Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Oh, hey, it's the bookmark. That's just a receipt for the book. Allie Ward and buckle up, bundle up. I'm taking you to Antarctica. Well, I'm not doing anything.
Chapter 2: What unique challenges does one face while camping in Antarctica?
I'm just asking anologist questions and they will take you on their journey from a curious outsider to very much inside a research station at the bottom of the globe. They have worked for NASA.
They are a National Geographic explorer, a microscopist, a filmmaker, a TED speaker, and host of their own excellent new PBS series, Life Unearthed, which debuted the very day that we chatted for this episode. We'll get right to it.
But first, a quick thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show for a dollar or more a month and for submitting your questions before we record. Thank you to everyone out there in ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Also, thanks to everyone who voted for us for a Webby Award.
We won the Best Science Podcast again, as well as the People's Voice for Best Science Podcast. So, New York, I will see you for the Webby Awards on May 11th. Exciting. Also, heads up to anyone looking for kid-safe and classroom-friendly versions of ologies. We release those in their very own feed. They're called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S.
And so if you want to entertain kids with facts, please find those and subscribe. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for Ologies, which help us so much. I read them all, such as this still defrosting one from Arugula Few who wrote, I love deep diving into topics, but I never have the time as a very slow reader with dyslexia.
Thank you for bringing me the joy of learning that I was missing so badly. A regular few. Thanks for being here. And I hope that you've got mittens. It's about to get very chill and chilly. Oh, and also thank you to sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of theologists choosing each week. Okay, so this ology, it's a real one. All right, I looked it up.
People have used it. And it comes courtesy of bears, rather no bears. So Antarctica literally means no bears. And that's a very helpful shorthand to remember that only the northern Arctic region has polar bears. They got no bears in the frozen south. How do they know that there were no bears, especially since the continent was not officially discovered until the 1820s?
It wasn't even named Antarctica until the 1890s. It's a baby. Well, the origin of no bears involves the visibility of a constellation called Ursa Major or the Great Bear. So you can't see it on Antarctica. You can't see it in the Arctic. But yeah, there's no polar bears there. We're going to get into that in a bit.
But for now, just crawl under a weighted blanket, sip something just under scorching temperatures. You'll need it. And open your ears for low humidity, high latitudes, freezing temperatures, microscopes, drones, luggage limits, potty protocols, tiny creatures.
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Chapter 3: How does Ariel Waldman connect her art background to Antarctic research?
Not great. Where were you in your life personally where you took this expedition? Was there anything going on that you're just like, you know, got to get away?
Yeah, I mean, going to Antarctica is really, truly a wonderful reset button. And I do think that nearly everyone who goes to Antarctica, even as tourists, have something that's slightly life-changing. I think what really changed for me during and after is I just... I no longer felt like I needed to prove myself. I was so used to being like the youngest in the room for so long.
And I was so used to just having to sort of fight my way to be like, I can do this or I belong in this space. And getting that reset in Antarctica sort of taught me that I don't need to prove myself anymore. So that was definitely the big change for me. You get just a lot of time. Well, I didn't spend it, you know, screaming in the middle of nowhere.
I did spend time where I'd sit on a rock and I'd just be like, instead of just focusing on the next task, which is very easy to do, like just sit and absorb this. And that was really a treat.
And you talked about freezing temperatures, which I'm sure is one of the first things that comes to mind. But you also mentioned the dry valleys that look like Mars. And your footage is astounding. It really looks like you're in the middle of Utah or some sort of desert. And evidently, there's just a light dusting of snow, I believe you say. Can you go over some of the terrain?
Because I thought it was just one gigantic ice sheet. But it turns out some of the ice sheets aren't even Antarctica. They're just... Kind of like a buffer around it. What's going on under there?
Yeah. So Antarctica is the continent that very few people pay attention to. It's not included on most of our maps, unfortunately. Some people out there in our nation don't have maps. But there's a few things people need to remember about Antarctica. One is that it's larger than the U.S. and Mexico combined. So when you're talking about Antarctica, you're talking about a huge area.
And so whether it's talking about climate change or different things happening in it, something that's going to be happening, for instance, in California is going to be very different from something that's happening in New York. And the same is true in Antarctica. So the ice there is up to three miles thick in a lot of locations.
Three miles?
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Chapter 4: What fascinating microorganisms live under the ice in Antarctica?
Today, it's krill.
The U.S. hasn't been like drill, baby, drill yet?
No, no, we have not, except for subglacial lakes for science. And trying to discover the oldest ice on the continent, which also involves drilling. But there's a couple of different ways to go about it. One way is drill as deep as you can, get down there. But that's really difficult.
So I know the American effort to do that called CODEX goes to this really unusual part of Antarctica known as the Allen Hills. But you can drill kind of sideways into the ice and get really old ice because it's getting pushed out instead of down. You know, a lot of what you can do is when you drill ice cores, what you see in them are all these tiny little bubbles.
And those bubbles are little bubbles of old atmosphere. And so they can actually analyze the old atmosphere in those bubbles and tell you how old the ice is.
Can I ask you one million questions from listeners who know that you're coming on? Oh, my God. Yeah, sure. The hard part about interviewing you is I want to ask you a million science questions as well as Antarctic lifestyle questions. I'm game. Let me see. Okay. Okay, folks, before we jump into the shock water of your curiosity, let's gather some cash for a worthy cause.
And this week, we would love to support Ariel's microscopy work with a donation to the San Francisco Microscopal Society community of aspirational, amateur and professional microscopists. And the society says they welcome people of all age or backgrounds from those who have not used a microscope to those who have been working with them for decades. And
and the San Francisco Microscopal Society is also a proud fiscal sponsor of Life Unearthed. On PBS and tax-deductible donations that write order of magnitude films in the donation will go towards both the nonprofit and to Ariel Waldman's ongoing film projects to illuminate microscopic wildlife.
And you can find out more about them in the link in our show notes or on our website at alleywar.com slash ology slash anarchicology. So thank you to sponsors of ologies who make their donation possible. Okay, questions poured in from all over the globe about the land at the bottom of the globe, such as this one from patron Mugda.
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Chapter 5: How does one prepare for a research expedition in Antarctica?
Is trying to figure out like, okay, what is causing this to happen? But the reality is, yeah, it's not 100% survival rate. So you're not going to... definitively have a tardigrade go into suspended animation and have them come back to life. You'll get a significant portion of them coming back to life, which is really impressive on its own.
Speaking of surviving the cold, obviously, Belle, aspiring garbage archaeologist, Addie Capello, Helzin Lin, Olivia Lester, Molly Furtazio, Goblin Prince, Andrea Delvin, and Hallie Ragusa wanted to know, Hallie asked, how much does it cost to stay warm? Do you just hit up the local mountain equipment store and be like, hello, one warm jacket, please?
Or do you have to go to the fancy Antarctica jacket store? Helsing asked, why are the high-vis jackets in Antarctica this deep red color instead of the usual neon orange or neon yellow, like on construction sites? So when it comes to gearing up, what's the protocol?
Yeah, no, great question. So all of your external gear, so you've got your snow pants, you've got your red parka, you've got your big boots, bunny boots. All of that comes from essentially a quartermaster in New Zealand when you're going to McMurdo Station. So there's the Antarctic... It's called the CDC and does not stand for... It's Clothing Distribution Center. You show up in New Zealand.
They've got all your sizes. You get everything external. Parka, the gloves, the hat, etc. But all of your layering underneath, your base layer, your mid-layer, all of that is you have to get yourself and you're on the hook to buy that yourself. That's not provided to you. So for me, who had been in California for so long, I didn't have any cold weather gear at all.
So when I went to Antarctica, oh God, it was expensive. Yeah, I had to go to like REI and all these other stores and figure out like, how do I do this? I learned about merino wool and how important that is. And then I also learned that like nearly all of the cold weather stuff is made for men.
And I asked about, you know, women's clothing when I went to these stores and they were like, oh, well, we've got like yoga pants. Oh my God. It's still to this day where it's like some glacier hiking boots or something. And they have like maybe one option if you're lucky for women. And then it's like, oh, here's the eight options for men. Yeah.
So it's like all of these sporting goods stores and everything and these athletic stores are like women like yoga and men like extreme cold sports. And it was so upsetting because it's just ridiculous at this point.
That's unreal to me. But also, yes, the fact that like the all-female spacewalk had to be scrubbed because they're like, we didn't have two suits that fit a smaller body is... So our lead editor, Mercedes, let me know that Ariel's rage is not unique.
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