And the forecast from the beaver experts, people who study the habitat change, is that the entire north slope all the way to Barrow, the very northern tip of Alaska, will have — be covered with beaver ponds. You know Beavers will migrate all across there by 2100! Okay, 2100 sounds a long way away, but guess what? You guys know who Greta Thunberg is? The young activist from Sweden. She’ll be 96 years old in the year 2100. So by the time she’s an old person. The whole north slope of Alaska will be covered with beaver. The beavers create ponds. The ponds are dark, and then they cause more thaw of the permafrost. So they’re actually a positive reinforcement of the thaw. And so yeah, that ecology is changing we would forecast that the trees would move north of the Brooks Range in in the coming future. It’s amazing, yeah, what we’re seeing changing. 

68:43 ELISE MCCORMICK 

Amazing. Well, thank you. And I please everybody join me in thanking Dr. Brigham-Grette for speaking with us. If you enjoyed hanging out with us tonight, um, please let us know. We’d love to get your emails so that you can join us for future events. There’s I think there’s more pizza. If there is, you’re more than welcome to have some on your way out and thank you guys so much for coming and we’ll see you next time! 

69:14 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE 

Thank you, everyone.  

69:15 Audience 

Thank you. 

69:17 ELISE MCCORMICK 

Would you, yeah, The next one is April twenty-something. Uh, we do have the date set, I’m just not remembering, but it’s set, and it’ll be here. Oh, yes we if you are familiar with QR codes, we have QR codes to scan so you can follow our website where we do more blogs and stuff and also keep up to date on what we’re doing for our events.  

69:44 THOMAS

I’m also going to send out a post event survey just want to know what we can do better. 

70:00 

Thank you. 

00:02 ELYSE MCCORMICK

I hope everybody got some pizza. Pretty much at any point tonight, if you’d like to get up and get more people, you’re more welcome. It’s it’ll just be over there. A couple of logistical things.

First of all, in and introduce myself: hi, I’m ELYSE MCCORMICK and I’m a PhD student at UMass. I’m also a member of Science Stories and part of our goal is to bring science to the Valley in hopefully a fun and engaging way. Yeah, So logistical things first thing, if you need to leave during any point, obviously that’s totally fine to do so just be really gentle with the back doors. They make kind of a loud noise if you’re not careful with them. So again, please feel free to get up, get water, go to the restroom, whatever you’d like. Just know that our back doors can be a little noisy if you’re not careful.

00:57 ELYSE MCCORMICK

So that’s the number one thing number two our camera that is allowing us to be hybrid right now is right there. If you walk in front of it, that’s totally fine, but just know that you’ll be you’ll be captured on camera. And then last thing, well, have a couple of times where you guys can actually ask Julie questions. And during that time, we’re gonna hand around a microphone. And that’s for a couple of reasons, one of which is so that our Zoom audience can actually hear the questions as well, and also so that Julie and I can hear them well as well. Because there’s actually quite a bit of distance between here and and someone that might want to ask a question in the back of the room. So yeah, if we’ve, if we bring you the microphone, it’s not to insult that you have a loud voice, it’s just so that we can hear a little bit better.

01:50 ELYSE MCCORMICK

So with that, I want to tell you a little bit about Science Stories. We were established in 2011, so we’ve been doing this for a while. And during the fall and spring semester, we invite experts to come and chat with us and tell us what they’re doing. And we’d like to thank the folks that fund us, so the Graduate Student Senate and the Graduate School at UMass Amherst if you’re interested in joining us, we’d love it if you subscribe to our mailing list if you haven’t done so already and stay tuned for what we do in the future.

02:23 ELYSE MCCORMICK

But for today, we are so excited to have Dr. Julie Brigham Grette with us here to talk about her work. Dr. Brigham Grette did her PhD at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she worked on sediment history of Arctic coastal plains. She’s been a professor at UMass Amherst since 1987. She served six years at the chair of the Polar Research Board for the US National Academy of Sciences and as the head of the geosciences and was the head of the Geosciences Department at UMass for another six years. She’s received funding through organizations such as the National Science Foundation, National Geographic and many others. And thank you so much for being with us today.

03:03 Dr. Julie Brigham-Grette

Thanks for the opportunity. I look forward to questions and talking about everyone

03:06 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Cool. So, starting off, as a geologist, what are your first impressions and memories of the Arctic? How did you get there?

03:18 Dr. Brigham-Grette

Well, that’s a fascinating story because when I went into Graduate School, they told me the program I wanted to get into was full and so I couldn’t get in. So, I told him I was interested in something else. So, they let me into the geology department in another field, and then I went to two weeks later and to talk to the Arctic geologists that I’d like to go to the Arctic. And he said, well, we’ll figure it out. So, I was able to get an opportunity to work on Baffin Island, and I’m not exactly sure what drew me to the Arctic other than I just found it fascinating. I was fascinated by glaciers. I was fascinated by the glacial history. So that opportunity, just it, it just, um, just came on naturally. It’s almost kind of hard to explain, but I’ll maybe blame it on my parents who took me camping every year and I liked being in a sleeping bag. I don’t know. (audience laughter) Something like that drew me to outdoor field work.

04:23 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Cool. And so how did you then connect that love of the Arctic into starting your research and your research questions?

04:32 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So, as a master student, right, being kind of thrown out there, I remember spending a week just trying to figure out what I was doing wandering around on this landscape. As I grew into that and finished my master’s degree, I realized I really had a passion for understanding the climate history of the planet. I saw it as kind of a way of, like, solving a puzzle where you have, you know, instead of a 500-piece puzzle, you’ve got a 500-piece puzzle, but you only have half the pieces or maybe only 10 pieces, and you’ve got to figure out the story from that. I really became fascinated with that.

05:13 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

The second part of my passion comes from a, again, something that was very much serendipity. I was working in a laboratory as a graduate student doing some work for a professor, who then went on sabbatical to Norway. And because he was on sabbatical, I was then put in charge of the contract work we were doing for people in the US Geological Survey in Alaska. So, I get this phone call from a, from the USGS person, David Hopkins. And he said I want to talk to, you know, Giff Miller and I said, well, I’m sorry, he’s not here. He’s on sabbatical but I’m in charge of your project. I’m in charge of your results. And he goes, well, who are you? (audience laughs)

05:57 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Um, so I explained who I was and he goes, well, can I fly you to California, to my office? And let’s talk about these results because I don’t understand. So I said sure. So I flew down to California to the US Geological Survey. And after a full day, he said, how about I fund your PhD? And you’d work on this area.

(audible gasps from audience)

06:21 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And I went OK, and I really didn’t know anything about the North Slope of Alaska.

I didn’t know anything about what I was getting into, and nor did I at that time appreciate the person I was talking to. Dave Hopkins is “Mr. Bering Land bridge”. He wrote his first paper. That there was a land bridge between Alaska and Russia in 1958, like I was three years old so and he had a lot of questions and a lot of really interesting problems and I thought the tech, the new age dating methodologies that I was using could help and bring. An answer to understanding the sea level history of the Bering Land Bridge.

07:06 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

When did the land bridge — when was it land? When was it seaway? And, and that I think to me even to this day, the fact that the Bering Land Bridge can be an ocean gateway or a bottleneck cut off by the land. That it acts as a as a landscape and then as an ocean. To me it goes back and forth over tens of thousands of years is fascinating. And of course with that is the migration of plants and animals, the migration of people. To me, I just — that’s kind of the center of my universe. So that’s where my passion comes from.

07:44 ELYSE MCCORMICK

That is so inspiring. And what an amazing story to just have somebody be like, yeah, I’m going to fund your PhD. That’s it’s cool.

07:55 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Um, so broadly, what types of systems do geologists study and what types of questions are they asking?

08:03 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Ohh. I, you know, at least in my field, Earths geology covers a lot of very different things in my field, like I, I call myself a stratigrapher. So, I’m interested in the layering and the organization of how things happened. And so in that story of this happened, then this happened and this happened, I can look at also how the climate has changed and how what, what were the processes going on in the ocean, the atmosphere, and on land to drive those different processes. So that’s where I come from, looking at the history of the land of the land bridge in particular. But just climate history, even the climate history of the Connecticut Valley is, is a fascinating story of glaciers coming and going. Why did those glaciers come and go?

08:59 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

What caused the Northern hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere to have glaciation and then have warm interglacials? That process of, even if we go back 3,000,000 years ago, believe it or not, the Arctic [inaudible] was surrounded by forests! There were forest right up to the Arctic Ocean and there was no sea ice. So how did we go from a forested Arctic to one where we have tundra and glaciers like we have today? To me, that story of the of the evolution, I call it the you think in biology and in a different way about evolution, but I think about the evolution of the climate of the Arctic is, is, is fascinating. So, I think of my work. I, I love to use the term. I think of myself as a Time Lord. Those of you know, Doctor Who. (audience laughs) OK, so I’m Doctor Who. I can go back, get in my Tardis is a sediment core.

09:59

And that sediment core can take me back in time, and I can look back in time and see what happened and reconstruct the rate at which climate changes, what may have driven it. What was changing? Was it sea ice? Was it vegetation? What was going on? And then I can also take models and model that system and take my Tardis forward and model the future. So, what are the lessons I can learn from previous warm periods about the Super warm period we’re creating ourselves and the human impact so. So, when you talk about systems, we’re really looking at that interface between ocean systems, atmosphere systems, terrestrial systems, the ecology of that landscape, what organisms live there, and what can those organisms tell us? Their fossil bones, their fossil shell materials? What can they tell us about the chemistry of the of the waters, of the temperature of the water. We can reconstruct all of that from the past.

11:10 ELYSE MCCORMICK

So then if the sediment is your Tardis, what’s your Sonic screwdriver? What are the tools that you’re using to be able to learn from that?

11:22 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

One of the one of the many things, first of all, describing the sediments, that’s what I like to do. But then I have to go to other experts, someone for example, who can look at the pollen. You know, pollen is everywhere. And some of you who don’t like pollen in the spring know what I’m talking about. Pollen lands on the on the surface of the lakes and ends up in the bottom of the lakes or in the bottom of the ocean and it records what vegetation was around. So, if I find someone who can look at the pollen they can tell me what was living around the the lake basin over time and when was it forested and when was it tundra for example. So, I can’t do that myself, but I can bring a team together and that’s one thing I like to do in my work, is bringing people who know more than I do about something, together to answer a problem. I can also use tools that are about dating, like finding how old something is and there’s a range of tools that we can use.

12:27 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Again, for the most part I take a sample that I’m on to get age dated and depending on the techniques, one that we’re using right now is called Optically Stimulated Luminescence dating. Now that sounds like a big word, but a fancy word but what can happen is sand grains that are made of quartz, of course, can as they saltate, or fall along the landscape, they get irradiated by the sun, and it turns out the sun will release little electrons

12:59 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Am I causing this to bump? Sorry, I think it was uh, it’s hard for me to talk without my arms.

(audience laughs)

13:09 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

But so there’s a zeroing process that has when the sun irradiates sand or silt in the landscape and within seconds it’s zeroed and all the electrons are released. Once that sediment gets deposited, it gets covered up, then the natural radiation in the ground radiates the electrons or the radiation and the like uranium, the radiation in the sun will then displace electrons and you can come back thousands of years later and remeasure how many loose electrons there are. Kind of simplifying this, but how many loose electrons there are in there in that quartz matrix? And it can tell you how long it’s been sitting in the ground and so we’re using techniques like that and of course, traditional radiocarbon dating to try to find out the, the age of the, of the material.

14:02 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So, Another tool that we’re using are fossil molecules like fossil leaf wax we can use that’s been ripped off the leaves of tundra leaves incorporated in the sediment and that leaf wax that you maybe scrape, scrape off of a tropical plant you may have in your house, that leaf wax contains information about the precipitation, where did the rain come from that fed that plant? How far did it travel? Things like that.

14:38 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Wow.

14:39 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

We can say something about can we use that information to say. “How much sea ice was there in the Bering Sea during 20,000 years ago?” “How far did that moisture have to travel to get to those tundra plants,” for example? So, there’s a whole range of new tools that didn’t exist when I was doing my PhD that now exists, and I bring those people together to help. Help us paint a better landscape, a better idea.

15:09 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

One thing I’m really excited about, I’m waiting for some results to come out from some people I’ve sent samples to in Denmark they’re using ancient DNA that’s preserved in the sediments and that DNA has remnants of the vegetation, but also the animals and the plants, even the mammoth, like mastodons and saber tooth tigers, that kind of thing. They can see that in the sediments.

15:40 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Woah.

15:41 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So, I’ve sent them some samples I collected in Russia that go back three and a half million years and all the way up through the last three million years, even through the up to the present. And I’ve sent them that material – I’m waiting, It’s been about a year now – but I’m hoping they’re going to give me this incredible picture of what was living in the landscape in the past during cold periods and warm periods. And, and to me, that’s, I just can’t wait for the results. They’ve done this work in northern Greenland and it’s just been fascinating. There’s all kinds of really interesting ways of putting together the, the evolution of, of the planet and the evolution of the Arctic. So, we can appreciate particularly how, how fast we are changing the planet. I mean, I think that’s what can we take away from that other than to learn how rapid and how sensitive the climate system is, if that helps understand.

16:41 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Yeah. Yeah, I can. It sounds like as you’re kind of piercing all of these things together, you need so many different areas of expertise, not just what you’re specialized in, but collaborators in different places, like the physical place matters.

16:56 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Absolutely

16:57 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Is that something that you kind of knew from the beginning would be important to draw all of these different people together?

17:05

Well, I did get a flavor for that in my dissertation work. So, I was doing mapping the North Slope of Alaska, the coastal plain where sea level had come, and back and forth, back and forth. So, I had these stacks of different oceanographic transgressions, and each of them had different fossils in them, and some of those fossils bivalves and snails and marine snails and so on. I didn’t know the names of those, so I went to a paleontologist with the US Geological Survey and he helped under– help me identify the range of mollusks I had. And so what was interesting is that some in in some of the oldest deposits I had, that I now know are three million years old, the, some of the, the shells of marine shells in there today live only in Japan.

18:00 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

OK, So you imagine how warm the water is off Japan, that water, it was that warm off the North Coast of Alaska

18:03 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Wow.

18:03 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Back in the Pliocene, something like 9° centigrade warmer than today. So that was an interesting thing and sometimes I see other mollusks that have must have come from the Atlantic Ocean or were isolated in the Pacific so we could tell something about the sea surface temperatures by looking at the assemblage of different kinds of mollusks that some of which are well beyond their normal range.

18:38 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Even something, another example where I go to a specialist so we might find the bones of a sea otter. Well, I find bones, I don’t know who whose bones they are and I can give them to a paleontologist who knows mammals and they can tell me “oh, this is a sea otter.” Well, there aren’t any sea otters in northern Alaska today because of the sea ice. Sea otters are in the South. So again, that gives us an idea of how warm it was, how little sea ice there must have been in the past.

19:12 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So, so, I started in my dissertation work finding the specialists who were beyond my own and then building that team to pull together the information. And so that led me all through my career to kind of doing the same thing where you here’s a problem and it’s like the some of the pictures I have here where we’re working with communities and I’m working with civil engineers who know something about water and sanitation in ways that I don’t. So again, bringing A-Team together. It’s more fun to work as a team together on something and there’s just a lot we can learn from each other. So, I’ve really enjoyed collaborations and working with a lot of different individuals.

20:03 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Speaking of things that we can learn from each other, what’s one thing that would surprise people in here about what you do?

20:11 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Oh wow, what would surprise you? Ah, that’s a tough one. Oh I already told you I like camping so that doesn’t surprise you and I like sleeping bags. Yeah, gosh. What would surprise you?

20:31 AUDIENCE MEMBER 1

I have a suggestion

20:33 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Oh, uh oh, [AUDIENCE MEMBER 1] go ahead

20:33 AUDIENCE MEMBER 1

Tell them about how you funded your research in Russia [inaudible] that was required

20:43 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Oh. Gosh, yeah. So I, I ran a $15 million field program in Russia and I learned to like vodka, by the way. Maybe that’s the surprise. It’s that I learned to like vodka so I could pull a science project across the line. Yeah, So we, so I was working with. So when the Soviet Union fell, Dave Hopkins and I saw this opportunity to wow, let’s go look at the other side of the land bridge. Let’s go collaborate over there. And so when the Soviet Union fell, we quickly wrote a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation about sharing the science across the land bridge and we got funded and in the process of over the years, we brought the Russians over to Alaska and we went to Russia. A lot of shared science in that process.

21:45 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

One of the Russian geologists said to me, showed me a picture of this gigantic meteorite crater. That crater is I’m doing it again. That crater is 12 kilometers across and the meteorite that created it is about a kilometer across. So just think in your mind, you know how big this thing must have hit. It hit 3.6 million years ago and created this hole in the ground that then became this lake and that lake was never covered with glacial ice. It just sat there as a receptacle getting pollen and sediments and growing materials. And so here was this perfect record, 3 and a half million years sitting there, and nobody had studied it!

22:32 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

OK, so. Again, that was like, wait a minute; I can get a 3.6-million-year record from land. So it was because of Olga Glushkova showing me a picture of this lake! And I said, look, she said we should drill this lake and I said I’ll try to find the money and. So Al’s got a loaded questionnaire because it took me about 15 years to get the $15 million. But in the meantime, we got a little bit of money, $100,000 to go to Russia and take the first settlement core. We didn’t even know how deep the lake was. OK, we didn’t even know how deep it was we had kind of a rough idea.

So we literally 2 Germans, 2 like I had to get German. There’s a group called the Alfred Wegner Institute and I knew they had money in Germany. So I said, look, I need some money to help us get this project going. And they decided.

23:35 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So, OK, I have to tell you another funny story about this, sorry. So I heard these these Germans, they had a lot of money and I heard that there was a guy named Martin who also was interested in lakes in the Arctic. So I contacted Martin on e-mail and I told him, look. I got a permit to go to this lake, but I don’t have enough money and I and I’m interested and I said, but if we’re gonna collaborate, this has to be equal, you know, and I I’ve heard that Germans have a big ego. And if you have a big ego, I don’t want to work with you. But if you if you agreed to share the project. Let’s work together. I literally said something like that and Martin wrote back to me. He’s one of my dearest friends now.

24:23 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

He wrote back to me. He says I don’t have a big ego, let’s work together. I almost, I wish I’d saved the e-mail, but it’s literally kind of in a nutshell how it happened. And then of course we have our Russian colleagues who came together and we made that first trip, 2 Germans, 2 Russians, 2 Americans. We literally told the helicopter pilot land in the middle! And it was March. It was –50 degrees. We set up our tent in the snow and we ended up getting the first like twenty to twenty five feet of of mud and long story short, it turned out that had 250,000 years in that mud. So that was our first indication that wow, we really had something special.

25:15 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So then we started shopping it around and it took a lot of trips to Moscow, walking around, getting permits from different agencies and Moscow. I didn’t know much Russian. I took two – four — semesters of Russian and grad school, but I didn’t really remember much. Even now I can only swear a little bit in Russian, which comes in handy so.

25:42 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Anyway, we, we eventually got the money we needed to do the project ended up being a $15 million field program with 65 different scientists and we got the whole record. And we, we still, we did that in 2009, OK, We’re still publishing at UMass. We still have students working on that material and so it’s just been a real adventure and and very sad when Putin invaded Ukraine, it cut me off from my Russian colleagues.

26:18 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

We couldn’t work together. And in fact, the younger Russian colleagues of mine have got out of Russia. My older colleagues who are still there have grandkids and they don’t want to leave so. But I’m still in touch with Olga Glushkova, who is close to 90 years old now and I, I tell her every Christmas, you know, I haven’t forgotten you, you’re still close to my heart. So we still collaborate that way.

26:48 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And that’s what science is diplomacy, OK, When we do stuff internationally, science can be a diplomatic tool of friendship and that’s still the case.

27:00 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Yeah, I have so many questions about that, but I’m going to put a quick pin in that and open it up to some questions from our audience if this would be a great chance to ask whatever, whatever burning questions you guys have.

27:18 ELYSE MCCORMICK

All right, we’re going. We’re grabbing the mic and be right to you.

27:23 Paul Peely

So, my name is Paul Peely. First, your math must be off because you said you were three years old in 1958. That makes you a septuagenarian! I don’t believe that.

27:36 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah, I just turned 71.

27:37

Right. OK, well, I’ll have to look at your driver’s license. But in this, in the course you were mentioning about the mollusks that were found now only in Japan, you said what about evolution? May maybe they have changed some during the migration?

28:03

That’s a good question and I’m so glad you asked that question because I did leave out one thing we get from them is temperature, but the other thing is age, because some of these fossils do have what we call first appearance datums, particularly microfossils like little foraminifera or diatoms and ostracods. They have first appearance datums and something they may exist for thousands of years and then they end. So they have last appearance datums. So we can go in and use particularly the diatoms and the foraminifera, the mollusks to a certain extent, but the microfossils really give us first and last appearance datums. And the paleontologists working in the North Pacific have these zones where they, you have these defined. So that helps us provide some chronology to what we’re looking at.

28:50 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And you’re right, some of them, some of them do evolve a little bit, but we also have an idea one when an Organism evolves into something slightly different than it gets a different name. So that’s how we use the first and last appearance datums

29:07 AUDIENCE MEMBER

(inaudible)

29:07 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah, sure. Thank you for that question.

29:15 AUDIENCE MEMBER 2

I’m very intrigued by the Russian study and the and the lake that you referenced. What did the lake end up being as far as depth and what sort of coloring and how far down and how far back were you able to get with the core samples that you collected?

29:36 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So this was a big deal because we had to get a large drill rig that weighed 100 tons into the lake and put it on the lake when the lake was frozen. So the – it — freezes the lake itself is 175 meters deep. So how deep is that? Think of the George Washington Monument ok, and having the top very top just sticking out of the top of the lake. OK, so if you could put it in that’s how think of the George Washington Monument. So you’re you’re you freeze the lake over in the winter time, you get a meter 2 meters of ice that 2 meters of ice, 6 feet or so, was enough strength to hold 100 tons OK now to make sure we hired engineers from Edmonton, Alberta to make sure the ice was strong enough because the Russians weren’t going to put a bulldozer out there unless they knew it was strong enough so we had ice engineers who put instruments into the ice make sure it was thick.

30:38 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

In fact, they cleared the first, an area about the size of a football field, with a bulldozer and the ice was about a meter thick so 3 feet tall, 3 or 4 feet, and then they put holes in and pumped water out of the ice out of the lake onto it and made it thicker. So then it had a pad 2 meters thick and that added the buoyancy. So when we put the drill rig on top of it, it and then we had instruments to watch and make sure the ice wasn’t breaking up or anything else. So we put this 100 ton rig out there on the ice. Meanwhile, we had a camp on the coast of the lake, just in case the lake broke up I didn’t want the liability of that we so we had a camp, we had a camp, we had cooks, we had warm containers to sleep in.

31:32 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

But all of that had to be brought in in trucks and we had 16 shipping containers with the drill rig. It all had to go from OK — the drill rig itself went from Salt Lake City to the coast and in Washington state got on a barge taken across the Pacific, imported into Russia and then in a week — this is a miracle — it was then put on another barge and taken up through the Bering Straits and taken to the Arctic coast and then from there it went on some dirt roads that were frozen and across the frozen tundra and pulled by bulldozers, 16 shipping containers pulled by. So it was a big operation to get everything in place and then to have the camp.

32:24 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

All set up one other fun story about the challenges, 175 meters and we had drill pipe, the casing, all of that out there distributed on the ice. But one of the one of the interesting challenges was the first crew that went, I didn’t go out there in the beginning. There was another crew that went out end of January -50° in the January of 2009, and they were going to assemble the drill rig. So they had power cords, they had generators, they had a tools to do all the putting the whole thing together. And guess what? Those extension cords were brittle at –50! So the entire drill rig was assembled by a group of 20 people by hand!

33:22

Because they, nobody thought about what happens to a power cord at that temperature, you know, like what, why didn’t we think of that? So, so that’s a, you know, it’s a real challenge to, to make sure everything’s assembled. We got the rig down there and then we started doing the drilling. And it was, I arrived in early March and I was there from early March to early May. And we were able to get all the way down 175 meters of water, 320 meters of mud, and then we hit the impact rock, so we had promised people who study meteorite impacts that we would go into the hard rock. So, we ended up going another 200 meters into the hard rock. So we had this, if you could imagine. 700 meters of drill string out down into the into there and then at some point we had to stop because guess what? The ice was melting!

34:29 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So this in May the surface of the ice was starting to get wet and everything was freezing into it at night and we had to pull off and get everything off the lake, so.

34:45 AUDIENCE MEMBER 3

[inaudible]

34:46 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah. So, so the the rock that the meteorite hit is a metamorphic, it’s igneous rock that’s been metamorphosed, OK. So it’s really ancient. It’s like 65-70 million year old rock, OK. And so when this but when this meteorite hit. It went down into the into the basement rock and blew everything out. So the original depth was probably more like almost — I’m not going to do the math in front of everyone, but it’s about 500 meters, say 500-meter-deep hole in the ground. And then what was interesting is that very first material that was sloughing in, you know, here’s this hole and it didn’t fill up with water immediately. We find evidence of mud cracks like there may have been. It’s really hot when you hit something like that, that.

35:45

Hard though it probably took maybe 10 to 20,000 years for the for the rock to cool off from the meteorite hit and so we see mud cracks we see evidence of hydrothermal fluids and then finally the lake starts to fill up and it it’s really it takes a while for even the pollen to be preserved. So we see very little if any pollen in the very first stages of the lake. So, fascinating, just fascinating. And one of the outcomes of that project that I really like.

That’s not my field exactly but it’s the evolution of tree line overtime. So we had trees there and the trees were there and then at some point the trees started that migrate South and then the trees came back because it was warm and then the trees went South and you would think that okay, glaciation starts, the northern hemisphere starts to be glaciated and you think.

36:46

OK, that’s it for the trees but it wasn’t like that! We can see there were walnut trees and hemlocks way up in the Arctic at that time and they over time, as the climate continued to cool, the forests changed and so there’s this beautiful high resolution record of how the forest’s changed over time, which there’s nothing like it in anywhere in the Arctic to see that kind of level of change, and probably won’t, else there won’t be another record like this. There’s just so few places in the high latitudes that escaped glaciation and getting scraped away and this lake was just really special. I’ve often said that if this meteorite had just hit four hours earlier, it would have landed in Alaska, right? As the Earth turns, it would have landed in Alaska and probably be a National Park, right?

37:47 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And had somebody else would have studied it before I was old enough to do it. So, I was lucky. I’m scientifically lucky.

37:59 AUDIENCE MEMBER 4

What’s happening at that research site now.

38:06 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah. So the question is what’s happening at that research site now? Well, we don’t know exactly because I’m not in touch with everyone there, but this lake is has an outlet that goes all the way to the Bering Sea and when we were there, they had built a Fish Camp and what they were doing is rich people could fly in and stay at the camp and then fish out of that lake and the fish there; there’s freshwater salmon. They’re like this, they’re really big. And so it’s a special place for people to come fishing. The other thing that some people we saw people doing, and I think the ecotourism is happening because there are rich Russians after all, but you can go into that lake, fly in there and then kayak your way out to the Bering Sea.

39:04

So I think there’s a little bit of ecotourism, but particularly hunting going on. It’s like any other place you can go to a Fish Camp in Kamchatka or go to a Fish Camp in Alaska. But I think it’s kind of that that kind of tourism that’s happening there.

39:26 ELYSE MCCORMICK

So, umm, we have a lot of other things that we want to ask. We’re going to keep moving. So taking back our pin from where we kind of left off in our questions before you talked a little bit about how science can be this great diplomacy measure and also how it took a lot of money to do what you do. Have how has some of the current funding climate and at the federal level impacted what you’ve been doing?

40:01 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Ohh yeah. That project, and it was very expensive, was an international effort. So we had international funds as well as, you know, German funds, and Austrian funds, and so on. So that that was quite a collaboration. In the current currently, um, as you know, if you have the word climate or Indigenous or diversity, um that doesn’t fly. And so some of the projects that I’ve been working on recently have I had some funding. Some of the work that’s shown in the slides there was funded before the current administration. I have had a project working with Indigenous villages on their perceptions of climate change and their lived experience on climate change, that funding was meant to be to have.

40:57 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And we were, we were actually ranked high enough to get the funding. And then it was, we were told that it was did not meet the president’s Executive Orders. So because of this, it was too woke as the way they put it. So that means that it was returned. So I had never seen that before. When you go into a those of us who do research, we go into a government website called research.gov and I can log in and I can see my entire career of all the research that’s ever been funded.

41:37 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And of course, I can see, you know, “awarded,” “declined,” “awarded,” “declined,” “awarded,” “awarded,” and now I have “returned” at the top. So it we’re in a climate where in a climate that. We’re in a political situation where things like “climate” and other things just can’t be said so. So we’re learning how to talk a different language just to be able to do the same research. So instead of climate change, we talk about, landscape evolution, we talk about, landscape change, we talk about landscape change in impact on infrastructure, for example, sea level rise and coastal erosion, but without talking about attribution of what’s causing those changes.

42:29

So I’m I have to say I’ve gone through a period of probably 6 or 8 months where I’ve just been trying to build back my mojo to resubmit those proposals and try and just reframe them in a way that is more acceptable. I do want to say because it’s, you don’t get to see what I see but when that program manager was on Zoom with me to explain why they had to return it, she was almost in tears. She hated having to tell me that and honestly, the people at the National Science Foundation dearly love to fund good science and they hate what’s happening and they’re doing the best they can. And it, I could just tell how upset she was that she had to give me that information. So I it’s, it’s not their fault.

43:30 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

It’s not their fault. So, many of us who are in that situation, who had projects returned, we’re going to go back, reframe them, and we’ll go back to do that. So the good news is that despite what you might hear, Congress is keeping the National Science Foundation and other agencies level funded, that’s good news it’s not a big whack of 50 or 80% of the funds. So we need to keep to keep those agencies alive. We need to keep the proposal pressure as they call it, keep putting, submitting proposals and don’t give up because we can outlive this eventually.

44:21 ELYSE MCCORMICK

And is there anything that people in this room can do to also help support some of those funding measures for Congress?

44:29 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Ohh yeah, yeah. I mean, if you if you do write to, you know, your Congress legislative groups and tell them about the how important it is to support good science and I also mean that about the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, or NASA, or NOAA, we still need those agencies. We still need the science that’s carried out observing the Earth, looking at weather patterns. How important it is even just for our the infrastructure of, of airplanes and how we fly around. We need, we need good weather and predictability.

45:11

So this, I mean, how many of us do not rely on NASA and NOAA and this, you know, all our weather comes from once place, right? And it’s just given different names like AccuWeather or something. Somebody buys it and interprets it, but it’s all coming from the same place. So when you have an opportunity, I usually write to Senator Markey and I’ll take whatever I write to him and I copy and paste it to, you know, Elizabeth Warren or whoever, but mentioned science, how important science is and the basics of science, science for our health, right, vaccines, that kind of thing.

45:54 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So use your voice. Think that’s important and talk to your friends who are skeptical.

46:06 ELYSE MCCORMICK

All right. We’ve got a, gosh, we have many more questions, probably more than we’ll be able to talk about, but kind of as we start to finish up, You mentioned before that you have a big part of your work that’s working with Indigenous communities in the Arctic. Could you tell us a little bit about what that means in terms of how you braid that knowledge together?

46:27 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah. So after I finished that other project, I had a sabbatical to kind of think about what I wanted to do and this project called Navigating the New Arctic all came up within the National Science Foundation and it was you had to work at the interface of the built environment, the natural environment, and the human environment and you know, I’m good with mud and rocks, but I’ve not really hadn’t worked with Indigenous communities before. And yet I — over my career have befriended so many people in the different communities that I’ve worked in I still have in my Christmas card list several families that I still remember and they send me a Christmas card we’ve kept in touch over the years.

47:17 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So I learned I have just such a wonderful place in my heart for Indigenous communities and this is opportunity came up to work with communities who were experiencing the difficulties of climate change and the impact on their infrastructure and I thought wow, let’s bring together some engineers to bring together people in coastal erosion and let’s see if we can help so I had to find the communities to work with and, um, and, and so let me just give you a bad scenario.

47:54 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Here’s what typical nerdy scientists like physical scientists like me, we’re doing is going, oh, here’s a project and we need to team up with a village and by the way, the deadlines next week! And they look at you and go, yeah, right; you haven’t included me at all, and yet we’ve done that for years. So the So what we what we really the proper way to do it. I got a grant kind of a a what do you want to call it a planning grant to develop a team and then farm out to I, I wrote to like, I don’t know, 3-3 villages initially, and then I started writing to about 10 different villages with the same.

48:40 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

I’ve got this team of a team of a group of people and here are the kinds of things that we can help with if it’s an interest of your community. We would like to partner with you and partner and together with your issues so on, so 2 communities wrote back. And one is called Mekoryuk on Nunavik Island and the other one is called Kongiganak, which is on the coast of the Yukon, Kuskokwim Delta, those two. People from those two villages wrote back to me and I started talking to them on Zoom. That’s when COVID hit! OK, and they have Zoom ao they were learning about Zoom, Zoom in their communities. And so I started talking with them and we built a relationship on Zoom.

49:30 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

And how did I build that relationship to build trust? Was we just talked What what’s your family like? What I’ll tell you about my family. You tell me about yours. What are you hunting this week? What, what’s what, what kind of fish are you catching. And we just started looking and thinking about each other as people. And then we started to talk about, well, what are the challenges in your community? And many, both communities came up with, well: coastal erosion is a problem, and the land is changing. We’re having to level our houses every few months because the ground is moving is the thaw- permafrost is thawing and, and, and these two villages, neither of them have piped water. So a a truck pulls up and they can get water delivered to their house, but it costs a lot of money.

50:27 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

The treated water is really expensive. Let me just give you an idea. So treated, So what they do, some of the villages, they collect water off the roof of the house. So they put a bucket out and many of you might do that for your garden, right? You collect water off the roof. Well, they’re collecting water off the roof of their house and taking it right in and using it to cook dinner! And the problem was – ohh, the other thing that these villages didn’t have was any sewer. There’s no sanitation system 1 village of 600 they still poop and pee into a honey bucket. So it’s just literally a bucket with a toilet seat on it and then somebody in the house has to take that bucket up on their four wheeler and deliver it to a lagoon and throw it in to the sewage lagoon and they do that every day.

51:25 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So they’re exposed to all kinds of fecal material. Real problem there. So they want to have proper sanitation, they want to have water and sanitation, but that’s very hard for these remote villages to do that because they’re subsistence hunting so 80% of their food comes from the land or the ocean. So the average income of these home of many of these villages is in the range of you know maybe $8000 to $15,000. And you can imagine, you know, a jar of peanut butter is going to cost, you know, $8 in the, in the grocery store. So it’s really very expensive for them.

52:04 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So they collect the rainwater and use it. But guess what? The, the, the birds have just been in the sewage lagoon And they then go land on the roof of the house, right? And, and then that rainwater brings that fecal material right into the water. So there all kinds of health problems that could be avoided. And there’s been some studies showing if you had piped water in, in the villages of the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta, there’s 50 villages you can lower the health costs so dramatically that it would pay for itself in no time and decrease the number of trips people make in to Bethel to go to the hospital. Long story short we started working with this community trying to target and partner with them letting them tell us where the problem areas were and then we matched a plan on how to study that landscape.

53:02 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Flying drones, collecting high resolution landscape information and collecting that information in a way that we can share back to the communities and then use that to inform their future, like does this community need to move? Do they need to relocate? And if they do, how many decades do they have to do that?

53:25

And one of the villages is on very wet, soggy terrain and they have a lot of permafrost the ground because in a few places it’s, it can be 50% ice. So you can imagine if you lose that the ground would change a lot. The other community has less problems with ice and more problems with coastal erosion. So they’re they’re problems are slightly different, but we’ll be able to. At least make give them information and shared that information with them and work with them to characterize what that future might look like for their for their village. So we’re working with, particularly in this last year, the project ends at the end of December of 2026, we hope we get a no cost extension to do a little bit more work with that, but we’re actually trying to wind up with a lot of our results over the next year or year and a half, and then provide reports to the community that they can use to then go to the state government and go to whatever federal agencies we can get to help them build the infrastructure they need and, and we’re trying as a as a group of scientists working in different parts of Alaska to decrease the barriers that have been built for indigenous communities.

54:58

If you’re there’s a lot of structural barriers just what they need to have if they’re going to get a grant, they have to have certain people in place in the villages. Well, nobody works 40 hours a week for the water and you know, for the for the water department or works 40 hours a week as the village accountant, you know, they might work 10 or 20 hours a week. So there’s a lot of little barriers that I’ve learned about that just are not appropriate for actually finding a way to actually bring that, bring that the resources they need into the village.

55:41

So one village, it turns out, is going to have piped water. So they did qualify. But the other village, their current water supply isn’t big enough to support that and here’s a practical problem. Think about Suddenly you can go to your sink and turn the water on. Wow. Do you think you’re going to use less water? No. So you’re probably going to use more you may use more that goes into your honey bucket or into your your sewage system. So they have to increase the size of the sewage lagoons if they’re going to increase the water use. And so there’s some things like that that haven’t been thought out completely. So wait a minute, I’m a geologist who studies climate change. This is all new to me, but I can use my knowledge of the landscape to help inform how landscape quickly those landscapes will change and to the team with the civil engineers we have at UMass who are working on the project with us, you know, then we then we can come to a lot of those answers, some of those problems.

56:54 ELYSE MCCORMICK

That’s incredible. I mean, that is just such a we’re so removed from problems like that.

57:01 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Let’s let me just give you an example about how much water costs treated water in these villages. So let’s imagine a room this size full of water. When I buy it in Amherst, this room of this size of water might cost me 8 or $10.00 for that water, OK. And but that kind of water in that amount might cost $250 or $300 in the village! So that’s why they use the rainwater off the roof because they can’t afford to pay for the treated water. That’s what it costs in these villagesa and that was a shocker to me to learn how much they’re having to pay, which is why they even go off all they have beautiful schools! The schools have metal roofs, and there’s buckets all the way around each building to collect rainwater. So yeah, next time you pay your water bill, imagine what it could be.

58:10 ELYSE MCCORMICK

So I’m going to ask you one more question before we take a couple more questions from our audience. I know we’re maybe going to open, yeah, just a little bit over, but this has been so, so much fun. I’m having a great time. But if somebody only remembers one thing from what we’ve talked about tonight, what would you hope that that is?

58:29

Oh boy. Um, well, one climate change is real, you know, contrary to what someone says, climate change is real and we can do something about it and we can decrease our, our, the way we’re changing the planet. That’s one thing. If I can squeak in a second one, just remember that when we’re changing the planet, we’re making it better. And I think if we could all live like Indigenous people do, they live in harmony with the land we are. They see themselves as part of the ecosystem we need to see ourselves as animals in this world, living on the planet, we’re not just to take advantage of the resources, see ourselves as animals on the planet, as part of the ecosystem. And I, I think if we all started thinking the way Indigenous people do about the, about our world, you know, we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves into this mess.

59:31 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Amen to that. Alright, we’ll take maybe one or two more questions and then we’ll wrap it up.I think you first?

59:45 AUDIENCE MEMBER 5

On the slides, oh, this picture right here, you talked about a bunch of places like Bering Strait and the North Slope and Lake Elgygytgyn. Can you point those out for people?

60:00

Oh, oh, yeah! Well, these are Mekoryuk and Kongiganak right? The two villages I’m pointing to right here in the Bering Sea. And I don’t think I can reach far enough, but Elgygytgyn is under the blue line in the middle of Chukotka.OK, so it’s northeast Siberia or northeast Russia? Arctic Russia? Not really Siberia. Siberia is that way, but that’s outer Chukotka.

60:32 AUDIENCE MEMBER 1

[inaudible] think about sea level lowering and exposing land.

60:38 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

OK, so, so, so here’s roughly that white line is the edge of the continental shelf. So that would have been the shoreline 20,000 years ago way out here. So when the land bridge existed, the North-South width of the Land Bridge North-South was 1000 kilometers! Huge. So you were a mammoth walking across you wouldn’t even know there was a North Pacific out there. So it was a gigantic landscape and, you know, low lying flat, many of these islands are little volcanoes. They’re remnant volcanoes and they were high because of the volcano building up. And they’re rich with archaeological sites because you can imagine people going across the land bridge. OK, let’s get up on top of that hill and take a look. Right? And they must have done a lot of that.

61:36 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

So I’ve been out to Saint Lawrence Island, which is the big island in the middle. That’s a fascinating place with a lot of volcanics there as well. So it’s a fascinating landscape.

61:47 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Thanks, Al. I hope that answered the question.

61:54 AUDIENCE MEMBER 6

You were talking about previous warm periods way back. How do they compare with what we’re going through now in terms of?

62:06 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Yeah. So great question. So we kind of have an idea that, you know, we have glacial interglacial cycles and roughly in the last million years, every 100,000 years or so, you have a warm period and so the last time it was this warm was about 125,000 years ago and at that time we think the world was 1° warmer than preindustrial. That’s our measure right now at 1½ degrees. So we’ve exceeded that and so where we’re headed the current agreements on emissions, which are not good would put us at about 3 or 4° above preindustrial, which puts us in the Pliocene.

62:56

So we out there, we now have a Pliocene, so 33 million, three and a half million years ago we had an atmosphere like we have now and unfortunately if we don’t change what we’re doing in about 200 years we could be back where we were in the Eocene, 55,000,000 years ago and we had massive surface ocean extinction and so there’s ocean acidification that’s happening as well. So we’re, we’re really at a critical time we’ve got to start turning things around because the planet responds slowly to some things and turning, changing the atmosphere in the ocean.

63:40

And we’re going to, if we start to get rid of all the CO2 that we’ve put into the atmosphere now, it’s still going to take a long time for all the heat that we’ve put into the oceans to dissipate, start to turn things around. So, the sooner the better in my estimation.

64:02 AUDIENCE MEMBER 7

Did you have a bullet or two take home about changes in the permafrost? I know it’s it’s melting, but did you have anything that we should be thinking about?

64:14

We are the permafrost scientists are, of course, we’re mapping how the permafrost is lowering and warming. So the permafrost is thawing across many parts of the of the Arctic, and that’s causing tremendous infrastructure problems, for one. Well, if you think about the roads between Anchorage and Fairbanks and various things, not to mention others. So, but the other problem that scientists are working on is what kind of carbon dioxide, just organic matter that’s been frozen for thousands and thousands of years — what kind of CO2 and methane are coming up rapidly out of the ground? It’s called rapid thaw and people are just kind of discovering that in fact, rapid thought can happen where there’s suddenly a lot of thaw in one place and that you may have seen it on the Internet if you the woman I know, Katie Walter, who went to Mount Holyoke College, she goes up on the lakes in Alaska and she pokes a hole through and she can take a lighter and it blows up because of the gas coming up into the lake and it gets trapped under the ice and so we know that these lakes are expanding the permafrost is thawing and it’s putting out a lot of CO2 and methane so that could overwhelm what we’re doing you know it’s just a lot of carbon and and we want to keep it frozen, keep it in the ground. So that’s a worry that we have about the permafrost.

66:06 ELYSE MCCORMICK on behalf of Audience Registration Questions

Alright. But um, one question that I’m going to try to condense from some of the audience registration questions that we had and then we’ll, we’ll close out, um I wanted to ask how climate change is affecting flora and fauna in the Arctic and what that means for the people that are living there.

66:28 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Oh, so the how the climate is changing. Well, one thing it’s changing the distribution of different organisms, many of them like cooler climates, so you may have heard about the migration of organisms that live on the sea floor moving northward. A lot of fisheries, even salmon are moving up into rivers that they didn’t go to some of the villages in southern Alaska are reporting that the fish don’t come anymore. They’re going north! They’re bypassing the rivers. At the same time on land, the moose are going farther north and one interesting thing is the beavers are moving north so the villages that I work with have never seen beaver before! They have no history of hunting beaver and yet now the beavers are coming back because the now the forests are coming back, the shrubbery is coming back, so the beavers have more habitat.

67:30

And the forecast from the beaver experts, people who study the habitat change, is that the entire north slope all the way to Barrow, the very northern tip of Alaska, will have — be covered with beaver ponds. You know Beavers will migrate all across there by 2100! Okay, 2100 sounds a long way away, but guess what? You guys know who Greta Thunberg is? The young activist from Sweden. She’ll be 96 years old in the year 2100. So by the time she’s an old person. The whole north slope of Alaska will be covered with beaver. The beavers create ponds. The ponds are dark, and then they cause more thaw of the permafrost. So they’re actually a positive reinforcement of the thaw. And so yeah, that ecology is changing we would forecast that the trees would move north of the Brooks Range in in the coming future. It’s amazing, yeah, what we’re seeing changing.

68:43 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Amazing. Well, thank you. And I please everybody join me in thanking Dr. Brigham-Grette for speaking with us. If you enjoyed hanging out with us tonight, um, please let us know. We’d love to get your emails so that you can join us for future events. There’s I think there’s more pizza. If there is, you’re more than welcome to have some on your way out and thank you guys so much for coming and we’ll see you next time!

69:14 JULIE BRIGHAM-GRETTE

Thank you, everyone.

69:15 Audience

Thank you.

69:17 ELYSE MCCORMICK

Would you, yeah, The next one is April twenty-something. Uh, we do have the date set, I’m just not remembering, but it’s set, and it’ll be here. Oh, yes we if you are familiar with QR codes, we have QR codes to scan so you can follow our website where we do more blogs and stuff and also keep up to date on what we’re doing for our events.

69:44 THOMAS

I’m also going to send out a post event survey just want to know what we can do better.

Thank you.