(light music) - [Presenter] Production funding for Beyond the Lab has been made possible through the generous support of Michael Dermody.

(light music) - Hello, and welcome to Beyond the Lab.

I'm Sherry Swensk.

In this series, we introduce you to the people behind the science, researchers whose curiosity carries them to remote peaks, deep deserts, and even into the clouds.

We'll join them in the field for the adventure of discovery and show you how their work is making a real difference here in Nevada and around the world.

(light music) Hidden deep within the world's oldest and remote ice is an extraordinary record of Earth's history.

Thousands of years of environmental, ecological, and human stories are frozen in time.

Unlocking these clues demands arduous exploration known as ice core drilling, where researchers extract miles long cylinders of ancient ice from beneath the surface.

The samples must remain frozen throughout their journey to specialized laboratories where they'll be meticulously analyzed.

At the forefront of this research is the Desert Research Institute, which operates one of the most sophisticated ice core labs in the world.

- You might think, well, why study ice?

Why are we going to ice cores?

And so like many other archives, natural archives that are out there, there is the idea that we're trying to develop a history or a record, a proxy record of something in the past.

And so you can imagine the snow is piling up and we're building up a year, year by year by year, we're building up a layer cake effectively of history.

And then we come along and we drill an ice core through that and effectively we're taking a sample of that layer cake of history.

And that history can go back, you know, a few decades or that history can go back thousands or tens of thousands or even potentially up to a million years.

- Joining me now is Dr.

Joe McConnell, research professor emeritus at the Desert Research Institute, climate and environmental scientist specializing in ice cores.

He founded the ice core lab in Reno, Nevada almost 30 years ago.

Welcome to Beyond the Lab.

- Thank you for having me.

- Dr.

McConnell, I got to ask you this first question.

If all the ice in the world melted tomorrow, what would we lose?

- So you can imagine this very detailed and very rich history in the ice.

And if it were to melt, there's no going back.

That would be the end of that history.

We would lose that history.

- Is it sort of like you can read a tree and tree rings years?

Because you're literally reading the years of history, but within layers of ice.

Is that right?

- So let's say at the ice core site, you might get, let's say at an ideal site, you'd have at least this much snow per year.

And it turns out that almost everything we measure in the ice has a seasonal cycle.

And so very much like a tree ring, we just started the year, we drilled the ice core and we just count the rings and the chemistry or the years and the chemistry, the layers and the chemistry going back year after year after year.

- And that's a lot of history because you're talking about a lot of humanity and ecological data trapped in thousands upon thousands of years below the surface.

So besides frozen water, what else do you find in an ice core?

So what information is trapped in there?

- So the ice contains sort of two records.

One is what's actually in the ice itself, and that's what was in the precipitation, if you will, at the time the snow fell as let's say a million years ago.

But also trapped in the ice are little air bubbles, gases.

And those are actually a little sample of the atmosphere at that time.

And you can imagine that's incredibly valuable if you're a climate scientist or environmental scientist or even someone just trying to understand how the earth system works.

- And so where do you go?

And where are these ice fields?

How do you know where on the planet is most valuable?

- So we kind of divide ice coring into three groups, if you will.

They're shallow cores, and I've done a lot of this in Greenland, Antarctica where you collect maybe a 30 meter course, roughly 100 feet long, a hundred foot long core.

And we can do those quite quickly in a few hours and so we can do many of them.

Then the next sort of would be intermediate coring and that might get you maybe down 150 meters, so about 500 feet, something like that.

And those records might go back hundreds to maybe a thousand years.

And then you get those really deep ice cores, the ones in Antarctica we spoke about that go back miles and those take many years and huge amounts of equipment, huge amounts of investment, maybe five years.

The instruments that we have are very sophisticated instruments capable of measuring for some things, measurements in the order of parts per quadrillion.

That's a one in 15 zeros after it.

So for perspective, for people in this area at Lake Tahoe, if you imagine the volume of water in Lake Tahoe, imagine a half a liter of bottle, a pint of water in Lake Tahoe and that's one part per quadrillion.

- [Sherry] That is sensitive.

- [Joe] Very sensitive.

Yeah.

- And so what are you identifying once you're extracting all of that information and that data?

Are you identifying how people lived?

Are you identifying what the climate was like, what the temperatures were like, what the air pollution was like?

- So you can sort of think of the natural aerosols, the volcanoes, the desert dust and sea spray, that sort of thing.

And then you can think of the human caused ones from industrial pollution or industrial activities.

A few years ago I was approached by archeologists and ancient historians from Oxford asking if we could develop a very detailed record of lead pollution during the Roman period.

So 2,000 years ago.

We were able to get ice from our colleagues in Denmark, archived ice, and we did the analysis and we were able to develop a year by year, actually a season by season record of lead pollution during the Roman period.

Their economy ran on silver and the silver ore had a lot of lead in it.

Galena ore had a lot of lead in it and a little tiny bit of that lead made it up into Greenland.

So it's effectively a proxy record of silver production.

- Talk to me about, you're collecting these ice cores, they're staying frozen, they're traveling to where, where do you keep them?

- It's quite a process.

It involves a lot of logistics.

We typically fly it out on a ski plane, off the ice sheet onto the coast.

And then it gets on a military plane and is flown in a so-called cold deck flight, which means that they keep the temperature at the back of the plane very cold, not a very pleasant ride.

And then if it's a big ice core, it goes to the National Science Foundation ice core facility in Denver and that's where it's stored.

- [Sherry] And it stays preserved, intact, nothing is lost?

- The key is that cold.

Keep it nice and cold and it'll slow down any changes in the chemistry.

So to get the timing in the ice core of what year that ice represents in terms of atmospheric chemistry is extremely important and we spend lots and lots of time on it.

- And I would assume you have to kind of cross reference back to other historical records of things that happened during those times.

For instance, you identified a volcano that erupted in Alaska in 43 BCE by reading ice in Greenland and you tied it also to the end of the Roman Republic.

So how do you tie those events together?

- So a volcano erupts and if it's a big enough volcano, it ejects sulfur mainly into the stratosphere.

Those sulfur particles will stay there a long, long time and circulate the entire globe or maybe the entire hemisphere, but in some cases the entire globe.

And then as it slowly settles out, we can find that in ice in Greenland or ice in Antarctica, sometimes in both.

We had a sulfur record from one of that ice core that we measured lead in actually for the people at Oxford.

And what we found was this big volcano, big eruption or big fallout event that happened in 43 BCE according to our dating.

So then we can look at little ash particles, the geochemistry of little tiny volcanic ash particles that are also deposited in the ice at the same time.

And we can use that to identify which volcano, if we're lucky, we can identify which volcano it came from.

And in this case, it turned out it had a very big impact on the Northern Hemisphere.

Now go to Rome and it's an agrarian economy and now it disrupts that in 43 BCE.

And you can imagine have a big impact or probably had a big impact on society.

This happened at exactly the juncture when the Roman empire was rising.

This volcano erupted in March, in early 43 BCE.

And this is right when the wannabe dictators who wanted to succeed, Julius Caesar, were fighting over who got to take over.

And this is the period of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

These were the players that were involved.

So it's really fun to tie what we see in the ice to this history and inform history, ancient history in a way that is not possible otherwise.

- Do you have historians that sometimes disagree with your findings?

Have you had to fight for your results in your research?

- Absolutely.

And I liken it to DNA.

It's new information, unambiguous new information that it doesn't necessarily mean you change your story, but it does mean you need to incorporate that information into your story.

- You're trying to complete the story.

Okay.

- As I said, maybe it adds a little nuance to the story.

- There you go.

Tell us about how your research was part of determining the decline of IQ of Europeans during the Roman era.

- One of the goals in developing the lab and developing our analytical capability, I would like our ice core records to be able to be used or taken up by the epidemiological community to look at how it maybe impacted environmental or especially human health.

This is exposure to the entire population because everybody's breathing the same air.

And so what we did is take those same lead records and what we found using modern epidemiological relationships and that level of exposure, we found that it likely reduced IQ population wide by two to three points.

And you may not think two to three point IQ reduction is much, but when you apply it to the entire population, maybe it is significant.

- I'll take an extra two to three points.

- Yeah.

Who wouldn't?

- Anytime I can get it.

(both laughs) Well, Dr.

McConnell, you've led an incredible career.

Let's take a look at this clip of you talking a little bit about your work.

- Is she gonna let me go over there?

Starting as a little boy and fascinated with the polar regions and to where I am now, sort of on the other side of career, it's been a pretty exciting run.

And the idea that I would get to spend, make many, many trips to the Arctic and the Antarctic and do the work that I get to do has been pretty good.

- It's been pretty good.

I think it's been pretty incredible.

(both laughs) I think I'm okay using that word, but looking back across all of it, what kind of legacy would you like to leave?

- One hopes that the discoveries that we've made and the capabilities that we've developed will be continued into the future.

- And the people that you've trained, that you've brought up, that you've mentored, your hope for them?

- That is the legacy, right?

Besides the discoveries in the published world, it's the training of the future generations that what matter.

- Thank you for all the work you've done.

It's a pleasure talking to you.

- [Joe] Yeah.

- I know we could talk for hours.

Thank you, Dr.

Joe McConnell.

- Thank you.

- Can you imagine yourself living on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere for weeks at a time as part of an ice core drilling team?

Well, this will give you an idea of how that experience feels.

(airplane whirring) - And when the plane flew away and I realized that I was going to be in that spot on this ice sheet, not really knowing where I was for many weeks, I was like, "Oh."

(Drake laughs) (light music) - It was my most sensory experience or most memorable experience was when we were driving these trucks, these Arctic trucks, hundreds of miles because it really felt isolated and quiet and kind of eerie in a way, just thinking and realizing how small you are in the landscape and how much ice there is and how there's nothing for hundreds of miles, really, truly nothing.

(light music) - Joining me now are Dr.

Nathan Chellman, assistant research professor specializing in snow and ice chemistry and the current director of the ice core lab at Desert Research Institute and Dr.

Sophie Wensman, also assistant research professor in the ice core laboratory, specializing in polar and coastal geochemistry.

That's a lot of skills right there.

Welcome to be on the lab, both of you.

I have to say, Nathan, you sound a little scared there in that video when you realized you were out there for miles and miles and miles of ice.

- Yeah, I mean, preparing for being out in the cold like that takes an enormous amount of preparation.

And so it starts really with being able to survive is kind of the first thing.

And so when that plane drops you off, you want to make sure you have everything you need to survive for at least a few days to a few weeks because it will come back with another load.

- Sophie, what's your experience being out there?

Is there ever a point where you reach, it's just too cold or you're just not warm enough?

- One of the things that is sort of a constant is needing to have enough calories in you, right?

So calories are sort of where you start with creating that energy to keep yourself warm.

And so in addition to kind of clothes, making sure that you always have food in your system is sort of a big piece.

So breakfast, lunch, and dinner became a very important part of camp life.

- The basics.

- Exactly the basics.

One of the things that we're doing when we're out there is we're actually touching and handling these ice cores.

You can't wear the big heavy mittens, right?

You're wearing sort of these very thin sort of layers of glove as you're handling this ice and so you really don't have much protection.

So you definitely lose feeling.

And so we definitely had as we were going through sort of a rotating crew of who was outside sort of bearing the brunt of the cold.

- [Sherry] What are the conditions when you're actually doing the physical drilling Nathan?

- [Nathan] That's a good question too.

So for drilling, these days, a lot of the drills actually come with a wind protection tent.

And so that keeps you out of the sun and out of the wind.

You're still touching the ice, of course, so it's still very cold, but at least you get some protection from the elements.

- [Sherry] Is sleeping a problem when you've got those fierce winds and the cold?

- I slept great, honestly, but when you went to sleep in broad daylight, you know, you definitely needed an eye mask to go to sleep to have any sort of semblance of dark, but your circadian rhythm definitely gets a little funky in the Arctic.

And then for those extra cold nights, you brought a second sleeping bag to then put inside your minus 40 degree sleeping bag.

So you definitely are sort of creating a situation where you can survive.

- What is really the hardest part of the field work that nobody really sees?

- I would say one of the hardest parts is the logistics that goes into one of these expeditions.

It's just enormous.

There's a lot of details and thought that goes into and so it's kind of a lot of unseen work that goes into the science expedition to recover an ice core from Greenland.

- What are you each looking for in the ice?

- I've focused a lot on kind of the natural chemicals in the ice, things like little tiny smoke particles in the ice that can tell us the frequency or magnitude of past forest fires, the amount of dust in the ice to look at how dry it might have been back in time, whereas I'll let Sophie talk about it, but she's focused a lot on the pollution side of things and human impacts on the ice itself.

- And can you actually document the amount or years of large forest fires or can you actually document things like that?

- Yeah, you can learn a lot about past fires from what is actually in the ice and those smoke plumes that can stay in the air for days to weeks actually get transported the whole way up over Greenland.

And when the snow falls, it falls, it takes a bit of that forest fire ash with it.

And by measuring that in the ice, we can actually pinpoint kind of years of high fire activity in terms of wildfire activity going back decades or hundreds or even thousands of years.

And so those chemicals that represent forest fires in the ice are in there mixed in with a bunch of other chemicals that can tell us about the environment, that can tell us about climate precipitation.

And so we can try to link what caused those years of high forest fire activity in the ice to other environmental parameters that we can then use to kind of inform if those conditions change, how might fires change in the present and future.

- Maybe to better prepare us.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- For sure.

- And Sophie, you're looking for something different.

What do you look for?

What are you specializing in?

- Yeah, so a lot of my work deals with sort of the anthropogenic or the human impacts and human emissions and how they're transported to the Arctic and what they can tell us about human history over the past about 2,500 years.

- And what have you found that is, anything that was remarkable?

- I think one of the things that we find most striking is that what we find across these records is that there are consistent patterns within them.

The advent essentially of leaded gasoline and the use of leaded gasoline produced widespread pollution throughout North America and South America as well.

We actually see the effect not only of pollution, but the effect of essentially effective legislation.

If we think about sort of the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages was a time period where there was very low concentrations of lead being produced.

And sort of we can talk about that as sort of our baseline, right?

And then if you come to sort of this industrial period and the rise of lead and gasoline, the amount of lead that was in the atmosphere that made its way to Greenland is 300 times that that we see during the Middle Ages during that low period.

- Wow.

- And so now after the Clean Air Act and EPA legislation and then subsequent legislation in Europe and China, we see lead levels by 2010, they were about 60 times what we were seeing during the Middle Ages.

And so we can see the effect that this legislation has directly on lead pollution, but also things like chlorofluorocarbon, CFCs, which impacted the ozone layer.

We have changes from other pollutants like mercury.

All of these sort of come down because of this effective legislation.

- Let's go back to recent history.

I know y'all go back thousands of years, but to 2011.

Tell me about your first day at the ice core lab.

- Oh yeah, my first day in the ice core lab, 15 years ago now.

I was still an undergraduate and I remember two things and specifically about the lab.

The first is if you think of kind of a mad chemist lab from like a cartoon or a movie, you just think of tubing all over the walls, instruments everywhere, lights blinking, alarms going off, just kind of general chaos.

- [Sherry] Was that your impression or is that what it really looked like?

- That was what the lab looks like.

It works extremely well, but it's very intimidating.

There's tubes everywhere.

There's shelves full of instruments.

There's like 15 computer screens you're looking at at any given time.

- [Sherry] Wow!

- It is a real labyrinth.

And so I remember just like this is insanity.

That was the first thing I remember.

The second thing I remember was dropping my first ice core sample.

- You didn't.

- Yeah.

It's kind of a rite of passage, I would say.

- [Sherry] Oh my gosh!

- You're handling a three foot long piece of clear, fragile ice, kind of moving it around a freezer and yeah.

- [Sherry] Oh boy.

- [Nathan] So I got that out of the way.

That memory has stuck with me.

- [Sherry] And what kept you coming back?

- Kind of the diversity and breadth of the work.

You get to go to Greenland, you get to go to sometimes Antarctica.

You get to go to glaciers.

You get to kind of have the adventure of field work.

- To me, I really, what draws me to this is sort of being able to sort of play detective almost.

And I say play, but it's meticulous and highly thought out and, you know all of the things that you want it to be.

But you kind of get to play detective of, you know, where is this pollution coming from?

How much was produced at the time?

- What's the most remarkable thing that you're both working on at the moment?

- Sure, one thing that both of us are working on, we actually just got back from the field working on this project is to actually study ice a little bit closer to home.

And so we've been working on studying these so-called ice patches, which are not, they're ice patches up in Alpine environments that aren't big enough to be a glacier, but they are still ice records that go back thousands of years.

These are up in the Rocky Mountains.

We've looked for them in the Sierras.

These ice patches are actually really cool paleoclimate records themselves, like a glacier or an ice sheet in a way, but just on a much, much smaller scale.

And so there's a lot of Native American history associated with them.

And so it's been a really multidisciplinary effort to try to study these both from understanding the chemistry of the ice itself, understanding how a piece of ice that's about 20 or 30 feet thick can stay in the same place for thousands and thousands and thousands of years without ever melting.

- What would you hope to find there, say in your area of lead isotopes and chemistry?

- One thing that sort of comes to mind in terms of the local impact is understanding what is in your backyard, right?

And how are these places being used over time, both from humans and from animals?

Understanding changes in the small scale climate of an area and how that impacts the humans that are using this place as hunting ground or the animals that are using it as a refuge.

You know, what are these places like and how are they changing?

- A lot of the most rapidly disappearing ice is in alpine glaciers in all continents, right?

And so we've been working on glaciers.

You know, once that ice is gone, you can never get those records back.

They're permanently gone.

- I want to shift our focus a little bit back to Dr.

Joe McConnell.

Can you tell me what Joe taught each of you that really isn't written down on paper anywhere that you might have learned from Joe?

- Sure.

I can think of many things.

The passion for the science.

I don't know if you've ever been in a road trip with Joe, but if you know, we were in a car for 15 hours, he is really good at coming up with ideas the entire time.

It's really quite amazing and talking about where research directions to go next, just really just so enthusiastic, it's very, very contagious.

And then the second thing would just be how to do really high quality science.

When you read our products as scientists are largely manuscripts, journal articles that are two, three, four, five pages long.

So very, very short pieces of literature.

But the amount of work that goes into a single study like that is enormous.

And just watching Joe put together these studies where you think you have a final draft and then you go back and read one more paper and it calls into question everything and so just making sure that all your T's are crossed, your I's are dotted, reevaluating all of your assumptions multiple times.

So by the time that two, three, four, five page document is published as official literature, it is as robust as it can be, has been really, really helpful to learn from a scientific perspective to make sure we're putting out the best work we possibly can.

- What about you, Sophie?

- One thing that I think about a lot is just how impactful it has been to have him essentially take a chance on somebody that came.

I essentially cold called him one day, right?

And he was generous and kind enough to basically take a chance and say, "Well, yes, you can have some of these very valuable, irreplaceable samples that we have and you can try this work."

And so it's really why I sort of got into the ice core world and you know, that willingness to sort of share ideas, share samples, be able to essentially run with ideas.

I think those are all really valuable things that Joe has taught me.

- Share the knowledge.

- [Sophie] Absolutely.

- Well, Dr.

Sophie Wensman and Dr.

Nathan Chellman thank you so much.

And thank you for joining us today for this look at the fascinating science and the history found in ice.

I'm Sherry Swensk.

We'll see you next time for another episode of Beyond the Lab.

(light music) - [Presenter] Production funding for Beyond the Lab has been made possible through the generous support of Michael Dermody.

(light music)