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11 Sharon Robinson: Antarctic moss
149 Plays4 months ago
Climate change biologist Dr Sharon Robinson takes us thousands of kilometres across the Southern Ocean to Casey Station, Antarctica. She is an expert on Antarctica’s ancient moss beds, which she describes as ‘miniature old growth forests’. In our conversation, we spoke about the adaptations that enable moss to thrive in some of the harshest environments on earth, and the impact of historic ozone depletion and climate change on these fragile ecosystems.
Bio:
Dr Sharon Robinson is a Climate Change Biologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. An expert on Antarctic moss, she first visited East Antarctica in 1996 and has been on 12 expeditions to Antarctica with the Australian and Chilean National Antarctic Programs. Her research characterizes the impact of anthropogenic change including ozone depletion and climate change on fragile moss ecosystems. She is a member and lead author of the UN Environment Programme, Environmental Effects Assessment Panel; and a Faculty Member of Homeward Bound, helping to create a global network of women with a background in STEMM leading and solving our world’s greatest challenges. She is a 2024 Australian Laureate Fellow and Deputy Director of Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future.
Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Plant Kingdom'
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults, and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and I pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers. We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature. We discuss their works, stories, and reflections from the field.
Meet Dr. Sharon Robinson
00:00:40
Speaker
Today's conversation is with University of Wollongong Professor and Dean of Researcher Development, Dr. Sharon Robinson. In our conversation, we traveled thousands of kilometers by virtual sea to Casey Station Antarctica, where Sharon has been researching ancient moss beds since 1996. Here's our conversation.
00:01:07
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Again, I've been really looking forward to speaking again about all of your incredible work. I guess to start us off, it's always interesting to hear people's journey.
00:01:24
Speaker
into their research and also when kind of plants became alive for them in part of their work. And did your research start in the lab and then field work came after for you or what's kind of your relationship with lab and field work?
00:01:39
Speaker
I guess when I was doing my degree in my third year I did a an undergraduate research project. I was working on zinnia cells and trying to make cells in culture produce plant pigments, which is kind of interesting because then I got came back into that as a postdoc many years later. But that thing of the fact that you can take a plant and then take cells from it and regrow regrow a plant or make the cells produce things. That that sort of um ability of plants to to reproduce in that way was really fascinating to me and so that was when I sort of really got into the research side of things. But very much in the lab um I did carrot cell cultures for my PhD so I stayed in that cell culture space. and Using a whole load of different techniques to study how plants work
00:02:28
Speaker
And that's always been something that I've been really fascinated by, you know, what makes them tick. There's so much alchemy in every day and everyday plants and what they accomplish. And first you research plants that are dealing with a lot of a lot of challenges and where they where they live, which I guess we'll dive into next. So a lot of your research is on Antarctic mosses, and you've been studying these mosses, I believe, for for decades. And I'd love to just go back to how this started for you. So you heard about the mosses before you saw
First Antarctic Expedition
00:03:04
Speaker
them. What kind of interest interested you originally in the mosses?
00:03:09
Speaker
So I was actually working on the plants that grow in Australian rainforests and I was really interested in in the way in which they are, you get a whole bunch of rainforest plants that produce, um instead of producing green new leaves with chlorophyll in, they produce leaves with different pigments and particularly red pigments so you can go into a rainforest and see all these pink um pink leaves. um what Sometimes they're white because they have no pigments in but often they're pink. bronze colored and I was really interested in what it was that the plants were doing you know why weren't they making chlorophyll why were they putting these other pigments in what sort of protection did that give them or you know what was the reason behind it I was giving a talk at a conference and somebody came up and said oh if you're interested in red pigments in plants you should go to Antarctica because the moss turns red every summer
00:04:01
Speaker
and I thought oh that's really fascinating and I'd never thought about working in Antarctica or doing work with mosses particularly and but I thought well maybe that's to do with maybe one of the reasons why the plants might produce red pigments is to protect themselves from excess radiation and particularly ultraviolet radiation and so with the ozone hole being a big thing at the time and wondering whether The reason the plants were going red was because of extra UV because of ozone. It seemed like a reasonable thing to investigate. And so I wrote a grant and I was successful. And um and that's where my Antarctic career took off from. So it was really an accident. It was a fortuitous, you know, one of those serendipitous moments.
00:04:48
Speaker
Yeah, it changed the whole course of your research and quite um a shift in preparing for field work when it's in the Australian rainforest versus Antarctica. And I guess for that first for that first trip, what was it what was it like when you landed in Antarctica? Was it what you had expected? Did you have expectations? Was there anything i really anything that really surprised you or was unexpected upon that first landing?
00:05:19
Speaker
Well, I guess that the whole thing was pretty unexpected because, and I mean, I didn't know, you know, I'd not really been on a long seavoid before. It was 10 days by ship from Hobart. So it was my first experience on a ship, my first experience travelling across the Southern Ocean, which is, you know, a pretty big sea and so ah quite exciting.
00:05:41
Speaker
and and um Luckily, I wasn't seasick, so that was a but a big bonus. But just that sense of distance, you know the fact that it takes 10 days of you just plodding across the sea and this ship bouncing up and down, really gives you an idea of how far away from ah Australia and other countries how far away Antarctica really is.
00:06:04
Speaker
and then we went in really early in the year so back then the first ship in into Casey would go in around October and so we went in early in the season and that meant that the sea ice was still really thick around the station so about a hundred kilometers offshore we we were put on ah put on a helicopter and we flew into the station and so again it was my first helicopter ride but lots of firsts And we were flying over sea ice and you see all the different sorts of sea ice. So you start off, you know, you have a very, very thin layer on the on the on the sea when when the ice starts to form and then it becomes, you get pancakes forming, which are small blobs of sea ice that bash up against each other and the edges get sort of mixed, um crunched up.
00:06:53
Speaker
And then it slowly becomes thicker sea ice as those patches, those pancakes fuse together. And so you go through all those different forms of ice um and eventually it's just like a white. The sea disappears and you've just got white rafts of big rafts of sea ice and big sheets of sea ice.
Discovering Antarctic Mosses
00:07:12
Speaker
And then we flew into the station and the station looked amazing because it was still all snowy. And the stations, the Australian stations are built on ice free areas. So they do actually melt out and they're on um ground that you can see in the summer. But in October, it was still all picture perfect white um snow background. And so that was all amazing. And then then the other thing I think that really I really noticed about Antarctica was you expect it to be white.
00:07:42
Speaker
but you don't expect all the other colours, so the blue of the sea and the the amazing light that you get because the solar angle, the sun is really low and so you get you get that sort of um dawn and dusk colours for hours in the summer. It's 24 hours of light, but you have a very long time where you've got really beautiful pinks and purples and yellows in the sky. And the other thing that really amazed me was you get to see the sun and the moon at the same time because it's 24 hours of light. So when it's a full moon, you've got the moon going across the sky as well. Wow. Yeah. And we've never have thought about the sky there and what that what that looks like.
00:08:22
Speaker
And can you just describe where Casey Station is? um So Casey Station is in East Antarctica, and it's pretty much due south of Perth in Western Australia. um And so we traveled about 3,500 kilometers across the ocean from Hobart to get there. um So it is um a very long way away. And then within Antarctica, there's um There's a French station off to the east, about 1,000 kilometres one way, and then a few thousand kilometres the other way. we have um There's other stations like Davis station, which is another of the Australian stations and some other country stations. So very, very isolated. A long way from the comforts of of home. And when you were speaking about the different colours there when you arrived,
00:09:13
Speaker
I guess there's there's not much green, right? And when you arrived, the mosses were still under snow. I guess, can you just introduce us to what these moss beds that you were you were hunting for are like and what what's the story of these moss beds?
00:09:32
Speaker
So we um we were we didn't know where the moss beds were going to be because I was down there with a new with student of mine, Jane Wozli, who now works at the Australian Antarctic Division. Both of us were new to the place. And when we got there, there was more than a metre of snow over everything. And so we knew where the moss should be, but we couldn't see anything.
00:09:54
Speaker
And then as the spring progressed, the snow melted out and eventually the moss beds came into view. And then you see this amazing verdant green and I was not expecting that absolutely sort of almost psychedelic green it was like because compared to the the snow and you know it's just such a vibrant um contrast and so yeah that was really beautiful. Casey has some of the best moss beds on the whole of East Antarctica and they rival some of the moss beds that you get on the peninsula and
00:10:30
Speaker
I had heard that anecdotally that when I went in so I knew Casey did have these good moss beds and they are amazing but the more places that I've been to since the more I realise and appreciate those moss beds that Casey's just the extent of them So they do go red. When they're stressed, the mosses go red. um If they're really stressed, they go brown and gray. But when they're in peak health and they're being fed by plenty of melt water, they're just luscious green. And it's just really, it really is amazing. And they're around streams, along streams and around lakes that that are present in the region.
00:11:10
Speaker
And so we are really lucky that we have those um those moss beds at Casey and and they are pretty unique. i mean There are some as some other amazing mosses that grow in pillars in freshwater lakes near one of the Japanese stations. But I've never actually been there but you can dive amongst the moss pillars. for Which would be pretty amazing. Pretty cold. but yeah or It's for the brave there, isn't it? um Are the mosses kind of the dominant flora of Antarctica? I think it would surprise a lot of people to think about plants growing in freezer conditions there. can you Can you just talk a bit about the main context of the other plant species there? What can you what can you find?
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, so all the plants are really tiny or all the vegetation is really tiny. Mosses for most of Antarctica, mosses are the main, um that the the largest species of plant. And the basically everything has to be able to survive in those windswept freezing conditions. And so you get mosses, you get amazing lichens. So the lichen vegetation is even probably more spectacular than the mosses. And and there's many more lichen species. And the lichens cover a much bigger area. um The other things that you get are cyanobacterial mats. And you get terrestrial algae. So you get things like olva. They look like olva. They're called praseola. But it looks like the olva that you get on the beach. So green green algae that grow on the ground.
00:12:50
Speaker
And they're particularly prevalent around penguin colonies, so where there's lots of nutrients off the penguin colonies, you get these bursts of very, very bright green, sheets of algae, basically. And then in the middle of the summer, when the snow starts to melt, the water starts to melt within the snowpack, you get snow algae.
00:13:12
Speaker
and that they're little single-celled organisms which swim through the so through the water that's surrounding the snow particles and they are red, green, yellow, all different colours and so you get these blooms, these snow algal blooms where the whole other side of a snowpack, like a great big area, hundreds of meters across, might go pink and so that's the vegetation. It's all really small Wow. Does this snow, I've never had to go look at snow algae after this. Does it occur anywhere else or is that only in in? In the Arctic, I mean in the in other polar regions. So in the Arctic, in ah on the tops of mountains. So basically where there's snow. And again, um you have to have water ah surrounding the ice. So there has to be there has to be something that those algae can swim through for them to be able to bloom.
00:14:05
Speaker
Incredible. And just to go back to moss, can you just remind us what types of organisms mosses are? What what makes a moss a moss? what What's unique about moss? So mosses are one of the earliest forms of plants. So that's not to say that the ones that we're working on are ah are ancient, particularly. But mosses are one of the early forms of plants. And their unique characteristics are that they they really don't They don't have plumbing, or they or most of them don't have plumbing. And that's the reason that they can survive in Antarctica is because they don't have plumbing, so there's no plumbing to get frozen by the freezing conditions. And so that's their superpower, if you like, in Antarctica and other polar regions. And so it means that basically everything that washes over them in the water
00:14:57
Speaker
um is is there Instead of having roots that can take minerals out from the soil, but what they do is they take minerals out of the water as it's running over them. And so they're much more sensitive to environmental pollutants that might be coming down in rain, um but equally they can mop up those compounds. They're really good at grabbing onto any compound that's dissolved in rain.
00:15:21
Speaker
But because of that, they don't have the waterproof strengthening tissue that higher plants have, and that means they don't have very much in the way of support. That means they can't grow very big, so hence their very small stature. They don't and they don't have um they don't have roots as a way of holding themselves into the soil.
00:15:43
Speaker
as well. so they the um All of those things have reasons why they can't grow very big. you know They don't have roots that can go down deep into the soil and tap the water, so they're reliant on the water that flows over them. They can only be growing when the water's um flowing over them. If the water disappears, they just dry out and then they can survive frozen freeze dried or they can survive dried and really hot. So the crazy thing about moss is that we can find the same species in the hot deserts in South Australia and at 50 degrees plus 50 and the same thing will survive, same species will be surviving in Antarctica at minus 40 in the winter.
00:16:31
Speaker
And they're unique in the plant kingdom because the adult body of the of the moss plant is haploid. So they only have one set of genetic information. And it's only when they sexually reproduce and you get the capsules formed that you get caps capsules with haploid. The spores, you have a ah very short period where the capsule which is producing the spores is ah is a ah ah diploid organism. So with all the other plants that we look at,
00:17:01
Speaker
you know a tree that we look at outside, that's like us. It's got two sets of chromosomes. Mosses have only got one. They can also reproduce just by um cloning. So if a small fragment of moss breaks off from a larger patch and ends up somewhere with good conditions, like will it will just resprout. So they they have that, which is another thing that really helps them in Antarctica because um where we are at Casey, there aren't any capsules. There's never any sexual reproduction.
00:17:30
Speaker
And all of the spreading that they do happens because little fragments get washed down streams or little clumps get washed away or blown away and end up somewhere where there's water and nutrients and they grow. So does that mean they're all clones? Like it's one?
00:17:48
Speaker
Genotype? Yeah, there's there's a few, but there's yeah there is actually quite limited genetic um diversity. On the peninsula, where it's warmer, there's and the growing season is long enough and there's enough water for the sperm to swim to the eggs and you actually do get sexual reproduction, but it's only on the peninsula.
00:18:09
Speaker
How many species of moss are there and do we know how they how they got there? Have they clung on since Antarctica looked very different and was warmer or have they migrated there? Do we know?
00:18:23
Speaker
ah so So we used to think that everything in Antarctica had actually come in, that the whole lot had been covered by ice sheets, and so everything that was there when Antarctica was warmer had disappeared. But now we know that the tops of the mountains that stick up through the snow and ice ah so these might be a mountain that's three to four kilometers tall but the very top of it is sticking out through the ice sheets and at the top of those mountains you get these unique communities of invertebrates and mosses and plant and other things that are that have basically been been isolated there in those refugia for a very, very long time. So some of the things that are there have probably been there for an extremely long time and possibly since, um you know, but anar warm on millions millions of years. Yeah, wow. But then there are other ones that have probably um come in more recently via the wind. And because the wind patterns around Antarctica are so strong, we think that a lot of the vegetation, like it spores, would will obviously be coming in and some of those again might might take take root. They could be blowing in.
00:19:38
Speaker
on the wind and how beautiful to think about those communities just hanging on in isolation on those mountain tops over millions of years of change. Yeah so we like to think about them as it's like they're islands in the ice so then you get these island communities that are all different from one another because they've been separated by ice for all those thousands of years.
00:19:58
Speaker
I guess there's extremes in the conditions they're surviving in the summer and in the winter.
Microclimates and Ecosystems
00:20:04
Speaker
What are the harsh conditions that these moss beds are surviving? So basically everything has to grow be able to grow through the very short summer season, which might be only a few weeks or a couple of months long. So that's usually December and January. The rest of the year, it's frozen.
00:20:24
Speaker
And so the thing that mosses are able to do and lichens and all the animals that live in the moss beds, they can all survive frozen in the snow, under snow, for eight to 10 months a year and emerge for a very, very quick growing season of a few weeks and make enough carbon, make enough new growth in that time to to to maintain their growth rates.
00:20:49
Speaker
So desiccation tolerance, so the conditions and and in the summer air temperatures will be one or two degrees and get down to minus 10 overnight. In the winter we're looking at temperatures on the coast where the nighttime temperatures will be minus 40 and the daytime temperatures will also be below zero. So that's the time when the mosses are basically just frozen, dried, dormant in the snow and it's also really windy.
00:21:22
Speaker
and obviously in the winter there's no water so there's no light in the middle of winter there's no water and then in the summer you've got water from the snow melt you've got 24 hours of sunlight and you've got the sun also helping to warm the moss beds up so we know that in the summer the moss beds can be 20 degrees above the air temperature because they're basking in the sun and warming warming themselves up and that because of that they're able to actually photosynthesize and in their in their little micro-habitats tapped away behind rocks, sheltered from the wind.
00:21:58
Speaker
ah Yes, they're kind of creating their own microclimate for themselves and then benefits a lot of other creatures, right? You you referred to them as as nurseries for other plants and also old growth forests at the same time. What's kind of the ecology of the moss beds in terms of what what else is kind of hitching a ride?
00:22:21
Speaker
so So the mosses are home to a number of the invertebrates that live in Antarctica. So there's tardigrades, which we like to call moss piglets. So if you imagine that you're sort of a few millimeters high and you're walking through a forest of moss and you've got these animals that are similarly, the moss piglets would probably be about piglet size then. But you've you've basically got animals living inside those moss terfs. The moss terfs will only be a few centimeters high.
00:22:50
Speaker
They're not very tall because the growing conditions are so harsh that their growth rates are sort of in the range of like one millimeter a year. So tiny growth rates growing really slowly, which makes them really old. If there are, even if they're only 10 centimeters tall, that's, you know, a lot of that's can be a hundred years or more. So they can be, they're really old. They're home to invertebrates and they're home to fungi and algae and cyanobacteria and bacterial communities.
00:23:20
Speaker
I like to think of them as a forest full of these very, very tiny animals and other plants. It's beautiful, yeah, the complexities of the relationships between species is as complex as another forest system. And it was that so individuals can be 100 years old and the beds themselves are thousands of years old, is that accurate?
00:23:45
Speaker
Yeah, so in in East Antarctica near Casey, where we're working, we know individual plants can be more than 100 years old. When we go to the peninsula, we find layers and layers of moss building up into peat banks, and those can be thousands of years old, but they will be multiple multiple individuals that have grown on top of each other. And so it's a different, that's not one individual that's been growing in that same place for more than a hundred years, which is what we find at Cayce. And we've done, and we think the reason why the moss beds are so special at Cayce is because they've been growing, they're growing in these areas that used to be covered in penguin colonies. And as the say as the ice is retreated, the land has has risen up, we call it isostatic uplift. And
00:24:36
Speaker
The penguins are now down at the coast, but they left behind, thousands of years ago, they left behind all this penguin poo, all this guano. And so they're really richly fertilized.
Mosses and Environmental Change
00:24:47
Speaker
Wow. And the great thing about Antarctica and its frozenness is that everything just gets freeze dried and stays there.
00:24:54
Speaker
And so these beds where the mosses are, underlying them is all of this rich guano, which is what makes those moss beds so unique and so so big and so and special for Antarctica. We think that that's probably true around the continent as well, that most of the best moss is growing in places where previously there's been penguin colonies. And so there's there's a whole load of nutrients stored away.
00:25:21
Speaker
And those penguin colonies, we know, were there five to eight thousand years ago. It's old, it's old fertilizer. It's still good. And so what an interesting way to be able to read the history of change and animal movement and migration through the moss beds too. Another thing I wanted to to ask you is that the moss themselves are recording environmental change over time and also
00:25:54
Speaker
some other interesting anthropogenic signatures in them. What's the environmental information that is being recorded in the moss' bodies? so So as the plants grow, they um they take up carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. And that carbon has a signature of what's happening in the environment at the time they were growing. And because they have no plumbing, that signal doesn't get mixed up. That signal remains in the same layer um where where it was deposited in the first place.
00:26:29
Speaker
And so using that, that enables us both to date them because we can trace down a MOS shoot and go, can we see the peak in radioactivity that occurred when the maximum amount of nuclear testing was happening, when we had when we still had atomic testing, aerial atomic testing, nuclear testing of what ah bombs. There was a as an increase in the amount of radio carbon across the globe.
00:26:57
Speaker
and plants growing at that time all took up that radioactivity into their bodies. So we can see this in tree rings and and we know that there's a peak in the nineteen middle of the 1960s where that atomic testing was at its height and then that nuclear test ban treaties came in and so we reduced the amount of radioactivity in the atmosphere. What we did was with colleagues at ANSTU, we've gone down our MOS shoots and gone, where's that west that peak in radioactivity? So they're picking up that radiocarbon and we know what bit was growing in 1965. And we can also use other isotopes of carbon to tell us how wet or dry the environment that the MOS was growing in was at the time they were growing. And using that data, we've been able to show that
00:27:46
Speaker
The moss beds at Casey, even though they look amazing, they're actually drying compared to what they the environment they would have been in in the 1960s. And so most of the moss that we see is actually growing in drier conditions than it was in the 1960s. And that's to do with ozone depletion and climate change, making it windier, basically. So even though there's water melting, ah more of it is evaporating away, we think.
00:28:15
Speaker
So they they store those environmental records and what we're doing at the moment is trying to see whether one of the other isotopes in the in the sugars and the wall compounds that they make, which is oxygen, whether we can tell from the oxygen what the temperature was and what the where the sources of the water were.
00:28:34
Speaker
So they're the things that we're working on at the moment with them. But in those peat banks, you can see on the peninsula, you can see things like when people were gold mining first in in South America. So when pollution gets into Antarctica, again, the mosses take have a layer representing that. So they're really good and but um proxies for coastal climates around Antarctica.
00:29:04
Speaker
and that even in their such extreme isolation that they're absorbing these pollutants. And it's a really, I think it's a really good warning to us. You know, we we sort of tend to think that Antarctica is this pristine place that's locked away at the bottom of the earth and it's it's safe from us. yeah But obviously, whatever we do here, in terms of, ah to whether it's atomic testing or um climate change, it's it's impacting Antarctica.
00:29:33
Speaker
And you've just mentioned that climate change is a big part of your current research on on the moss. Any insights into what the future looks like for those mosses?
00:29:46
Speaker
I mean, I was really shocked when we started. we We were the first to start monitoring the moss beds to see if we could see change. And and partly that was because everyone on station would be would go, oh, so are they doing better or worse than they used to? And nobody knew. And that was what got us on the path of trying to date them. So we actually knew how old they were. And also working out whether their environment whether they preserved a signature of their environment as they grew.
00:30:14
Speaker
So it's led to really interesting research. But I at the time thought, well, we should do this because if we don't start monitoring, we'll never know how they're doing. But I really didn't expect there to be change. Actually, I thought I'd be retired before we saw any change.
00:30:32
Speaker
and the biggest shock I've had is just how fast their environment is changing because of those things like the ozone hole but also because of climate change and so the fact that we're having that impact on these things that have been growing there for all those hundreds of years and you know it's a very long way away and We can see that signature even though it's quite hard to see a consistent signature in the climate records. which It's beginning to emerge now, but for a long time we weren't even sure that there was, you know, we we were able to see a signature of climate change in Antarctica. And so the Mosses were picking that up for us even before we we knew it was there, I suppose. what What is the state of the ozone hole?
00:31:20
Speaker
Has it gotten better or is that not?
Climate Change Impact
00:31:24
Speaker
So the Montreal Protocol was is the most successful environmental treaty. And so in terms of controlling the substances that break down the ozone layer, ah Montreal Protocol has been really successful. All countries in the world have signed up to it. So it's a real success story in terms of what humanity, by working together, can do. The problem is that when you perturb the climate,
00:31:48
Speaker
it takes a very long time for that to repair back to where it was and so even with all of that work in the Montreal Protocol and most of those compounds being banned and then the ones that we still use are really highly controlled it's still going to take until probably 2060 or 2070 for the ozone layer to recover okay and that's if we that's assuming that we don't do anything in the meantime to increase the numbers of those compounds that are released into the atmosphere. So yeah there is concern, the last few years have actually seen really large ozone holes and that's been because of bushfires from ah the Australian bushfires. So when you have really intense bushfires
00:32:33
Speaker
the particles from that can get into the stratosphere and start to break down ozone, and also volcanoes. And we can't do anything about volcanoes, um but you know climate change is the main thing that's driving those really intense, really frequent bushfires, and they have the potential to make the ozone you know, create problems for the ozone layer as well. so So that's another example where actually acting on climate change and making sure that we don't we don't have more and fiercer bushfires is is really important for multiple reasons. Yeah, and similar with
00:33:11
Speaker
climate change if we were to stop all emissions we would still be locked into 20 years of warming or something right like similarly can't just turn it off you know we should have done we should have been doing the best time to do it was 20 years ago but the next best time to do it is today yes yes agree agree so I guess in since your first time in 1996 going there, you've seen a lot of firsthand change. Yeah, so most of the, change I guess the change in East Antarctica is still, luckily, is still relatively slow. There's change because of station building and there's change, um that there is some change. But the biggest change we see is on the peninsula. It's one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet. And there you see
00:34:05
Speaker
whole areas of land that have been opened up because glaciers have retreated. And in the Australian context, um Heard Island, which is one of our World Heritage Islands halfway between Australia and and Africa, it's the glaciers there have been retreating kilometers over you know the the last few decades. And so where you where you've got, taking us back to that ah that my early interest in geology and the fact that you can have a valley that's full up with ice,
00:34:35
Speaker
and then within human lifetime that whole, all that ice just melts away and new land is, is of you know, there's new land, there's vegetation moving in, there's all sorts of changes, there's new lakes, just that whole sort of landscape being reformed as a result of that rapid loss of glaciers and that's the most dramatic thing that you see that's happening in Antarctica.
Communicating Science for Action
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, it took thousands of years to accumulate and then how fast it's gone. I spoke to a few years ago a researcher who was studying Antarctic corals, but she was speaking about just the experience of hearing the glaciers calving off and breaking off and just how loud that was and how arresting that experience was.
00:35:24
Speaker
It's because it can be you can be near to those glaciers and it can be pretty much silent and then there'll be this incredible sound of the cracking of the ice and then masses of ice just falling into the water. it's It is truly truly awe awe-inspiring. And another aspect of your your work I wanted to to speak to you about,
00:35:49
Speaker
Already just in this conversation, we've spoken about the ozone hole, nuclear signatures of the atomic bombs recorded in the mosque, the climate catastrophe, and a lot of your work is to understand the impact of these changes on the mosque and these vulnerable life forms. and But you also do a lot of communication and sharing of your knowledge, and I think a part of that is also mentoring scientists as as well. Why is it important for you to communicate this this work and share what you what you're seeing and learning?
00:36:28
Speaker
I just feel that I've been really fortunate to just been a real privilege to be able to work in Antarctica and to be able to satisfy my own curiosity, I suppose, around. I find those plants fascinating and understanding what they can tell us about the climate is something that I've been really passionate about. But given that the work that I do is funded you know by the Australian government, I think there's a real responsibility on us to communicate our findings and to communicate what we're doing to the public, to kids in school so that they hopefully will be inspired to do science as well. And so, and I and i think really with working Antarctica, you know, you get such amazing photographs, there's real opportunities for art and there's really ah opportunities in that storytelling to excite people about science. I really enjoy that communication, I really enjoy the storytelling, but I think it's something that we really need to do because, but also because it's so important that we do something about climate change. We don't want to be in a situation where those Antarctic ice sheets are melting and the
00:37:38
Speaker
Water is coming to beaches near us as sea level rise and as tidal surges and storm surges And so it's both it's both partly paying back for the that privilege that I spoke about But I think it's also the responsibility to say hey, we're we're really doing damage to those pristine areas of the world and it's not just going to stay there and be a sort of um an interesting scientific discovery.
Conclusion and Credits
00:38:05
Speaker
It's something that's going to affect everybody because sea level rise, which is going to predominantly come from ice sheet melt in Antarctica and the Arctic, is is a real threat to humanity and to all the ah all the other organisms on the planet.
00:38:20
Speaker
Yeah. And you get to know so intimately these places. A lot of people won't get to see in these organisms. A lot of people have not thought of. So thank you so much for for sharing that.
00:38:46
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Sharon Robinson. thank you for listening and thank you to sharon for sharing her work plant kingdom is hosted and produced by me catherine ptz and our music is by carl der listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom dot earth
00:39:09
Speaker
Thank you for listening and thank you to Sharon for sharing her work.
00:39:27
Speaker
you