about polar science and exploration and within our art studio that you as the children put it we aren't told what to do we follow our own ideas so after the workshop we asked them to make artwork in response to it and submit it through a competition judged by polar scientists the school is in one of the most deprived areas of Britain so when one of the children submitted this work I found it very moving indeed I wondered if this 11 year old boy like Shackleton had written endurance as a desire and a will to survive the forces that pressed in against him and I hope it helped we also asked the children to judge a competition of photos submitted by polar scientists from their fieldwork they awarded joint first prize to two photos that are not only beautiful in their own right but also reveal the unusual ways ice can be seen in the natural world this first was an iceberg about to break away in Iceland made of the oldest and hardest form of glassy ice known as blue ice and blue is actually in a sense the true colour of ice ice is only white because of the air bubbles inside it and so when it's very compressed it squeezes the air bubbles out then it looks like the ocean it absorbs every color except blue so blue is what we see [Music] the second is a Sun halo a phenomena in Antarctica when the Sun shines through ice crystals suspended in the air so instead of a rainbow it is a kind of iceberg so ice can exert these huge pressures because of its strength as it did for Shackleton but the thick ice of glasses and ice sheets is also under its own kind of pressure gravity this makes it deform and slide and to flow these glaciers in Antarctica are flying just like icing down the sides of a cake here's the whole of continent of Antarctica which I study in my research and the whole vast ice sheet is actually flowing outwards from the center we think of it as a static unyielding chain unchanging place but it's flowing outwards from the center under its own weight in streams of ice along the coast that ice breaks up and off into the oceans at its fastest I scan flow by several kilometers a year this is showing the Amundsen Sea in Bayman area of Antarctica which is about the size of Texas and these are the two vast glasses of Pine Island and Thwaites which are the area which is the area that Antarctica losing ice at the moment so part of my work is to predict whether this kind of ice flow is going to speed up in the future with global warming or natural variability and ice here in this landscape is not static but very much dynamic very much evolving this rather beautiful picture shows the flow of ice and the colors are the speed of the ice where pink is pink and blue are the fastest so you can see it's just like rivers of ice catchments flowing in streams and tributaries through trees that join together and flow into the ocean these pink areas are the big ice shelves the two biggest ice shelves this is a haiku which is based on climate research which was talked about in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report back in 2013 so they had some headline findings and a guy called Greg Thompson turned those into haiku and water public color pictures so just thinking about ice this one reads clusters and ice sheets melt worldwide speed increasing sea ice snow retreat so there are Oh another one sorry yeah but she has no receipt no Arctic format I soon which I mentioned frozen earth melts - so there are subtle variations in the way ice is formed and the way it interacts with its environment and with us each of those can surprise us with its danger its softness Beauty complexity each confirms the nature of ices ambiguous slippery in more sense than one ice can be a fear of death but it can also be nurturing with its beauty the next stereotype barren this is a hole in the ice formed when black dust landed on the surface and darkened it that darkening made the ice warmer and melt away as the dust sank down the hole filled with water and the water filled with life in the hole bacteria algae sometimes insects blown in with the dust and the wind live that can tolerate the cold each hole is an entire ecosystem with different species nutrients and cycles life death life death the living things and the whole produced energy that warm the ice and make the hole grow larger in the winter a lid of ice protects the inhabitants with a small amount of water beneath so when summer returns the lid melts and the colony continues to grow in the hole there are microscopic monsters this is a ciliate one of the most complex single-celled organisms it is covered in cilia small hair like features which they use as touch sensors to move and to feed pink snow red snow watermelon snow blood snow some cups these and the names given to snow and ice on which algae have left their red color snow and ice are so bright so unrelenting in their exposure to the Sun but these algae contain a kind of sunscreen to protect them from the ultraviolet rays these are red orange and yellow pigments called carotenoids carotenoids are found in carrots which is why using carrots helps protect your eyes from ultraviolet damage but not just carrots now found in tomatoes red peppers flowers autumn leaves edgert shrimp crab and lobsters corals fish amphibians and the pink Flemish of flamingos so far from being barren ice can sustain life and life in turn can give heat and color to the ice now I talked about the voice and the vocabulary of ice the pressures and the life but Isis also a record keeper a history book ancient Isis has a language that speaks about the past Helen key might know here presents' radio for programs on science and space she asked me about ancient ice for her book the science of Game of Thrones I will borrow from her writing because I like the way she tells her story the cold keeps all kinds of secrets scientists working in Antarctica are using finely balanced drills to bore as deep as 3 kilometres into glaciers and ice sheets extracting rods of ice known as ice cores to catch a glimpse of undiscovered history these ice cores have allowed us to look back as far as 800,000 years and there is hope it will one day soon be 1 million years or more when I speak to Tamsin she's just come back from the British Antarctic Survey Labs there's a photo of her on Twitter beaming with utter delight as she holds a tiny offcut ice chip to her ear the survey have a bag of leftover ice core chips and their visitors can rub them beneath their fingers and listen when the ice is exposed to a bit of human heat the bubbles of ancient atmosphere trapped inside it audibly desert gases that were caught in ice when woolly mammoths ancient Greeks roughed Elizabethans roamed the earth are freed into the air again after their long cold imprisonment scientists can analyze the composition of trapped air bubbles in the ice core to give us a record of Earth's climate history [Music] glasses contain layer upon layer of fallen impacted snow so it's perhaps not surprising that they can tell us how much snow fell in a particular year the sizes of the snow layers I like the rings of a tree but the tiny amounts of gas dust and particles of debris that are also trapped when the fluffy snow falls on fluffy snow and freezes can tell us even more violent volcanic eruptions leave a layer of distinctive she dust and tiny shards of volcanic glass amid the ice crystals telling tales of cataclysms before recorded human history began we can see there's a distinct rise in lead dust when the use of Queen age became widespread first in ancient Greece then across the Roman Empire before a sudden fall when the Roman LED mines are exhausted and the Roman Empire itself begins to decline but this isn't all we can learn from those bubbles of gas trapped by the falling snow climate scientists have records of how much carbon dioxide and methane were in the air in the past compared with today we can also get a rough idea of what the temperature was like like in the area at the time putting this information together climate scientists come up with a sawtooth figure showing our Earth's long history of ice and prayer Ice Age is coming along every hundred thousand years or so with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide rising and falling in regular patterns it is difficult not to be captivated by the song of the Antarctic ice cause the waxing and waning of great empires the Greeks the Romans the Victorians recorded in ancient dust and gas found frozen in time deep inside an uninhabited continent at the ends of the earth after that coincidental mention of Ice and Fire we come to the fingerprints of fire I want to talk not just about fire but about what it leaves behind the markers that signify its presence the way it fire imprints itself on the natural world we start with a primordial fire the Sun not a true fire of course made from the forging of atoms but more ferocious than any on earth the Sun has fingerprints upon its surface sunspots black marks as if a child with fingers had clutched of all those spots change every day every months every year but sunspots are not just a curious pattern despite their darkness they might areas of Greater solar activity more heat more fire as the number of sunspots waxes and wanes so does the sun's power and so too deserts temperature in 1645 there was a 70 year period with abnormally few sunspots and Earth's climate was noticeably cooler but in today's climate as it were when we think of warming we think of the greenhouse effect we might think of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide as a malevolent force an unwanted intruder on our calm climate our sins made flesh a devil of fires and furnaces in the Brothers Grimm story the grave Mount the devil is called the charcoal burner but without the warming of the greenhouse effect there would be no life on earth the planet would be far too cold like the warmth of a campfire the greenhouse gases sustain us in the cold night of the universe so the concern about today's greenhouse effect is one of balance too much of a good thing if both the Sun and greenhouse gases warm the earth how can we tell which is more important now the method scientists use to deduce the culprit culprit in the whodunit of global warming is called fingerprinting this is a snapshot of a BBC program I helped with called climate change by numbers now the sun's rays leave a very particular fingerprint on our atmosphere this yellow shows every layer of the atmosphere warms early evenly greenhouse gases leave a different fingerprint they warn the lower levels of the atmosphere shown in red close to the surface while the upper layers in blue and purple cool so fingerprinting is the name that we give to identifying the different influences of the sun's fire on our own warming on the client climate volcanoes ruptures in the earth a glimpse of the liquid fire just beneath the planets thin crust and a hint at the deeper liquid core close to the center of the earth this deepest most hidden fire of liquid iron turns and tumbles inside the planet and creates the Earth's magnetic field without that magnetic field our atmosphere would be unprotected from the Sun and stripped away into face so the fire inside the earth protects us from that of the Sun and sustains all life but volcanoes can also bring cold when a large volcano erupts gases are thrown into the high atmosphere like a huge eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 those gases react with water in the atmosphere in the air to form tiny particles these particles hang in the air reflecting the sunlight which cools the earth for a few years they can also amplify the sunsets this is Hong Kong after the Pinatubo eruption some people think that turner's paintings were influenced by high volcanic activity at the time so bringing to mind the algae in the red snow a volcanic eruption can both turn the skies red and yellow and also act as a global sunscreen the fire inside the earth can protect and cool the climate again with fire as paradox as a contradiction fire is destruction this shows a wildfire in Texas in 2011 and global warming makes wildfires more likely more droughts more heat waves it will also bring good in some places fewer people of dining have cold better harvests in the cold northern highlands but it will take more than it gives we burn my carbon air warms for decades but seas for millennia human ingenuity though is being stepped a task to harness the fires of the Sun and global warming some of those suggestions are pure science fiction one is that we might protect ourselves from the sun's rays with a giant Sun Shade in space the Sun is so blindingly strong we would only need to brought block less than 2 percent of its power to compensate for our own warming so this idea of a Sun Shade brings me back to the Ancient Mariner the Western wave was all aflame the day was well nigh done almost upon the Western wave rest the broad bright Sun when that strange shape drove suddenly betwixt us and the Sun another idea is that we might mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes throwing those same gases into the air to create those particles that reflect sunlight away Helios the Titan drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky when his son v Don asked to take the Rings to prove to prove his divine heritage Helios warned beware my son recall your request while yet you may it is not honor but destruction you seek I beg you to choose more wisely Python of course loses control of the horses scorching the earth but fire might be tamed in a far gentler way fairy tales can be subversive because they suggest to us unexpected solutions strangely enough the brute the Grimm's brothers charcoal-burner might be a way to temper global warming we can plant trees for their ability to take carbon dioxide from the air and reduce global warming but for this to work we cannot let them decompose because this releases the carbon dioxide back into the air we must find a way to lock the carbon into the wooded definitely one way to stop word from rotting is to turn it into charcoal by gently burning the wood not too much fire not too little it barkins and can remain intact for thousands of years charcoal from the early fires of man can still be found in the soil tens or hundreds of thousands of years old so the fingerprints of fire on would then provide hope by locking up carbon dioxide charcoal prevents it from warming the atmosphere fire might be manipulated as an ally might be tamed without that fear of danger I will edit with four images some images of ice and fire in one a bulk a no in the ice this beautiful photo was taken during the 2010 eruptions that salt stopped air traffic around Europe this rather startling fruit issue scientist setting fire to methane gas bubbles escaping from under the ice and frozen ground large areas of the world's permafrost are predicted to soar with global warming and some of those areas might release methane adding to the greenhouse gas effect we don't yet know how much finally ice itself can burn this is me think laugh rate also known as fire ice just like the previous images the fire is caused by burning methane but instead of trapped bubbles the methane is bound up in the very structure of the ice itself the ice and the fire each containing opposites as they exchange places and coexist in the natural world thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] can't see anyone shout I like to take that as a sign that it was all perfectly clear Oh everyone's sound kind of calm and soporific yes well throughout the whole year is a different question and I'm not sure if that's what you're asking well it's compared with what I was talking about about the the minimum so I think scientific climate scientists tend to make most of their predictions for this century and so after the highest the sort of very high greenhouse gas scenario that we that we think of as a as a what if for the future we look at other scenarios as well it's the minimum that would that would disappear sort of middle of the century maybe slightly after under those conditions and what I'm not sure about actually is how long it would take for the Arctic sea ice to disappear completely I would think that that was more on the two or three hundred year timescale but that's a bit speculation certainly I mean my area is more the actual ice on land of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and again it's a mixed picture we think that there would be a lot of ice loss from both this century but those kind of really worrying tipping points of losing the whole ice sheet say in Greenland would be much more thousands of years so they're always multiple kind of timeframes that we're thinking about in climate science but certainly I think the whole of the sea ice would be would be a little way off but but it is an amplifying process really the more you lose the more you lose again because of that warming effect that I talked about I think there was one more donor was a couple donor I think [Music] the mining yeah I mean I guess the way that climate scientists make predictions in a way is quite crude this idea of a what-if scenario and what's what's challenging is to balance that the you know thinking about the what-ifs from me what is actually happening and it always takes some time to run the climate model simulation sometimes years as well so you can't always be absolutely up-to-date with every single emission of carbon dioxide say that's out there every possible thing that's happening so to some extent it's a little bit of a broad pick brush picture and we're saying if the co2 was this high we think the climate change would be this much if the co2 was this low we think the climate change would be this much and then we go back and see how much those scenarios compare with what's actually happening but quite often that happens kind of in hindsight and we say well we've been tracking this one or we've been tracking this one so it's a bit more broad-brush than that but certainly obviously we try to include everything we can yeah okay thanks very much

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Id: aC5IBmesUyQ

Length: 40min 13sec (2413 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019