You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty light on my blog posts the last nine months or so. That’s because I’ve been consumed with our Web project, Ice Stories. Just about a year ago, we got funding from the National Science Foundation to do this International Polar Year education project and it’s been non-stop polar research and education since then. We did a full slate of Webcasts last winter from Antarctica and trained some young Arctic researchers in media production and story-telling this past March. We gave them cameras and asked them to post dispatches, video and pictures from their research camps in Alaska and Greenland. We also sent an Exploratorium media crew to Barrow in May and June to produce Webcasts and stories from this science outpost on the northern-most spit of land in the U.S.

Now it’s my turn for a polar expedition and we’re going to Greenland starting July 7. Summer is an intense time for science in Greenland. With 24 hours of daylight and a melting ice cap to study, researchers spread along the edges of glaciers and on camps atop the summit of the ice cap to learn all they can about the dynamic nature of ice, wildlife, climate, and geology in an era of rapid climate change at the poles. I’ll be up there with video production Lisa Strong to document all the science we can stuff into three weeks. We’ll be camping and hiking with glaciologists, biologists, and climate researchers, recording interviews, writing dispatches, and capturing moving and still image scenes of this gorgeous icy island.

Our first stop will be the town of Kangerlussuaq, nestled along a 160-km (100-mile) long fjord with the looming ice cap behind. We’ll reach Kanger, as it’s often called, via an Air National Guard military transport from Scotia, New York and we’ll be staying at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support facility, aka “KISS.” We hope to catch up with Billy D’Andrea, our Ice Stories correspondent from Brown University, who is studying lake sediments for clues of our recent climate past. We also plan to hitch a ride and hike out to Tom Neumann’s camp along the glacier edge. Tom is a glaciologist from the University of Vermont (http://www.uvm.edu/~greenlnd/) who is interested in the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in particular the last time Greenland was free from its mantle of ice. His team does this by patrolling the edge of the glacier and collecting debris spit out from the base of the ice sheet. These rocks contain clues about the last time they were directly exposed to cosmic rays from the sun (i.e. the last time they weren’t covered by ice). Near Kanger, we also hope to capture some musk oxen with our cameras and will almost certainly encounter unwelcome wildlife in the form of marauding Arctic mosquitoes (Billy says we’ll be eaten alive, which is why we’ve packed mosquito nets and plenty of deet).

From Kanger, we fly to the lovely town of Ilulissat, a major tourist and science destination on the island. Ilulissat means iceberg in Greenlandic and the town is aptly named situated as it is near the outlet of the world’s fastest-moving glacier, the Jakobshavn. Jakobshavn is Greenland’s largest glacier and it regularly calves huge icebergs in the summer season, some as large as a cubic kilometer is size. We hope to capture one of these gigantic calving events at Mark Fahnestock’s camp along the rocky shoreline of Disko Bay at the base of the glacier. Mark is a glaciologist from the University of New Hampshire, and studies the flow rate of the Jakobshavn glacier. This one glacier, a fraction of the 630,000-cubic-mile ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, produces 35 billion tons of icebergs every year, nearly all the bergs that threaten ship traffic in the Northern Atlantic and almost certainly the origin of the monster that sunk the Titanic. As a final destination of our Greenland science tour, Lisa Strong will fly with the Air National Guard up to Summit Camp to get a perspective of the ice from on top the two-mile-thick sheet.

No, this isn’t a dire climate prediction from one of Al Gore’s disciples. This description was of the Arctic’s distant past given by a paleo-oceanographer during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science, being held this year in Boston (brrr, baby it’s cold outside). This particular scientist, Henk Brinkhuis from Utrecht University in The Netherlands, also said that 50 million years ago the Arctic was “stinky, swampy and freaking warm.”

Scientists know this because a few years ago an international consortium mounted the first ever deep ocean drilling expedition to the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. The ice-breaking drill ship pulled up sediment cores that represent climate history back to a time when Earth was a “greenhouse world” with no ice caps at the poles. Their 2004 expedition is written up in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) website. It was actually a feat to drill through thick sea ice to the ocean floor below and it took three ice breakers to do the job: a nuclear icebreaker from Russia to break up the floes, a Swedish ice breaker to grind them into slush, and a third ship to deploy the drill string.

Sediment cores are a time machine, scientists pore over the mud looking for fossil fragments, ancient microbes, pollen, and other pieces of evidence that give clues about the temperatures of the ocean and atmosphere. We know from the ANDRILL sediment coring project in Antarctica, covered in our Ice Stories website, diatoms and other plankton are good indicators of past climate because they are very particular about the environments they live in, including the temperature of the water.

Scientists at the session were quick to say that they don’t expect palm trees and crocodiles anytime soon in the Arctic. In fact, from these ocean cores it appears that ice started forming 40 million years ago, shortly after the maximum warm period, and as been an important climate driver in the Arctic Ocean since then. With recent thinning and changing sea ice cover around the North Pole, Kate Moran, a leader on the arctic drilling expedition, said “As scientists, it’s important to point out the issues that demontrate the vulnerability of our planet, that we could destroy this in 200 years.”

photo credit:
H Pälike © ECORD/IODP

Global warming has been called, with good reason, the biggest environmental challenge the world has ever faced and the bad news about the impacts of climate change just keeps piling up. Summer arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than even the most pessimistic scientists ever predicted, villages in Alaska are tumbling into the sea, the beloved polar bear is at risk of extinction and Adelie penguin populations on the Antarctic Peninsula have been declining as temperatures there have risen an average of 6 degrees Celsius in the winter.

The losses are mounting, but is there good news for some? Anyone who has read Andrew Revkin’s series of stories about the land rush in the Arctic knows that some oil and shipping interests will benefit from an opening of the fabled Northwest passage across the Arctic Ocean. (However, these short-term gains will inevitably lead to long-term losses by the rest of the human and natural world as NCAR’s Michael Glantz so eloquently writes about in his blog Fragile Ecologies).

But did you know that residents of Greenland can now enjoy locally grown potatoes and brocolli? And that in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica, Adelie penguin populations are actually increasing, unlike the penguins of the Antarctic peninsula? That was the subject of a recent talk at the Exploratorium by David Ainley, a biologist who has been studying the intrepid Adelie penguin for nearly thirty years and reports on his research in the Penguin Science website.

The story, David says, is more complex than the view that a warming earth melts ice and destroys the habitat for all animals that live on or near frozen sea or ground. In reality, global warming does more than melt ice and heat up the air, it also changes wind patterns which can affect the extent and movement of floating sea ice. For Adelies, which nest on bare rock near the coast, increasing winds push sea ice farther offshore and give the penguins access to ocean feeding grounds without having to walk across kilometers of ice. That makes them better able to feed their chicks, increases reproductive success and has meant a steadily rising population of Adelie penguins in Eastern Antarctica. At the same time, this loss of sea ice threatens the Emperor Penguin, the heroes of “March of the Penguin” and “Happy Feet.” These large birds need a stable platform of sea ice to lay their eggs and hatch chicks. They do this in winter, rather than summer, and the caretakers do not return to sea while they are raising chicks, as the Adelie penguins do. Emperor penguins are vulnerable to shifting sea ice and have suffered population declines as much as 50% as increasing winds have destabilized their breeding habitat and swept chicks and eggs out to sea. The very bad news for Emperor Penguins is that climate models are forecasting even stronger winds in a warming Antarctica, making them climate losers.

July 7, 2007 will mark the global concert Live Earth, which features bands on all seven continents rocking out with a call to arms for combating global warming. San Francisco residents can watch the satellite feed at the Exploratorium, along with a screening of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Web audiences can tune into MSN’s Live Earth webcast here.

Among the dozens of headliners, which include The Police, Shakira, and Linkin Park, Live Earth will launch the Indie band Nunatak onto the world stage. Made up of scientists at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, Nunatak will record a concert with a live audience of only 17, the full contingent of scientists and support personnel manning the station in the dead of winter. You can check out a rehearsal video on YouTube that features some pretty decent fiddling by Tris Thorne, the communications engineer at Rothera Station.

There’s a long tradition of do-it-yourself entertainment in Antarctica. Among the earliest explorers, who spent up to 18 months or more on the ice, it was the only choice they had. Costumes and wigs were part of the cargo on all of Shackleton’s expeditions and his crew competed in talent shows that starred cross-dressing sailors. Even today, with cable TV and DVDs available, there is plenty of homegrown arts and culture on the ice. During our expedition in 2001/2, we were lucky enough to catch “Ice Stock,” the New Years’ celebration of garage bands, arts, and chili-cook-off competition at McMurdo, the largest NSF research station in Antarctica.

That concert line-up in 2002 included a pro in the mix, guitarist Henry Kaiser pictured here in red with one of McMurdo’s house bands (written up in his Antarctica blog).

I spent a couple of days in Boulder, Colorado visiting Mickey Glantz, Exploratorium Osher Fellow, friend and collaborator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In his 30 years at NCAR, Mickey has concentrated on the social side of climate research shuttling between the world of science and communities of people worldwide who are affected by climate change. His usable science workshops help farmers, fishermen, small business owners, and community leaders make sense of, and prepare for, changes in the weather including extreme events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, and other disasters associated with climate fluctuations like El Nino and La Nina.

During my visit, we talked about his recent visit to China and meetings there with scientists at the polar research center in Beijing who are enlisting Mickey’s help in setting up a polar affairs center. China is among 60-some countries participating in the International Polar Year which started this spring and continues until March 2009. Canada is another of the participating countries and, while I was in Boulder, I went to a talk at the University of Colorado by a researcher, Shari Gearheard, who lives in the Canadian Arctic.

Shari is a remarkable young social scientist who occasionally sleeps in an iglo and is an apprentice dog musher, a necessary skill for traveling to her research sites on the ice. She is documenting native knowledge in an Inuit village of 800 residents, collecting observations of climate and environmental change and helping mediate that knowledge with scientific studies of the region. (In this photo, Shari is with Ilkoo Angutikjuak, Inuit Elder and hunter from Clyde River, Nunavut, with whom she has worked closely since 2000 on environmental change research). Arctic communities are experiencing more dramatic climate change than anywhere else on earth, but the patterns aren’t uniform across the North. On Baffin Island, houses aren’t falling into the sea as they are in some places in Alaska, but the Inuit are still facing changes that affect their traditional way of life. Indigenous Arctic hunters depend on stable ice, predictable seasonal and daily weather patterns, and productive ecosystems, all of which are threatened by global warming.

In her talk, Shari described the last three years living among her indigenous Arctic colleagues. Shari has deep respect for the Inuit people and spoke of all she’s learned from the hunters and their families, including patience, humor, courage, and deep, precise knowledge of the environment. It may be an exaggeration that Arctic peoples have 100 different words for snow, but there is precision in their language that can communicate subtle variations in wind direction and speed, ice thickness and stability, and changing weather conditions, all of which tells a hunter whether it’s safe or perilous to venture out on the ice. Shari talked about their curiosity and eagerness to participate in the scientific research happening around them, in many cases Inuit knowledge has preceded the science and is proving valuable in helping track both the extent and impacts of climate change in the Arctic.

Shari created a CD-ROM of her work in Clyde River, which you can order here.

I often hear complaints that science, writ large, changes its mind a lot. One study says salt is bad for you, another says it isn’t so harmful after all. What people often don’t understand is that the process of science is a provisional and a cumulative one, which makes it self-correcting over time. A small study of a population indicates that sodium intake may increase blood pressure, which is an indicator for a higher risk of heart disease. A later, larger study may show that other factors, like a high-fat diet, are more important predictors of what makes a ticker go bad. Another study indicates that genetic pre-disposition together with diet and exercise habits may be the best predictor for who will have heart attacks and who probably won’t. All the studies may be valid, but the results are provisional and our understanding may continue to evolve as new research is conducted. Human bodies are complicated, individualistic and variable machines so the answers about health and physiology are rarely completely straight-forward and universally applicable. The more we learn about human health and biology, however, the more we understand these complexities and variations.

And so we come to climate, another complex system with many interlocking, interacting parts. For decades, oceanographers and climate scientists have been studying what’s known as the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream, which carries warm, equatorial waters to North America and Europe. We did a webcast recently on the basics of this phenomenon, hosted by Exploratorium senior scientist Charles Carlson (scroll down to 4-21-2007). As recently as 12,000 years ago, this conveyor belt of warm salty water shut down when a flood of fresh water from melting glaciers poured into the ocean, plunging Europe and North America into a mini ice age (which was also the premise of a recent disaster film, “Day After Tomorrow.”) Scientists have been worried that global warming and the subsequent melting of ice sheets in Greenland would cause a similar disruption of the North Atlantic Current, but the recent IPCC report backed away from this prediction, reports Walter Gibbs in the New York Times. I asked Charlie to comment on this recent finding, here’s what he had to say:

“We can all remove one possible disaster scenario from our fears about global warming. The latest scientific evidence, coupled with more sophisticated computer climate modeling, doesn’t support a northern hemisphere plunge into a mini-ice age, as the Gulfstream current fails. Since the late ’70’s oceanographers have observed that the Gulfstream has periodically and dramatically varied in flow over the earth’s history, and that these variations are associated with major climatic shifts, like ice-ages. Such current fluctuations certainly could account for climatic shifts, since the North Atlantic current accounts for moving about 30% of the equatorial heat towards the poles significantly warming the northern latitudes, making Europe and North America more habitable. But a closer look has revealed that such a current failure isn’t all that likely. It would take a major catastrophic melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and that’s not in the earth’s current climate cards. So no “Day After” ice-age, we’ll all slowly warm instead.”

Last Sunday’s New York Times had a book review of Al Gore’s version of Inconvenient Truth for kids. The review was written by Robert Coontz, Deputy News Editor for Science Magazine (full disclosure, Robert is an old grad school classmate and good friend of mine).

Robert praised the book for its concise language and organization, an improvement over Gore’s original book for adults. He chides Gore a bit about painting too much certainty about global warming as the culprit behind Hurricane Katrina, a claim that most scientists are uncomfortable making. But Robert also says that in many ways the book does not go far enough. Because the main message is already out there that humans are impacting climate, now we need to fill in the gaps and explain the uncertainties and complexities of climate science. We should be introducing the scientists and how they use and make sense of data, especially as new findings come out and refine our understanding (and sometimes overturn previous scientific interpretations).

This gap is where formal and informal educational institutions can step in to provide context by helping our audiences make sense of the basics of climate science and the new information coming out. The Exploratorium developed the Global Climate Change Research Explorer that shows real observational data and how scientists interpret these observations to understand the mechanisms of climate change. We also produced a series of Polar Science Webcasts that introduced basic concepts about climate systems and some of the scientists, many of them working in the earth’s polar regions, who are piecing together climate history to help us understand what is happening now and may happen in the future.

As a museum, the Exploratorium has been on the Web since 1994 and we’ve developed online exhibits, artworks, live Webcasts, and other experiments. Before blogging was recognized as such we wrote expedition journals in Antarctica and dispatches from science conferences, like the AAAS meetings in 2001 and a couple of NCAR “usable science workshops” on La Nina and El Nino in the Galapagos.

But these early experiments in proto-blogging have been eclipsed by a robust community of folks who write about science and society, about the museum’s role in the public understanding of science, and who share tips about developing exhibits, communicating research, and getting in touch with our diverse audiences. So, some of us at the Exploratorium have been mulling it over and we decided to launch our own blogging experiment. (I should mention that much of what we do here can be described as experimental, we like to think of ourselves as a learning and research institution which thankfully means that we can chalk up failed experiments as learning experiences and move on.)

I’m the first out of the blocks and I hope you’ll bear with me as I figure out how I fit into this interesting online ecosystem. My goal is to contribute something interesting and unique that reflects the richness of what happens at the Exploratorium. I want to share some behind the scenes glimpses as we develop new projects for the museum floor and the web—in part because I’m often asked by scientists and others at conferences about what we’re working on and whether they can get involved in or partner with us on museum programs. I also want to reflect some of the compelling conversations and the fascinating people who walk through the door and interact with our staff and the public audience. In my job as director of the Osher Fellowship program, I’ve had the great privilege of hosting visits by some incredible scientists, artists, and scholars including E.O. Wilson, Elizabeth Blackburn, Christian deDuve, Cynthia Kenyon, Fred Wilson, and Lewis Hyde. I want to introduce these folks to you and share some of the interesting discussions we have with them. I’m also compelled in this effort by our director, Dennis Bartels, who wants the Exploratorium to be both an outside in and an inside out organization. So some of the blog will be devoted to giving you a peek behind the curtain at what we’re doing but we also want to invite our audience to contribute ideas and feedback that will help us to be more responsive to your interests, needs and ideas. As we think about our local, national and international audiences, we want to continue developing programs and projects that help make science accessible and relevant to everyday life. And we’ll invite you to get involved as we figure out ways to make sense of some of the most socially important, controversial, and complex science issues of the day, such as stem cell research, global warming, and the evolution wars. At the same time, we won’t lose sight of the fun parts of science, the everyday cool stuff that the Exploratorium is known for. So, please I want to hear from you and hope this opens a fun and fruitful dialog.