Ted Scambos’s Antarctic Adventures: A Tale of Climate Science and Discovery

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable.
Helping me today is Ted Scambos. He is a glaciologist who has helped unravel the mysteries of Earth's frozen territories. As a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder's Earth Science Observation Center, Ted investigates the dynamic environments of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice.
Ted earned his PhD in geology from the University of Colorado in 1991. His career has focused on understanding climate change impacts on ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. He has gone to Antarctica over 19 times and braved the harshest conditions to collect measurements on remote glaciers.
Ted currently leads the science coordination office for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a major multinational effort to assess the stability of that glacier. He also co-directs the Tar Sand Project, creating advanced radar maps of hidden and Arctic terrain.
Ted has published over 150 articles on cryosphere topics from glaciology to paleoclimate records in ice cores.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, and now here is the remarkable Ted Scambos.
What exactly is a glacier?
Ted Scambos:
A glacier is massive ice that flows under its own weight. Typically they have to be about a hundred feet thick or so, and then under that kind of pressure, at the bottom, the ice begins to deform and flow. A glacier is usually at least about a half a square mile in area and flows outward. They're beautiful, really. If you get into an area that has a lot of glaciers, it's just a spectacular landscape, and many glacier areas in the northern hemisphere have national parks or some other fantastic world heritage site type designation.
It's an interesting aspect of earth science, because it's a part of the earth geology that's actually alive and moving and responding to climate, and that makes the subject really interesting to me. It's something that you can watch evolve in the course of a career, and see how changes that are happening, both ones associated with global climate change and also those just associated with where that particular glacier is or what rocks it's encountering, what obstructions it's encountering, how they change. And that makes it interesting. It's a faster paced form of geology that I think is really fun to work on.
Guy Kawasaki:
If I'm flying over Antarctica and I look down and I see ice and snow, is all of Antarctica a glacier or where do you say, "Okay, this is the end of the edge on land?" I don't understand.
Ted Scambos:
That's a tough question, maybe a little tough to explain. It's like if you were to pour a pancake dough onto a griddle except that this griddle had ridges at the end, and so you get this big dome of pancake dough spreading out, but then it squeezes through these ridges or mountain ranges at the end. So in terms of the official designation of where the glacier is, it just has to do with the slope on that big mound of ice. As long as it's going downhill towards a particular glacier, it's part of that glacier.
But I think if you were there looking out the window, you'd say, "Ah, where the ice starts to break up and I can see stripes because the ice is flowing and it's getting organized to go through this fjord, that's the glacier, and then the smooth area that hasn't really broken up very much yet, that's the ice sheet." That's an informal, but I think a personal sort of a definition that you might have.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so this glacier is thicker in the middle, further from the water, right?
Ted Scambos:
A lot thicker. In general, a lot thicker. Sometimes these fjords are really deep at the end of the glacier, but usually you've got about a mile, even two miles of ice at the beginning of the glacier in the center of Antarctica, flowing out towards the sea.
Guy Kawasaki:
And as the sea gets warmer and melts the edge, then it's more likely that the glacier can slide down some more into the water. Is that the danger?
Ted Scambos:
Yeah, that is. It's a little complicated. So I mentioned before that the glacier is, everywhere the ice is flowing in a downhill direction towards that glacier, that's part of the glacier. That's really what drives the glacier is that downhill slope, that flow. And if you start melting the bottom of the ice right at the ocean where it begins to go afloat or is stuck at the edge of the ocean, you make that last little bit steeper. You're taking away ice from the underside. The last little bit gets steeper, wants to flow faster into the ocean.
And the problem with a warmer ocean is that just a little bit of warming goes a long way. It's like ice in your cocktail or whatever. Even though the cocktail is cold, the ice disappears pretty quickly because water, even a few degrees or a degree above freezing, actually has a lot of heat in it. And that's the problem for Antarctica right now. There's warmer water reaching the underside of the ice along big stretches of the coast of the Antarctic ice sheet, and it's causing glaciers to speed up.
Guy Kawasaki:
And how do you pronounce that glacier?
Ted Scambos:
Thwaites.
Guy Kawasaki:
Thwaites. Okay.
Ted Scambos:
Yes, Thwaites.
Guy Kawasaki:
God forbid, if the whole thing were to fall into the ocean and melt. I read someplace that it'll raise the sea level two feet. Is that true?
Ted Scambos:
Yeah, that is true. Probably more than two feet, more like six to eight feet in total. And that's because Thwaites is in this sort of central position in a part of Antarctica that we call West Antarctica. You call it West Antarctica because it's in the western hemisphere. East and west in Antarctica are complicated because the South Pole is in the middle, but west Antarctica is the very far Southern Pacific Ocean. The ice that you encounter there is West Antarctica.
If Thwaites were to go, it's like a hole in the middle of that big ice sheet as it was deflating, and that's going to draw the rest of the ice around into Thwaites. Before it's done, Thwaites is actually going to unload just about all of the ice on West Antarctica. But I should say, that will take centuries of time. Initially, the problem is Thwaites, all by itself, maybe within sixty years or a hundred years, could greatly increase the rate of sea level rise.
So before we get to two feet of sea level rise, we're in for a rollercoaster ride of having three more inches, five more inches, six more inches, where every major port city around the world is struggling to keep the port open, keep flooding out of the streets and spending billions of dollars in order to protect it. So the real issue in the near term is how fast sea level rises, not the ultimate sea level rise.
Guy Kawasaki:
And let's say a city like New York does nothing. How many inches does it have to rise before Goldman Sachs building is under, let's say the lobby of the Goldman Sachs building is under water. How many inches are involved?
Ted Scambos:
They're worried about even a meter, which is about forty inches of sea level rise. That's substantial. That's three feet. Remember, Thwaites is one glacier, and there are a lot of places now contributing to sea level rise. And if you remember during a super storm or Hurricane Sandy, New York was flooded quite a bit, especially in Battery Park. What I didn't realize before Hurricane Sandy was that a lot of the edge of Manhattan has been built out and is actually fairly low and susceptible to sea level rise.
Manhattan is bigger than when we bought it for twenty-six dollars or whatever back in 1690 or whatever it was. And those areas that are bigger are really vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding and that sort of thing. But yeah, if New York were to do nothing, even another foot or two feet is going to make it more difficult the next time a storm surge like a hurricane comes close to New York Harbor.
Guy Kawasaki:
And would the melting of Thwaites, would it cause storm surges or it just makes an existing storm surge worse?
Ted Scambos:
It makes an existing storm surge worse, but you touched upon a point there, and that is if you take ice from around the world and put it in the ocean, it doesn't just fill up the ocean like a bathtub. It's not even everywhere around the world. And that's because there's so much mass, so many billions and trillions of tons that we're talking about flowing into the ocean, that Antarctica won't pull the ocean close to the shore like it used to. There's less mass there, and mass means gravity, so it doesn't pull the ocean as close to shore and it slides back a couple three meters in Antarctica.
Sea level goes down near Antarctica, but at the expense of sea level going up in other places, typically ones that are far away from Antarctica, and that means the coast of the United States, both coasts, the Gulf Coast, and Northern Europe. Now if you get pretty far north, the same effect happens with Greenland. Greenland is losing mass and it's not pulling the ocean close to it. So the real troublesome areas going forward for sea level rise are the islands around the equator, the tropics, and Florida coast, Gulf Coast in the US, Southern California, those areas that are away from the poles because the water is leaving that area, but filling a little bit more around the coastlines on either side of the equator.
Yeah, that's a mindblower, really. That really is. That's hard even for me. When I learned it, I went "Really? Is that how it's going to work?" In that how ironic that the place that's causing sea level rise, sea level rise drop. Actually it has a slowing effect but not enough of a slowing effect. So sea level drops, it means the glacier rests harder on the ice sheet, but it's not enough of a drop to really stop the problem from occurring.
Guy Kawasaki:
This gives a whole new meaning to the concept of a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil. A glacier falls in Antarctica and Hawaii is underwater. Maldives is gone.
Ted Scambos:
The splash is felt. Yeah, the splash is felt in Miami. Yeah, it does really change the game a lot. But it means that it's important, and people in the US and even in Europe, they think of Antarctica as being far away and not important. And in fact, what goes on there really has an impact, specifically on the coast of the United States, the northern hemisphere, and especially the mid-latitudes to low latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
Guy Kawasaki:
So all those secret documents in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom, they're going to all be flooded and they're going to be all wet.
Ted Scambos:
Exactly. I shouldn't get into that here. Yes, he really put them at risk, but they would've had to have been there for another fifty years or so to really be threatened by sea level rise. Although, yeah, Miami gets a lot of clear day flooding now. Miami's in a particular problem because even if you build a sea wall, the entire bedrock is so porous that the water will just seep up from the far side on the inside of the sea wall.
So there's a real issue with trying to protect Miami and yeah, that's going to be a tough one to solve. I don't think we're ready to abandon Miami. It's too much fun, but it is going to be difficult to, it's going to be difficult to manage all of these cities, New Orleans as well, Savannah, Georgia; Los Angeles, San Francisco, those areas are all quite concerned about another meter or two of sea level rise.
Guy Kawasaki:
And Dwayne Johnson's going to be busy making movies for quite a while. Geez. So how will Thwaites falling into the ocean change ocean currents?
Ted Scambos:
Good question. It's not as big an influence as what we're worried about for Greenland, but what we're seeing is that the natural overturning, the exchange of water between the top of the ocean and the deep ocean is probably being affected by how much melting there is going on in Antarctica, and also warmer air conditions near the coast. We're not producing the coldest, densest water that we used to produce around Antarctica.
That's a tough one to explain. When you freeze the ocean, the crystals, the ice that come out of it is fresh water. It's fresh water, it doesn't have any salt in it, and so that salt that isn't in that ice that's forming on the surface, that makes the water that's left behind cold and dense, it gets more salt in it. And so that water sinks to the bottom. Most of the ocean is covered by a layer of water that started off near Antarctica and is right at the freezing point. Even though there's a very high pressure at the bottom of the ocean, it's right at the freezing point near the bottom of the ocean, quite salty, and it drifts around on the bottom and then under certain conditions, in certain parts of the world, it comes up.
Those areas tend to be really productive for fishing and for biology in general. And so any change in that massive overturning, very slow paced, massive overturning, but any change in that is a really big issue for the health of the ocean and fisheries. Yeah, there's a lot going on around there, and we didn't really appreciate it. It bugs me. There's a lot of maps that don't even show the continent that I've spent my career working on. If you look at a big Mercator map, half the time Antarctica has this little white line on the bottom, or maybe they don't even show it.
I just got my thirty-year award for working at the University of Colorado and they gave me a globe, it's like a glass goblet globe, but there's no Antarctica, which I pointed out to my boss, and we had a chuckle because he works in the polar areas also. But yeah, it's a little bit frustrating because this area as we're talking about it, is important for everybody, and really the changes there are going to have big consequences. It's not going to happen like a catastrophe like right away, like five years or ten years, but slowly, just like global warming has progressed since the 1990s. Slowly we're going to see more and more impact from this gigantic ice sheet just beginning to fall apart.
Guy Kawasaki:
And at this point, do we truly “know” what causes this?
Ted Scambos:
It depends on what level of detail you mean by know, because at the top level it's the fact that warmer ocean water is now reaching the underside of Antarctica. The mechanism that drives that water there, I could talk to you about exactly how the wind changes are trying to push the surface of the ocean around, and that might be what's allowing this warmer water to reach the coast. In terms of, it's this what we call a causal chain.
You keep asking, how did that happen, and how did that happen? How did that happen? And you get to the point where it's a little unclear. It looks like it has to do with warming in the Central Pacific Ocean and how that affects weather there and how it affects the number of thunderstorms and the number of basically warm fronts that head southward into the polar regions. There's no doubt about it. It is a little uncertain, the exact mechanism. It does appear that these things are tied back to a warming atmosphere due to greenhouse gases.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what if a politician says, "Last winter I was at Martha's Vineyard and I tried to put my foot in the water, and it was freaking freezing. This is all bullshit. The ocean is not heating up." Which that's not out of the question happening, right? What do you think when you see something like that? You can use profanity on my podcast.
Ted Scambos:
Okay, yeah, that they're fricking idiots, because it's been so obvious. And here's the point that I like to make. We've been saying the same thing, we climate scientists, we've been saying the same thing since the 1990s. And when we said it in the 1990s, they said, "Oh no, it's just a phase. It's going to turn around." When there was a pause due to the fact that we had a big El Nino in the late 1990s and then it went away and we didn't warm up as fast for a few years, "That's it. Global warming's over, it's not going to happen."
We said, "No, it's going to keep going until we change what we're doing to the atmosphere." Step by step, decade by decade, the things that were talked about in the 1990s, and again in the early 2000s, they've come to pass. The head of the UN just said, "The era of global boiling has begun," because he's so concerned about how many heat waves there are around the world right now, and the fact that the ocean, and that is particularly bad, that the ocean is seeing really warm temperatures, unprecedented high average temperatures for the ocean.
These are subtle changes, and that's where your politician can get away with saying, "My foot went numb when I put it in the water outside of Long Island Sound." Yeah, it's because it's a subtle change, but the Earth is a sensitive system, and the ecology is a sensitive system, and we human beings and the things that we've built around the world that define civilization, are also sensitive.
We want New York to be a port for as long as it can possibly be a port. We want the Midwest to grow wheat and corn and soybeans for us, and if that becomes untenable, that is a big problem. It's not like wheat and corn and human beings are going to go extinct. It's that we can't do things the way we've invested in doing them with trillions of dollars of investment, because the earth is changing and we started it. We're setting something in motion. It's not just costly. It's incredibly disruptive to the economy and to the environment.
I wish I could be happier. I want to joke more, but it's a little tough to be frivolous, but I agree with you. It's like talking to a flat earther when I hear from a denialist anymore. It's almost as if, and I suspect this of flat earthers, they simply don't want to be told how to think. And that's fine. People are entitled to their own perception of the facts, but misleading the public when you're in that kind of a position, that's an untenable thing. That's a terrible fricking thing to do. Since I'm allowed to let loose, it's a fricking bad thing to do to the public.
Guy Kawasaki:
Arguably, it's harder to become a beautician than a senator. Right?
Ted Scambos:
Seriously. I've met some smart beauticians actually, I guess hair stylists. But yeah, doing field work, you run into folks that have lived on the land for a long time. I'm really impressed with how bright some of those guys are. They are not sitting out there with a weed coming out of their mouth. They read about what's going on, and a lot of them are really pretty sharp characters.
Yeah, maybe not senator, but congressman doesn't appear to be too high a hurdle to clear, and that's a problem. That is a bit of a problem, and I wish as a nation, from both sides of the aisle, we had more care and respect for the position of congressperson and the profession of being a politician. I don't want to get into any specifics. It would be nice if we cared more about voting and who we vote for, even if you're a conservative, even if you're a liberal, electing people that know how to understand each other and work.
Guy Kawasaki:
We could go off the deep anyway.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. I'm going to bring you back to science now.
Ted Scambos:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is your work, obviously you spent a lot of time in Antarctica, but how has Landsat changed what you do? Do you just look at photos now and you can do analysis and throw AI at it, or do you still need to get your butt on a plane and into freezing conditions?
Ted Scambos:
I like going to Antarctica, and it's fine with me to get my butt on a plane and get out there and be camping there and making measurements. The thing that Landsat did, and it was a revolution for polar science, actually in particular polar science really benefited from what we call remote sensing, all of those satellites. But Landsat in many ways led the way.
Yes, we can do tremendous things with Landsat, and it means that to get three or four people out there, we get a whole lot more out of that presence in Antarctica than we would've gotten if we didn't have the satellite picture to say, "If we understand this area, this little patch that we can explore with our skis and our feet and our instruments, that means that this large area of Antarctica can be understood better. That means that our satellite tells us that this area over here is the same or slightly faster or slower or warmer."
And Landsat really is a fantastic tool because it goes back fifty years. There is data from fifty years ago. It's an unbroken record. It gets a little thin in some places when they thought they could make it a commercial venture, and that just really flopped in the 1990s. But now that it's free data and the government collects as many pictures as they can with the two Landsat satellites that are up, but we get a tremendous record of the earth at the scale of a typical suburban yard, basically, that every yard like that size has a pixel that has data more or less every two weeks, going back fifty years.
So we can tell when the forest changes or when the ocean changes, when the coastline changes, and that's a tremendous resource for research. You're right about artificial intelligence and machine learning. It's typically the term that's used. We can say characteristics like this in the picture mean this is happening, so go hunt through the entire archive and give us all of the places that are doing the same thing within these boundaries.
And yeah, it's going to be another game changer eventually, and I think people are maybe hoping for a bit too much out of it. It's going to take a lot of handholding of the machine in order to get the learning. But yeah, it's definitely a resource that people are embracing and using on everything.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so I can understand what Landsat does. Now, what do you need to do when your butt is in Antarctica? What are you looking for? Little cracks in the ice?
Ted Scambos:
Of course, it's not just my butt, it's four or five other butts that are pretty smart, and so they all have a different kind of an instrument that we can apply. So there's a precision GPS. It's based on the same thing that's on your cell phone, but it's precise down to the millimeter. We can set those up and understand very quickly whether or not the ice surface is going up or down, and if it's flowing faster.
We drive these things that are called radars. It's probably better to think of them as radio echo sounders. So they send out a blip or a beep or sometimes a complicated signal, and then they listen for what comes back from the snow and ice and the bedrock underneath. So we get a really good map of how the ice has bent and flowed and where it had more snowfall and where it had less snowfall.
Let's see. The other things that we've done, we drill through the ice and into the ocean, and we've set up instruments that actually see this warm water right there by the front of the glacier, in some cases melting it away. In other cases it's interacted in the past and now it's in a sort of stable state. We understand all of that when we go there.
In particular, the things that are a little bit tougher with remote sensing, and where we're going to need to focus our work in the future, has to do with where the ice meets the bedrock. That's something you can't easily see from space. And also where the ocean meets the ice, that those ocean measurements are a little bit harder to come by. Automating those, getting that global picture, is tough. It takes lots of little sensors.
You know what we use? One of the things that has been really effective is to, it's going to sound cruel or maybe unusual, we glue a little computer and sensor onto the head of a seal. And you get a dozen of those. You come up to a bunch of seals, they're sitting there on the beach, sleeping usually. Just to make sure, you hit them with a tranquilizer so that they're not going to get too upset when you approach them. You got to pick the right time of year when the fur is just coming back because they come out of the water to lose their fur and they can't swim at that point because the fur is important for insulating them.
So when the new fur is out, you take a box, It's about, I don't know, two packs of cigarettes or yeah, bigger than a cell phone, maybe a stack of three cell phones. Glue it onto the fur on the top of their head, and then they come out of the tranquilizer and eventually they'll go into the water, and we get this tremendous data set, because they dive fifteen times every day, and every time they surface, there's a little radio that sends out a signal that says, "Here's what just happened."
I was really amazed. I thought they'd have to instrument a hundred seals in order to get decent data. No, ten of these guys, and you can't even keep up with the data rate because they're such great swimmers. The other thing that they do, is that they know how to dodge the ice. So if we were to do this with an automated, a robot or something that floats up and down in the water, it would get crushed. It would try to surface at the wrong time and get bashed between big blocks of ice.
And so the instruments on the seals last for just a little bit less than a year, because when their fur falls out, the sensor falls off, and then if you're still funded for your program, you go back to the same beach and you try to find a few likely looking seals again and put this little box on top. They don't seem to mind, and it doesn't seem to be like the geeky kid at school doesn't have any luck with whatever gender he's trying to attract, they seem to do okay before, during, and after. And yeah, it sounds a little odd to be using them in that way, but it seems for their benefit in the long run, and it seems that it doesn't bother them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, we're going to get all this PETA hate mail from this. That's okay.
Ted Scambos:
I hope not.
Guy Kawasaki:
We'll let Madisun answer those. And when you're doing this, just tell us, what's your day like? Is it's so cold, you can only be out there for ten minutes, or how does it work?
Ted Scambos:
I've been in east Antarctica, which is the other part. It's bigger, it's taller, it's colder. That's a rough life. It's more than fifteen minutes. You can be out for a few hours, but it can be extremely cold, and you can't work very fast. You can't play with knobs or instruments or screw metal together, that sort of thing, very easily because when you touch something, it's got a strong possibility of burning your fingers with cold, not with heat.
In West Antarctica, in both sides of Antarctica, we go during the summer. It's milder than you might think the worst conditions would be in Antarctica, and thank God for that. In West Antarctica, if it's a sunny day, it is pretty nice. We have really good weather gear now. I can't believe what Scott and Shackleton did in their day with the gear that they had. We have much better gear. Keeps your skin dry, several layers keep you well insulated, and you can work.
It's a hard day's work. You have to live as if you're camping, but you need to have six or eight hours, more like ten or twelve hours, to get the instruments working, troubleshoot them. Something is always breaking or a battery won't quite get warm enough. There's a lot of challenges. I really like it because you have to think on your feet and fix things as you go. But in general, yeah, west Antarctica is not too bad. It's about spending a day skiing except that you're also doing your science lab all day.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what are you sleeping in at night?
Ted Scambos:
A tent. It can be just a regular mountain tent, like you might go backpacking with, a little heavier than what you would go backpacking with. Or we actually use a tent, and I will say to their credit, Scott and Shackleton came up with a design that's just about bombproof for Antarctica, a big pyramid. It's not light, you wouldn't backpack with it, but if you're using a plane or a tractor to get you set up, it's fine to load these tents on. A big pyramid with this double canvas wall, and they actually get quite warm and comfortable, and they have almost never blown away in the wind, which is a big problem.
If you get a windstorm, then a mountain tent, just about any of them that you see that you would go backpacking with, really just can't stand up to it because it's getting snow piled onto it as well as being deformed by the force of the wind. So that's a pretty good setup. And then we usually have one big tent that has both the science gear and the kitchen in it, and that's where you get together and talk and eat a meal and plan out the day, and then everybody fans out from there and does the different jobs that they have, GPS set up or weather station or this radio echo sounder I was talking about.
I like it, and I like it even at three or four weeks out in the field. It's grueling. I usually do lose weight because there's so much energy being expended all the time. But you come away with good data and a real adventure, and you make some great friends because you've got a team that's fighting against a constant enemy, which is the weather and the cold, and you're in it together. So it makes for some lifelong friendships and collaborations too.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what pray tell are you eating when you're doing that?
Ted Scambos:
A lot of dehydrated food, but people learned early on you can do that. Maybe the military does that, because a lot of the rations are from the military, but it's really not fun to do that day after day. So we usually have two or three dinners every week that are more what you might get from the supermarket. Frozen food works pretty well. If it's going to be a really warm day, we're making sure to bury our frozen food so that it has no chance of melting, and those really make the field season fun.
If you're just slogging through day after day and then ten minutes, you just boil water and eat out of a pouch, that grinds you down very fast. You really need the human interaction, a little bit of fun cooking. Typically, this goes back to Scott and Shackleton again, if there's a day like Christmas or maybe somebody's birthday, that's usually you take an extra three or four hours off, have some fun.
Yeah, there's usually alcohol. Not beer, too easy to freeze. Wine, maybe. Typically it's spirits because they don't freeze, and they're compact and a little more talking and fun on those days. But let me say again, it's hard work, and usually everybody on the team, most people lose weight even though they're eating constantly, because it takes a lot of energy to be down there out in the snow.
Guy Kawasaki:
And are you wearing these super-duper high tech custom made jackets, or you just go to REI and buy something off the rack?
Ted Scambos:
You get both. You get all the good stuff you can think of out of REI, and then they issue some pretty good gear before you go out into the field. So there is a parka, they call it “Big Red” in the US program, that you could almost live in. It has huge pockets, thick insulation. Typically, I almost feel like I'm drowning if I put the whole thing on and zip up the hood and everything. I actually don't wear them very often unless the weather is really bad, because they're designed to be a survival parka in case you are stuck away from camp and the weather becomes incredibly bad.
Most of the time it's layers. It's something that will break the wind on the outside, something quilted and then dry, maybe another layer and then dry like a polypropylene or maybe one of these fancy wools from New Zealand that wick moisture away from the body. Actually, it's not too bad going for a week or two weeks between what you would call a bath, because you don't sweat much.
If you manage the clothing right, then you stay cool and dry. The air is pretty dry in Antarctica unless it's snowing, and you can get by, it's not that uncomfortable because there's no dirt in the middle of the ice sheets so you're not getting dusty or dirty or gritty, and then yeah, after a week you just start to feel like your clothes don't feel right against your skin, and you'll change out all the way down to the bottom layer and wash off, and then you're ready to go again for another week or so.
People that spend six weeks out in the field, they're exhausted. They need to get back into civilization and they're happy to get there, but it's not unbearable to be out there, and it really is beautiful. I encourage people if they're interested in the outdoors or earth science, polar science is a very fun subject to be involved with.
Guy Kawasaki:
A few weeks ago somebody asked me if I wanted to go on this high-end, VIP cruise ship to Antarctica.
Ted Scambos:
You should go. You will really enjoy it. First of all, it's magnificent. The landscape is magnificent. It's like you can't believe it's not a national park or a world heritage site, and you get this sense of a continent trying to fight its way up through this blanket of ice that's been on top of it for hundreds of thousands of years. There's a tremendous amount of wildlife in the ocean near the coast in Antarctica, so you'll see. It won't be hard to spot. Sometimes you go to a zoo or the woods and hard to find those elk and deer or whatever you're looking for. Not hard in Antarctica, there's really abundant and very active environment.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm actually surprised by your answer because I thought you would say, "These cruise ships come, and they dump their sewage.”
Ted Scambos:
No, they don't do that anymore.
Guy Kawasaki:
"And people leave their bags, and all that, and it's ruining Antarctica. They should just stay out."
Ted Scambos:
I think it's more valuable. Maybe you've encountered a polar scientist that has a slightly different perspective on this. The areas that get severely impacted are tiny compared to the size of the continent, and the value of having people see the landscape and see in some places the changes that are occurring, I think that's more valuable than making sure that every last square kilometer of something that's eight million square kilometers, is pristine.
We are keeping Antarctica pristine for sure, and we insist that cruise ships not dump their sewage in the ocean and when they're close to the coast, that they use a special kind of fuel that is not as damaging should there be a leak from that ship. And all of the cruise ships now have a protocol, if you are going to step foot on either sea ice or the continent, that at least the bottom of your boots are sterilized before you walk on the continent so that you don't bring an invasive species or microbe, it's hard to defend against all microbes, but onto the continent and have it disrupt the environment.
You should really go. You'll be amazed, and I think you'll see just how vast a continent it is. And then the cruise ships tend to visit the same areas and they do get impacted. It's not scot-free to the environment for this sort of encounter, but it is pretty well managed, and it's getting better managed all the time. While recognizing what I said, the public, the people of the world, deserve to see the one continent that was set aside because it's so beautiful and so rare and pristine, and the fact that the Antarctic Treaty has led to that, it's one of the best political or international agreements that I know of in that we've actually stuck to holding Antarctica as a continent separate from the others.
All the territorial claims are suspended, no military operations with the intention of military goals in Antarctica. And we're sticking to it. I'm not sure what'll happen in the 2040s. It's up for renegotiation. I think a lot of countries are eyeing the mineral resources of Antarctica and considering whether or not they want to stick to this model of don't touch anything in Antarctica. We'll see how that plays out, and you'll be able to develop your own opinion if you go there on one of these cruises. I've been a lecturer on one of the cruises and I was really impressed.
Guy Kawasaki:
Great. What should we do as a society? That's a pretty big question, but you're seeing it, right?
Ted Scambos:
Yeah. I think we're headed in the right direction, that we are recognizing that this is real. I wish we'd recognized it when the folks that are paid to provide answers to the public and give them an understanding of what their world is doing, I wish we'd taken action when we knew that and were saying it, and I would say in particular by 2007, that IPCC report was quite clear and emphatic that there really wasn't any question anymore. We could have taken stronger steps sooner, but we are on the right track.
And the thing that people haven't really grappled with yet is first of all, we're going to exceed the threshold that we thought was the safety line. We're going to go over the safety line with global warming. If it hasn't happened already, it'll probably happen within the next couple of years. One and a half degrees centigrade, about three degrees Fahrenheit relative to a century and a half ago.
The thing that people haven't really begun to talk about is that if we want climate that doesn't even still continue to evolve towards warming, we need to actually get carbon dioxide levels to go down. Not just flat, but down, because the level that we have now, if we let it play out for century upon century, we will see a much smaller Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller Antarctic ice sheet, much warmer ocean. We'll see conditions that we haven't seen for millions of years.
And the reason those conditions came about is because the earth got warm, not crazy warmer than it is now, but it stayed there for thousands of years, so the whole ocean turned over with this warmer climate that we're in, and all the ice sheets came into what you would call an equilibrium with warmer ocean and warmer air.
That, reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, will be another version of the challenge. Probably people will start talking about it around 2040 when we think we see that we've got our arms around emissions of greenhouse gases.
How do we actually get them out of the atmosphere, reduce them? You can do it by planting more forests. You can do it by directly removing carbon dioxide. People talk about trying to change, it's going to sound too dangerous, the chemistry of the ocean a little bit, and I'm talking about alkaline versus acidic, these very subtle changes, but a little goes a long way. What we need to do is reduce carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and then we actually need to tackle getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what can your random Gen Z person do? Buy an electric car, use mass transit, don't eat beef. What do we do?
Ted Scambos:
Yeah, it is important to embrace it on a personal level. And I'm also happy that when the winds of politics were blowing in the other direction and drill, baby drill kind of stuff, that cities and companies and counties and states said, "No, we're sticking to our guns. We are aiming for zero emissions or zero net emissions by some decade," 2050, 2030, whatever. That really encouraged me, because it means that throughout many levels of society, people get it.
And at the personal level, you need to think about, "Will my next car be an electric car? Will I recycle more? Think about recycling more? How am I going to handle air conditioning? How am I going to handle mass transit?" As you mentioned, those sorts of steps on the personal level, everybody's going to need to embrace those if we're really going to get to this point where we're at zero emissions.
Now, the real problem is that poor countries, folks that are more desperate, they don't have the ability. They do have by and large the awareness of global climate change, but they don't have the means to really say, I'm not sure they'd put it this way, "I'm going to be personally carbon neutral while I'm trying to get to middle class level of living, or even lower class level of living by US standards."
And that I think poses a greater problem. It speaks to international cooperation. It speaks to trying to give these countries less expensive access to clean means of generating energy before they go and build and commit to building power plants, infrastructure that essentially produces a lot of carbon. If we can jump in there and say, "On your way up, do it clean, and here's a discounted version of the technology." I think that's a big part of the answer. I'm thinking of India. I'm thinking of countries in Africa that are trying to make a better life for themselves. If we can make that happen, but in a cleaner way, then we've got a jump on trying to get this solved.
Guy Kawasaki:
And don't you think nuclear power will play a large role in this?
Ted Scambos:
I think it's clearly an answer, and technologically we can do this and do it safely. It is not like the power plants that were installed in Three Mile Island or Fukushima or Chernobyl. They're much more mistake proof going forward. We have done a great job of getting people to recognize the dangers of nuclear energy and the problem with waste.
I don't know if you know, but in the 1950s people used to talk about taking radiation baths in caves that were known to have a lot of natural radiation. In those days, there wasn't a good understanding. And then by the 1960s and 1970s there was a very clear understanding of just how dangerous it is, and how even a trace of it can be a problem over the long term.
That said, I think it will take time, but with the right kinds of demonstrations of the safety and a better appreciation of where technology has gotten to over the last few decades for nuclear power, people will begin to think that it can be part of the solution.
For now, I think putting the pedal to the metal on renewables is a good approach, a great approach. And the other that should go almost hand in hand with that is restructuring the power grid in places like the United States and Europe, so that it can manage this much more distributed power source framework that's needed if you're going to have a big fraction of your energy come from renewables.
Guy Kawasaki:
Lots of work to be done here.
Ted Scambos:
Yeah. Honestly, I don't see it as an out of pocket. "This is going to cost me, here's a hundred dollars, here's two hundred dollars out of my income." It's going to be a part of the economy going forward. It's not going to cost us a trillion dollars. It's going to be a trillion dollar component of the economy, so the companies are going to build wind power stations, or they're going to build solar panels, or they're going to make the infrastructure happen, or they're going to build mass transit facilities or electric cars.
Those things are where the trillions are happening, and it's not as though I had an income and then solving global warming went and took 5 percent of it. It's, this time I bought an electric car, and this time I switched so that my power source was from wind power. That's how I think people will perceive our entry into zero carbon world.
Yeah, nuclear probably will have to be a part of it, but I think we can go a long way on the path we're on now. If I were in the nuclear power business and if I were the right kind of politician, I'd start trying to get people accustomed to the idea and talk more about how the technology has gotten better, and why it's okay to have these within a few miles of where you live, the newer, smaller plants.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what if you're the governor of West Virginia and you at least think that your constituency are all coal miners?
Ted Scambos:
Yeah, we didn't want to get a whole lot of work for Madisun, right? We wanted to have this be nice and easy. It is a small fraction of the population. It seems as though, at a generational scale, we want that workforce to be available to build the renewable power environment, and that is going to send some guys through the roof, that there's no way I'm contributing to this global warming solution, and that's unfortunate.
But I think eventually, without losing, and I don't blame them, they have a right, without losing their conservative principles, they'll still feel that it's okay now to build electric cars, or okay now to work at a plant that builds components of a wind power station, or maybe a nuclear power station. It'll come around. It has to.
And I think what you'll see is that without ever saying, without ever feeling, without ever being wrong, we will all change what we do in the future. And hopefully get there while still debating whatever new political points there are to debate fifteen or twenty years from now.
For example, geoengineering, which I think is worth debating right now, whether or not we're going to put aerosols in the atmosphere, or change the brightness of the ocean or clouds. People are even talking about building undersea dams or curtains in order to prevent warm water from getting to Antarctica. Those things I think are worth a public debate, but we're not there yet where those things are being presented to the public in a big enough way to really talk about it at that large population scale, at the voting scale basically.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so this is going a really off the wall question and probably my last one, but I'm basically an optimistic guy, but I have to say that I sometimes think that the arrogance of humans, that we're the top of the pyramid and this whole universe has been created for us. Maybe humans are just another species and we're going to be extinct, and that's how life evolves. You ever think about that?
Ted Scambos:
I do, but I want to push back on that because it's so dangerous to think that way. What that leads to is, so who cares if we damage the environment. If humans are only going to be around for another century or two centuries or some limited amount of time, if we're going to kill ourselves, we're going to have a nuclear war or whatever, then why bother?
If you want to think of human beings as being at the top of the pyramid or placed on this earth for a purpose, the purpose is to take care of our planet and to get there and get everybody into hopefully as comfortable and as peaceful, and as, I'll even say satisfying a life as possible. That's the highest mission for the human race, and part of this is this challenge of global climate change.
I'm going to go off here, not swearing, but maybe a little bit further philosophically than you were expecting. This is such a fundamental challenge to the human race because we don't have the political tools that think in terms of fifty and a hundred years, and yet here this problem comes down the pike, or sciences is at a point where we can see that in fifty or a hundred years, we're going to have a huge issue with what we're doing today.
If you had said this even as late as the 1950s, 1960s, that in fifty years there could be a big problem with warming in the world or a change in the oceans in the world, people would've said, and you can tell from the movies that were produced back then, people would've said, "We don't have to worry about that. The future is going to be magic. The future is going to be able to solve everything. There's nothing we can do now that can't be solved later on."
Then the environmental movement came along in the 1970s, and it came about because we recognize, "Oh, wait a second. If a species goes extinct, that's it. We don't get them back again. If we take down all the forests, that's it. That area has changed forever. We might be able to replant, but it won't be the same." That recognition of the scale of our residence, of our presence on this planet, that's maybe the best thing that's happened in my lifetime to a future for humanity. It's the kind of thing that makes you realize that as big a problem, as big an argument and all the wars and conflict there is in the world, we're stuck on this planet.
And Elon Musk wants us to be a multi-planet race. That's fricking crazy. We will never have an interest in putting enough people on Mars or the moon in order to actually secure the human race. This is our home. We need to fix this place now and make sure that we've got a happy and sustainable future for a millennium, as far as we can think forward, because the idea of moving is just ludicrous. It would exhaust the earth to try to put another earth on another planet, at least anytime in the imaginable, I don't even want to say foreseeable, imaginable future. And yeah, let's stay here and let's fix it. We know how. We talk to each other. We have the internet. We're well connected. We can do this. And I'm happy to watch the part of the movie that I get to watch.
Guy Kawasaki:
You could make the case that what you just said about Elon, the irony is that he, probably more than any other single person, brought electrification to cars, right? So he's one of the great forces that has reduced emissions from cars.
Ted Scambos:
Yeah. And he's going to be a force for exploring the moon and the other planets, and I am really excited about that. But the idea that we're going to be a multi-planet society, have a sustainable presence on Mars, that means that it's okay to take Earth to the limit or beyond that. That's wrongheaded. If that ever happens, okay. Have you seen Mars? It really, it's not that nice. It makes Antarctica look like a paradise.
Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe Twitter will keep him busy. He won't address this.
Ted Scambos:
Maybe. I'm glad to see us explore Mars, but again, I just don't see it as being a get out of jail free card for taking care of this planet. And yeah, I hope that's not too upsetting to too many people, but yeah, that's just plain fricking logic right there. Just anyway, yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
We've come a long way from Antarctica now to Mars in this one hour.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to the Remarkable People team, Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, Madisun Nuismer, the Drop-in Queen of Santa Cruz, Tessa Nuismer, who prepares me so well for these interviews, and Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura, Fallon Yates, the rest of the Remarkable People Team.
Please check out the book that Madisun and I wrote. It's called Think Remarkable. It is a combination of what we learned from over 200 remarkable people on this podcast, as well as what we've learned throughout our careers. I promise you, I promise you, it will help you make a difference and be remarkable. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.