Exploration=Survival: Getting Your Hands Dirty in Global Issues | Paul Rose | TEDxCornellUniversity

[Music] foreign I'm the head of expeditions for National Geographic pristine seas and my life's work is meeting scientists with really ambitious hypotheses and turning those ideas their risky ideas that have been formed up in the lab turning those into action in the field now of course like all the best Adventures it comes with some unexpected hazards like this project here this is me in the Arctic very recently and our bear dog was very unhappy when I was diving under the ice he was very nervous and on the last dive of the project he independently brought an end to the Expedition by when I came to the surface grabbing me on the head I had no idea what was happening except it hurt like hell and it lasted a long time but it felt a bit like love he wanted me back there and to me when I look at that sign and I sometimes feel these lumps on my head and these scars it's lovely just to remember that beautiful moment in the field my work is at the front line of field work it really is where the magic happens it's where all the numbers come from every single science data point every field observation certainly every science paper helps Drive Global economies and informs smart political decision making and here's what that looks like limpets tell great stories when I was the base commander for the British Antarctic Survey at Rotherham we were working on Olympics as part of our climate change project it's a really great idea Olympic shells grow a little bit like tree rings so if we can look at look at Limpet shells we can learn quite a lot about past climate and also project future climate naturally so it was pretty simple at first we'd swim around like hundreds of Olympics very quickly get them in the lab keep their feet cold into minus two water that is analyze the shells and get it back in the sea very quickly now these are long Dives you can see it's very shallow so they're Long Cold Dives and and that water is very nutrient Rich so it's very murky the ice is on the move you need to use a line so you sometimes when the wind closes up the ice you can't get back up but in those kind of conditions the lion gets caught they're really long difficult Dives and then the science team one day said all stop we think we need a map as to where the Olympics come from and also make sure they go back exactly where you found them well imagine the workload then went up you know 10 or 100 fold but of course we did it we had the Olympics all marked up with the yellow nail varnish and we swam around with these complicated maps and then afterwards when we're still feeling the cold from the first dive we'd be back in getting extra cold swimming around you know number 74 where the hell did he come from and we'd get them back in but you know what I absolutely loved it and the whole team loved it because we recognized and you feel it and you know it that you're at the front end of climate change and you're making a big personal difference now how did I get into that well I got into that by being terrible in school I certainly couldn't have come here but I hated school the teachers were the enemy and all I wanted to do was get away but I did enjoy watching television so when I was 11 all these people were whizzing past me I've written Jacques Cousteau with his team traveling the world on Calypso Hans and Lottie house with those incredible black and white images when you look back on those black and white images now they're look a bit grainy but in those days wow there's a whale shark you know here it is and for me as a young boy it had to be him I mean just look at the title Mike Nelson battles armored car robbers underwater at a desert lake and for me that was it here's a fictional character the others are real there's a fictional character and every week he was having testosterone adventures in the water and I thought to myself that's for me uh but that dream didn't help at school if anything as you can well imagine I I declined because I just had this crazy dream and didn't engage with with the school but then luckily enough I was saved by all people by teacher a geography teacher who took us to the Brecken beacons which is on the English Welsh border it's a very beautiful place I've never seen anything like it in my life it felt big and wild and beautiful and the weather was really powerful and I absolutely loved it I discovered I was naturally good at it I was really good at long days in the Hills I was really good at crossing rivers I had a good sense of safe routes up and safe routes down I had no idea I was doing mathematics but I I was there with a map and compass and I had a good Instinct working out how to get there and then I particularly enjoy because I hadn't experienced it before that sense of teamwork and Leadership at the end of each day where all the tents were wet and the sleeping bags were wet and the boots were wet and the waterproofs are wet get everything back to the youth hostel get it all hung up and cleaned and mop the floor and help with the cooking and I couldn't have said it at that time but I still remember sitting on the step of the eustos youth hostel peeling hundreds of potatoes into a bucket and I thought and I'd never felt so alive I could not have described it at that time but in that way but I still here with you all today I can feel that moment and that energy that sense of confidence and being good at something plus the general Buzz have been out in bad weather for lots of weeks you know I had that glow got me back to school and in those days if you passed anything you could leave um but but I was rated to not pass anything but I got back to school and I managed to pass something I passed metal work uh ordinary level pass so that means I could leave school and I'm happy to share with you all today that remains my highest academic qualification to date with that same energy I managed to get into professional diving a diving instructor and also Mountain guiding so I was working at Sea I was working in lakes and I was working in the mountains and I bumped into scientists and something called science support because you know scientists need a lot of non-science support you know from cooks to airplane pilots all of those non-science support jobs and this is a great example this is just Jeff Severn house from Scripps with a whopping great equation which is almost indecipherable it certainly is to me but it was about how and why we're going to collect ancient methane from the ice and of course he needs people like me to help do that but before we got stuck into the work here we are on the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica when we first land in a place like that from a science support side I'm thinking right get Camp up get the food and fueling get things established get the science laboratory tents go and let's get to work particularly in a place like this which looks undeniably beautiful but it's a very hostile place it's one of the windiest places on the planet and certainly it feels like one of the coldest but before all that can happen there's a wonderful moment of pause where either Jeff or Vasily is up that ladder because there's a perfect height step ladder and with the right light and the right Distance by over on the left there the scientists could tell the features in the ice exactly where we started to drill and it's a great moment a moment of great patience I'm Keen to get going to work but guess what it's all stop the world stops eventually we get the go ahead and we set up camp and there's a small camp and it's highly technical the outside is very sort of industrial drilling holes in the ice we're collecting those big ice calls we're preparing the cores we're putting them on the melter on the left hand side which is a mum one million B2 BTU melter it's a big physical practical semi-industrial job inside the lab it's highly technical highly precise even when the tent is being shaken by the wind and there's a lot of noise and Racket going on all of that analysis going inside that tent is true high quality Laboratory up in Greenland on the ice sheet we couldn't drill the holes because of the way the ice is formed we had to use sort of open cast mining techniques and that was right up my street because it's hugely physical and we would chainsaw and shovel 11 tons of ice put it in the melter and then extract the gases and carry on for the methane and one of the things I did learn on both those projects a big surprise to me is you have to do a whole season wearing a plastic bag because the microfibers coming from our Gore-Tex and elsewhere can contaminate those samples so here you are working hard in a very challenging environment freezing cold wearing a plastic bag rather a research station which is my base I was the base commander here for 10 years undeniably the most beautiful research station on the planet was the launch pad the hub for science hundreds of science projects going from the coast all the way down to the South Pole a key moment in a research station life is when the supply ship comes it's a really great thing only once or twice a year if you're lucky and in there would be food and fuel for the next 18 months there'd be the new fresh team there'd be science gear there'd be new new machines new people and the food was the most important and for me when this was going and it's still called relief which is the old term for relieving the base when relief was going on I used to walk into the galley and smell fresh cucumber and that was like yep we're gonna survive no problem in the remote camps which is where I've spent most of my time in the Antarctic they're very mobile so you're traveling light and we're using these lightweight Scott polar tents your input by the um you know pickup trucks of Antarctic these small twinot aircraft maybe quite a few leaps to get you in so once you're in you're very remote you're a long way from the base and the aircraft would not leave until you double checked everything and most importantly made a radio call back to the base so you had good comms now when a ski equipped airplane departs it's really noisy near tons of snow and ice blowing around but once it's gone there's that exaggerated silence and it's a wonderful wonderful may you go well it's just me and the scientists in the field 100 110 days traveling completely Independence amazing feeling so no matter where we are if we're on a research station in a small technical camp on the Taylor Glacier in a remote camp or in a very cold camp this is one of my old camps near the South Pole the work goes on and that work that goes on in the field is exactly to the standard that was set in the lab whether it's the frequency or the type of samples that are being taken whatever it is it's got to be at that standard and you don't see that in many Industries you know when people are really tired exhausted same old food Terrible Weather you've got to get out the tent now because you've got to take that sample right then our work at pristine Seas we have a similar method we work from the surface to the very bottom of the ocean at the surface you can see we're using scuba diving we're using remote cameras a bit deeper we're using special Deep dive techniques then we use our submarine down to 400 meters and below that we use these remote drop cameras which have been all the way to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and back up it's called pristine seeds because Professor Dr Henrik Salah from Scripps was writing science papers and one day he said you know every single science paper I write is like writing an obituary for the ocean I need something that's practical physical that's really going to make a difference so it came up with Christine seas and why not find explore and help protect the last truly wild pristine places in the ocean like putting money in the bank now we can measure pristineness in lots of different scientific ways but for me I always like to go on that first dive with Dr Alan friedlander our chief scientist I know him well and even from a great distance I can tell what he thinks of the that bit of the ocean and in this picture even without knowing Alan you'd think well yeah that's he's happy that's a pristine bit of water we use our submarine a lot that's me in there live reporting from the submarine it's great science platform and a great media platform but what a tool for politicians country leaders and ministers the environment we get them in it and we often get them in to their bit of the ocean it's the first time they've ever been in their ocean first time they understand what's going on and typically they get to love it and of course if we love it they can then be empowered to protect it so the front line of field science is hugely exciting I mean a very quick snapshot there you can see it's physical it's Dynamic it's committing and there's a sense of energy about this we're really getting somewhere and yet when we look at these amazing things like the sustainable development goals you know it's a terrific terrific set of global goals or climate change and how we talk about it for people like me that work in the field it looks dull it looks bureaucratic is full of politics and even worse it feels remote and a bit tedious like it's quite okay to miss these Global targets because life goes on you know so what you know one and a half degrees is the Paris agreement so what 30 by 30 campaign protect 30 of the land and the Sea by 2030. life just seems to go on it's not it's not real enough so there's a whopping grape uncomfortable Gap between the front line of science which is dedication energy commitment the sense of progress and it's physical and practical and then the way that it's described here in the Press which not only can it be tedious and dull and just a set of numbers but it can also be you know completely open to four to false news and false reporting anyway so we've got to recognize that Gap and fix it so what are we going to do well first we have to recognize as a gap there's a big problem there and to fill it we need to activate in the first instance the politicians and our Big Business Leaders and I think the way to do that is to somehow find a way that they feel what happens in the field if they felt the same if when we looked at politicians we thought well that person looks like she's just come back from Antarctica working with working working digging tons of tons of ice well that person you know she looks like she's just become back from big deep scuba Dives well that person there's been climbed we need to somehow get that sense of energy into our politicians I think the way we can do that is by all demonstrating our values and we have to accept that we can't expect Society to make informed and sometimes difficult decisions based on a set of numbers or goals that look as if they're algorithmic or mathematical projection we need to every time we see those numbers go this is these numbers have got people's life in them they're out there every day doing that piece of work they're live they've got the passion the drive the dedication the sacrifices that have been made because even today with all of our remote sensing equipment everywhere we still need scientists in the field to actually make this happen so I think if somehow we can recognize and celebrate the field scientists we can make all of these Global goals more personal and I think we can then make them more achievable so it's true science exploration really does mean our survival thank you very much foreign

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 256

Keywords: English, Exploration, Global Issues, Global issues, Nature, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:53819]

Id: 9GMI_pWEUT4

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023