Robin Williams

So it was used in a very sophisticated fashion earlier in the year.

And yeah, people were doing it from 11,000 years ago, probably from 40,000 years ago.

Why before did you mention the icebergs and the water flow?

So periodically in the last 130,000 years ago, maybe 10 times, there were rapid melting events of the northern ice sheets and those icebergs flowed out into North Atlantic and melted and so the seawater became fresher.

And the Gulf Stream, which is a warm current that flows up the East Coast, couldn't dive down and return to the deep ocean circulation.

The East Coast is the U.S., sorry.

And ordinarily, it dives down and rejoins the major ocean circulation pattern, but it stops.

So you get a buildup of heat in the northern hemisphere,

And that causes droughts in China.

And with that same record from the fire record, we can also show that Heinrich events caused it to be incredibly wet up here for periods of relatively short, geologically speaking, let's say a thousand years.

Did you say Heinrich events?

Heinrich events named after Professor Dr. Heinrich, not Heimlich.

He was the one that found these little pebbles in deep ocean sediments that could have only got there by being carried there by icebergs.

And that's how they defined the Heinrich events.

And it turns out to be a quite important driver of climate.

And potentially we're messing with that now.

And if the Gulf Stream shuts down again and it's slowing, then we can expect it to get very wet in northern Australia.

So it makes sense you're doing work on that from here, northern Australia, as you said.

This is a good vantage point from which to do it.

Yeah, it's been worked on in the Northern Hemisphere.