Man: It’s my great pleasure to welcome all of you to the 34th Annual Faculty Lecture. Peter Ward is a native of Seattle. He earned his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree right here at the UW before moving on to McMaster University and receiving his Ph.D. there in 1976, which just happens to coincide with the beginning of this lectureship.
The fact that Peter’s been selected here is a great honor for him and for all of our university community. The faculty of the university select one person every year to represent the intellectual life of the university and it is, in many ways, the highest honor that the faculty can bestow upon one of their colleagues and we’re absolutely delighted that they’ve chosen Peter to join the Nobel Laureates and the scientists and the artists and musicians and historians who have received this recognition in years past.
The world has just completed a year-long celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work on the origin of species. As a paleontologist and astrobiologist, Professor Ward has spent his examining how evolution worked millions of years ago before Darwin arrived on the scene and pondering what it holds for us in the many years in the future. He’s studied the mass extinctions that have visited Earth and have shaped our history and he’s considered how that might happen yet again.
His accomplishments are even more remarkable when you consider the fact that by his own admission as a freshman at the UW he nearly flunked out. Fortunately, some professors took pity on and he was able, as he said, to finally learn how to work and the results are pretty obvious, as you’ll soon see.
His research has taken him to every part of the world. Late last month, for example, he returned from a month-long stay in Antarctica. And his work has afforded rare opportunities including things like swimming with the nautiluses in the South Pacific.
He’s the author of 15 books, including two that he has co-written with UW astronomer David Brownlee. One of those, “Rare Earth,” caused more than a little sensation among astrobiologists by suggesting that complex life is probably exceedingly rare in the universe. Indeed, Ward and Brownlee contend that advanced life is so rare that beings like ourselves, if they do exist elsewhere, are likely so far away from us that, for all intents and purposes, we really are alone. That’s really depressing.
Before joining our faculty, Professor Ward held faculty positions at Ohio State University and the University of California at Davis. At the UW he is a professor of biology and earth and space sciences and an adjunct professor of astronomy. He is also a former curator of invertebrate paleontology and former Chairman of Geology and Paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming to the stage this year’s annual faculty lecturer, Professor Peter Ward. Peter.
Peter Ward: Well, thank you, and in thanking you I’m going to do this.
(Playing audio: These were taken just a month before. This is the UW team. We’ve been down here for a month to try to understand if ancient climate change can help tell us about modern climate change. That’s really the subject of my talk. And Dr. Everette, I want to assure you that we have now claimed Antarctica for the University of Washington. Welcome to your new territory.)
Peter Ward: All right. Now that we own Antarctica I want to acknowledge several groups, including the astrobiology group at the University, of which I am a proud member, and here we see Woody in front and Roger Buick in the back. I think this is one of the finest examples of interdisciplinary work, not just at this university, but any place in the world. And it’s a great pleasure, great honor to be associated with those scholars and those grad students.
There’s two other people I want to talk about, the first of which should be up here, Don Brownlee, and I would like you to join me in claps or a hand for this great scientist. Thank you.
And because this talk is both science and I hope to show a way of integrating science and outreach, I’ve like to honor another person in this audience, Richard Hutton, who is sitting over here who I think is the greatest science documentarian in the world. Richard.
All right. That said, what I want to do tonight, again, is try to merge science with outreach and the subject will be climate change but also climate change, as we know, two of the most powerful words in the world now are “global warming.” It is political as well as science. We see it in the headlines, we see it everywhere, and so I’d like to take a new take on it.
Let’s look and see what Deep Time can tell us. So we’re going to look at some data from Deep Time and look at times in the past when there has been radical climate change and how it may have affected the life at the particular time. I’d like to ask, “Can Deep Time inform future time?” But I want to finish thinking about that global warming and why it is that about half of Americans believe it’s even happening or that 80% of Americans believe that the government is hiding information about flying saucers or that about 70% of Americans have grave doubts about evolution. You know, how have we come to this place? And so by the end of this talk I hope to come back to that as well.
Don and I wrote two books. One is about time, one is about place, and both of them, I think are very interesting ways to think about our planet and our planet is an example of what we think is an Earth-like planet. But on the slide, all of these are Earth just like all of you change through time. So our planet has evolved through time and changed through time. And when we think about Earth-like planets, when NASA goes out with ever new missions and tries to find other Earths, which Earth are we talking about?
As I hope to see tonight, Earth has been changing not just in Deep Time but in Shallow Time as well. This change, in fact, is going on right now. Some of this change is good. Some of this change, at least for civilization, at least for a species that attempts to become as numerous as ours, may not be so good.
If we look back in Deep Time, the time of animals, it’s only been the last halfbillion years of this 4.6 billion year planet that we have had animal life and here we find a curve of diversity through time going back from the first animals about 540 million years ago to the present day. From that great seminal (undecipherable) explosion when life really took off we’ve found a rise through an approximate steady state and then for the last 200 million years or so a rather radical and rapid rise upward.
But it has not been smooth. There have been great wrecks in the road, not just bumps in the road, and we call these the mass extinctions and we in astrobiology would like to know how often other such catastrophes would affect other planets with life and whether these things, as well as being terrible, stops to particular evolutionary lines, might in fact be almost necessary to produce complexity and to produce innovation.
So it’s not I want to look at these, but I also want to look at a change in paradigm that has happened over the last 30 years and understanding of mass extinctions. It’s not so long ago that fossils were reviewed as curiosities and it was in 1800, really, that the first indication of extinction took place. George Cuvier in France, greatest comparative anatomist ever, was able to look at any bone and tell you the species of it and his great bone yard is still present in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris today. Cuvier was sent these bones and quickly said this is not a living mammal. These are bones of something totally extinct and in 1800 the concept of extinction was unknown. Well, we’ve come a long way since then.
The greatest change in our understanding of extinctions, which from Cuvier to about 1980, was that very slow forces did it. But that entire conception collapsed in 1980 at this particular spot. This is an outcrop in Italy, it’s a deep ocean bottom in the Apennine Mountains, and there this student, standing next to his professor, Walter Alvarez, collected these white rocks. He found within them a great number of sea organisms on the bottom, about 50 species of planktonic creatures called foraminifera, and within a couple millimeters above, one species of tiny size, a drop from 50 to 1, and likely enough he said he turned to Alessandro, “I wonder how long that took place. I think I’ll ask my dad.”
Well, Walter had the lucky chance of having a dad who was a Nobel physicist who said, “I got an idea. Let’s figure out how it took place.” And they measured the cosmic abundances of clays, and to their great surprise found this. They found a great enhancement of platinum group elements and very quickly realized there was no in way the world, this world, that that could have happened naturally without a little nudge or a big splash by extra-terrestrial material.
This is an iridium enhancement. It is in parts per billion but nevertheless highly significant. When you cross those rocks in Italy and then in many places around the world you will find this narrow enhancement of material that is common in outer space but vanishingly rare here on Earth. Go try to buy a platinum ring and you know what I’m talking about.
At the same time in 1980 I was at the University of California at Davis and completing what had been my major research up until that time. Diving had been in my blood since high school and I’ve got most of my Franklin High School contingent over there. Hello. I was combining that love of the water with research working on the chamber of a nautilus. A more recent picture, but very close, well, I guess the eyebrows were the same in 1980. There’s more hair.
And the interesting thing about this animal is that it has come down to us for 500 million years of history. So here’s something that did not get caught up by the mass extinctions. And yet a close relative, the ammonites, which were also fascinating to me did, they die out in whatever killed off the dinosaurs at that same time interval that the Alvarez’s looked at in Italy, a sudden sensation of this entire linage and the question was, “Why?” This particular shell looks pretty much like the one before. Why does one die and one not? Is this bad genes or is this bad luck?
And hence this interest of mine arrived at about the time that I did at the University of Washington. I began looking at the fates of these two organisms at another of what these are now called cretaceous tertiary boundary sections, this one a beautiful spot in Spain, where we find purple rocks leading up to that black shadow on the left part of the screen to me, and that’s one of these so-called KT boundaries. And once again, there’s iridium there and there’s a rapid cessation of life. Life just disappears that this boundary and other life takes it up.
And so in the 1980s, then, the great call was to try to really resolve whether the Alvarez’s were right and they have a two-part hypothesis that we were hit 65 million years ago but that number two, the hit caused enough environmental carnage to kill of 70% of all species. Well, that we were hit was pretty clearly the case within a couple of years but it took a lot longer to figure out the effect of it. And in fact it wasn’t until the time the crater was found in 1990 that paleontologists had discovered and looked at enough sections to realize that yes, indeed, not just the little stuff but the big stuff, including the biggest stuff of all, the dinosaurs, went out not slowly, but extremely quickly.
Well, as you might expect this wasn’t just a scientific jolt. It certainly, certainly got the attention of the press. It became one of these great, great pressfriendly bits of science and in fact Hollywood soon followed and by the middle 1990s it was, in fact, printed to be true because once a movie is made about it, since almost everything we know is from the movies, it had to be true. And in fact there were two great blockbusters, Deep Impact and Armageddon.
And so hence in a Thomas Kuhnian sense the paradigm of mass extinction taking the long and slow and by Earth-bound processes was turned over – short and violent and caused by something from outer space.
But is that entirely true?
(Video playing: Sixty-five million years ago a world was destroyed when a 6-mile wide asteroid stuck the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. One hundred million megatons of energy were released, shaking the entire planet, sending megatsunamis crashing across coastlines, and pummeling the surface with falling debris. And that was just the first 24 hours.)
Peter Ward: The first 24 hours. This was from a TV series called “Animal Armageddon.” Two years ago I had a Hollywood producer come to me and say, “I’m going to make your greatest fantasy come true. I’m going to give you an animation,” well, he must’ve known me, “I’m going to give you an animation studio. You try and make it technically correct, but there’s just one rule: unlike Ichiro, you can’t be a singles hitter. It’s for the fences or nothing.” And so we did swing away.
The mass extinction paradigm that impact did it and in consequences and causes, as we just saw in that brief video, swept my field so that by about the year 2000 every one of the mass extinctions, the biggest of the five, were thought to be caused by impact – one at the Devonian, one at the end of the Permian, one in the Triassic, and the cretaceous tertiary itself. And it turns out that at UW people have now worked on every one of these mass extinctions.
My own work moved from this KT disaster of the 1980s so that by the middle part or early part of the 1990s I had moved to South Africa. It was still Apartheid and I was able over the 10 or 15 years of going there year by year to watch the veil of that hideous racism be lifted and a country embrace freedom, and it was fabulous to watch, and at the same time we started thinking about what is the nature of the fossil record and the nature of the biggest of all mass extinctions – not that that killed the dinosaurs but the one that came before, 65 million years ago.
Coolest animals of all are called gorgons or gorgonopsians. And who better to talk about gorgonopsians –
(Video playing: They must have been the top predators of their ecosystem. I’ve seen skulls of these things that are about 2 1/2 feet long, so much larger than a lion’s skull.)
Peter Ward: And this is the great Christian Sidor, who is now a member of our university, and lucky for us. And here’s my poor son Patrick who absolutely hates this slide. Paleontological child abuse. Sit still for scale. You get a sense of the size of these creatures. This is a dinosaurian group and this is a bunch of animals that were not tiny but little way before dinosaurs. Some, however, were small, including this thrinaxodon in the earliest Triassic strata. This is a picture I took. It’s about the size of a robin egg. There’s a pen for scale. And this is every one of your deepest ancestor in the mammalian linage. If this creature does not escape that particular mass extinction we don’t have this talk and something probably scalier sits here and espouses all this stuff.
So what do they look like? And this is from the film by Richard Hutton, the great film Evolution.
(Video playing: Lystrosaurs were the Permian’s most common plant eaters. Gorgons, ferocious predators up to two feet long ruled the plains. Then, suddenly the Permians ended. The rock record reveals a cataclysmic change at the threshold of the next geological period, the Triassic.)
Peter Ward: Cool hat.
(Video playing: We geologists can climb through time. I’m going to climb about 50 feet up through here. I’ll go through 2,000-5,000 years of time when I do it. This is the very last layer of the Permian. As soon as I climb above this I’m now in the Triassic. We’re sitting in the very bottom beds of the Triassic. In these beds we have no fossils whatsoever. All the Permian creatures that we saw right down there have disappeared entirely. A few of them we know to have survived because one or two species will be found a little higher up. But in these beds we found nothing. Not only are there no fossils, there aren’t any of the burrows or the tunnels or the traces of animal activity. We see, instead, layers of rock that could only have formed in the absence of animal life. So catastrophic was that mass extinction that even the small creatures had died out. It’s not just the mighty. It’s the meek. This place is dead.
Narrator: What could destroy so much?)
Peter Ward: So this was 10 years later. Now, taking another look at what some of those creatures might have looked like, but this time on caffeine.
(Video playing: Lystrosaurus, gorgonopsian, thrinaxodon, and dicynodon. They are the mammal-like reptiles.
Man: Mammal-like reptiles are kind of the lost group of vertebrates, lost in the fact that they’ve never had their own popular movie. They’re not mammals because they have differences in their bone structure. They may or may not have been warm-blooded, but we think they were. They may or may not have had live birth, although we think they may have done that, too.)
Peter Ward: So we’ve got this world and we’ve got a world in which really a lot of really bad thing happened. So let’s look at some of the science. In 10 years of working in South Africa very painfully and slowly, a team from the University of Washington combined with the South African Museum and now the mantle taken up by Christian Sidor, worked out fossil by fossil, skull by skull really what was the pattern of extinction crossing this particular mass extinction boundary
First of all, was there evidence of impact? Secondly, was there a sudden extinction? And the answer is there was not a sudden extinction, seemingly, and it was no evidence for impact, but what there was evidence of, if I could walk over here, was something very interesting in the carbon cycle. And we have to do a little chemistry now. The ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12, there’s a lot of carbon 12, you’re sitting here using it up and breathing it out as C02, but it’s really a rough indicator of the health of the world.
And it turns out we use carbon isotopes and this particular ratio can tell us the health of a planet. When it moves this way, the world’s getting really in deep trouble. As extinction hits a planet it moves to the left. The carbon isotope record at the end of the Cretaceous, the one that killed the dinosaurs, was a single extinction, like an earthquake and back, and the world resumed. What we found, and others found all over the planet, is that nothing like this happened.
Now in this slide it might be a little hard to see, the top half of the slide you can see the green dots and they’re pretty straight. They’re going up. That’s a normal carbon isotope record of the world. But down through here, the end of the Permian into the lower Triassic, we see a big swing negative, a positive, a negative, a positive, a negative, a positive. If you can pretend that the carbon cycle is a great big bell, somebody has hit it hard and it reverberates and that reverberation takes 5 million years. Either there’s a whole lot of impacts coming down or something radically different was plaguing that world.
Now we see these particular carbon isotope swings not just at the end of the Permian but here now in 200 million year old rocks. One of these is from the Queen Charlotte Islands, the other is from Nevada, there are, again, all University of Washington results, we see them in Devonian. We’re on the 4th year of a project on the Devonian. My great student Kelly Hilba, who you saw in the initial stealing Antarctica for the University of Washington, has been working through here. But what we’re looking at here now are corals, fossil corals, and they’re draped by black sediment. That black sediment has been deposited in the absence of oxygen. And if you’ve been in a coral reef you know there’s no way in the world that corals can thrive in low or no oxygen waters. We’re seeing here an extinction that is not caused by impact.
The carbon isotope curves that Kelly has come up with on the top, again, meaning those swings but they’re not meaningless. They are not this straight of a normal world. They’re millions of years of back and forth and back and forth. And so we’re coming up with a pattern now and this pattern looked at for the last 250 million years tells us there’s normal time and there’s really nasty times. In the Permo-Triassic, at the Triassic Jurassic, only time bit, but right after the Cretaceous Tertiary off to the right the carbon cycle just goes crazy. One of these is impact and the rest are not. Deep Time is telling us there is more than impact that causes great, great disaster.
So if it’s not impact, what? Science is about producing, testing hypotheses and so we have to come up with a series of hypotheses that we can try to shoot down one after the other and my sense is that the great Precambrian, which to me is the microbial world, strikes back that these were short periods of return to a microbial world, the same world that we had prior to the evolution of animals. It seems to have been caused by rapid and short-term global warming
We have in our audience another great scientist. Joseph Kirschvink of Caltech is sitting in the front row. Joe Kirschvink is the person who discovered snowball Earth. Joe Kirschvink is also the person who discovered really the cause and the consequences of the first oxygenation on this planet. This is his kind of world – low oxygen, lots of sludge life, what a great place and we animals have kind of ruined all that. But you can think of that world sitting on the wings, saying I’m going to win it back. And they will, sooner or later, and for we animals we just hope it’s later.
So let’s look at this because the weapons that they use, the anoxic microbes produced is something called hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen sulfide will, I think, be a topic we’re going to look at tonight.
We have carbon isotope records but if that were enough probably we couldn’t pin the extinctions on anything. And instead, we’ve come to a whole new branch of science. I’m a paleontologist, I work on body fossils, I work on shells, I work on skulls and I’m becoming rapidly obsolete. And what is making me obsolete are chemists, those monsters, because chemistry is discovering that it’s not just bones that preserve but parts of cell walls. Cells are so tough that they have within them lipids and they have within them compounds, carbon compounds, that you think are soft and squishy but it gets into sedimentary rock and can sit there for millions to hundreds of millions of years. We call these biomarkers.
It turns out that various groups of animals and plants and microbes will leave particular chemicals, traces to themselves, as identifiable as a fossil is to a paleontologist so to to biochemists do these particular biomarkers tell us what was going on in the past. It’s a whole new window and we here at the University of Washington are working hard at this. Dr. Julian Sachs, in oceanography, one of the great masters of this art, is moving us forward. And what was found at these strange mass extinctions that do not seem to be associated with impact are biomarkers that tell us that the old sludge world that Don likes to talk about did indeed try to make a comeback.
The two particular biomarkers we should be most worried about are coral bactane and especially isorenieratene because one comes from a green sulphur bacteria and the other from a purple sulphur bacteria. These biomarkers were found in that slide of corals I showed you. These biomarkers are also found all over the world at the end of the Permian. Every ocean seems to show them and why they’re of interest, and of scary interest, is for the following reason. Purple sulphur bacteria can only live under the following conditions: they have to have sunlight, these are photosynthesizers so therefore they have to be shallow in the photic zone, but they cannot have any oxygen in the water and the water has to be laced, enriched, with hydrogen sulfide. You need surface waters without oxygen full of hydrogen sulfide. There’s no place on our planet today like that and yet every ocean at the end of the Permian was like that.
This is nasty stuff. Here is coming up from the Black Sea a water sample filled with the purple sulphur bacteria. They were indeed purple. This is nasty smelly stuff. Hydrogen sulfide is the reason it’s nasty and smelly. It’s a very, very bad poison. Volcanoes produce it in small amounts but life, especially a whole suite of anoxic bacteria, produce it in large amounts. If you can produce an oxygen-free ocean these microbes can take over and produce hydrogen sulfide in sufficient quantity to do what happened to Lake Nyos in Cameroon in the early 1900s, when a great burp of carbon dioxide came out of solution and killed over 3,000 people on the shore. Well, if you produce enough microbes of H2S it comes out as solution and it could make it into the atmosphere.
This was the hypothesis of Lee Kump, Penn State University, another astrobiologist in 2005, suggesting that it was the buildup of hydrogen sulfide on low-oxygen bottoms which triggered this particular mass extinction, that hydrogen sulfide is the kill mechanism and the effects are high temperature and low oxygen and this may have been the cause of more than 10 mass extinctions.
Today, an associate of the University of Washington, Mark Roth, Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, is studying hydrogen sulfide. I’m lucky enough to be his colleague and working with him. In the last few weeks we’ve made what we think might be an extraordinary discovery. We found a bivalve, which in the presence of sulfur and the absence of oxygen, can live for a month. It’s breathing sulfur. An animal that breathes sulfur. It makes sense. If you’re a bivalve you have dead zones that come through and we think we have the first proof of this from this collaboration. My student Loren Ballanti is the principal on this.
So let’s take another look at the (undecipherable).
(Video playing: What would it take to exterminate life on Earth, to kill every living thing, and turn the entire world into a barren wasteland? Two hundred fifty million years ago it nearly happened. The result of a volcanic apocalypse unlike any other recorded in history. Our planet, a bastion of life, in a cold, dark universe nearly dies, with only a few species left to start all over again. This is the worst catastrophe life on Earth has ever endured. Who will survive the great die, on Animal Armageddon.)
Peter Ward: Oh, got to love it. Swing for the fences. The one good thing about that, other than I just love it every time I see it, flood basalts. In that film we saw areas where we have lava not coming up as a volcano, a point source of Mt. St. Helens, but breaking open the crust and spewing out. We in the state of Washington have our own experience with flood basalts. Between you and me, you can have the entire eastern half of our state. It’s covered with lava. All the good geology is covered up. It’s very boring, nasty rock. That particular episode, had it been ramped up, could have caused a mass extinction and we think we know why. It is flood basalts which we think triggered each of these short-term mass extinctions. So how do we go from a flood basalt, innocuous enough, to dead stuff everywhere?
Hollywood on occasion does get it wrong. This whole sense that if we slow down some of the currents it might get really, really cold was the subject of a movie early 2000s, Day After Tomorrow. But we might look at this now and start asking our question, “Flood basalts. Climate. What do these have to do with the modern day and what do they have to do with the near future?”
On this graph I put together data from Robert Berner at Yale University, a colleague of mine looking at carbon dioxide through time, and we can walk through this. We geologists keep flipping things over back and forth through time, but this is in hundreds of millions of years ago, so here’s the dawn of animals all the way up to the top of the graph, the modern day. And we’re looking at carbon dioxide through time. C02, so small in abundance that we sit here and as we breathe about 385 carbon dioxide molecules are present in every million molecules of gas. That’s not much, and yet sufficient, even in small quantity, to do amazing things.
This is the curve of carbon dioxide over the last 500 million years and the red are the mass extinctions that take place, or took place, that seem to be associated with heating and the heating came from the volcanoes. Each of those red marks marks a time when flood basalts rather quickly warmed up the planet. We have times as well when we can see when there was ice on the planet and we do not know of a time for sure when we had ice sheets on this planet when C02 was above 1,000 parts per million. It is 385 and rising at 2 parts per million every year.
Therein is our problem. When we look at carbon dioxide through time, in this particular case looking just for the last 1,000 years, we see that something like the carbon isotope curves it has been relatively steady, it’s been bouncing up and down and ups and down, up and down until we start coming in through here.
Why would carbon dioxide hurt us? Well, let’s think what the flood basalts did back in the day. Flood basalts produce carbon dioxide, a volcanic gas, in huge quantities in this basaltic stuff hits the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It warms. But the way physics works, the poles warm a whole lot faster than do the equatorial regions.
Why is there wind? Why is there current? Why is there oxygen in the ocean? It is because we have a cool pole and a warm tropics. That heat differential causes enormous masses of water to move great currents of air. If you warm the poles and don’t warm the tropics as much you reduce the heat differential, you slow down the currents.
Why is there oxygen on the bottom of the sea? It’s because great big thermohaline currents, cold water carries a whole lot more oxygen than warm does, near the poles dumps oxygen out of the deep sea. If we turn off those currents, that oxygen disappears and very slowly your ocean loses its oxygen. And when that happens, you invite the hydrogen sulfide bacteria to come on in.
All right. What’s the difference between a flood basalt, a volcano, and a Volvo? Nothing. Carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide. And that is the greatest problem that Deep Time tells us. The volcanoes did it, something else is doing it now, but we know what the something else is.
This is the most endangered and most important part of planet Earth – continental ice sheets. We should all be wearing buttons, “Save the ice sheets,” because without ice sheets our climate turns into something much more akin to the Mesozoic when the reptiles held sway, a time when we had these greenhouse extinctions over and over and over. When we have ice we keep sea level at the level that it is now and changing sea level is, I think, the greatest single problem facing us from climate change.
Far off in the future we might get a greenhouse extinction but it’s the next 1,000 years in sea level that scare me the most. The immediate problem is that carbon dioxide is rising and is rising fast, and if we get to 1,000 ppm it’s seems highly unlikely we can maintain the ice sheets. How high it has to go, how fast it gets there, is something that many people at this university and many places are trying to work out. But there is no more important problem to civilization than understanding what this could do.
A 1 meter rise is built into the system. We’re going to have this probably by 2100. One meter sea level rise, CNN has already projected, would cost trillions of dollars in infrastructure costs to change the height of the docks. Something as simple as docking a boat, a meter sea level, will radically change. Or how about landing in San Francisco Airport, which is built right at sea level? What did it cost for that 3rd runway at SeaTac? A billion bucks? So let’s replace every single airport in the world. I think when you start seeing what happens here, Holland spends 10% of its gross national product on dikes right now. You think we have economic problems at the moment? Let’s rebuild every airport, let’s move every city inland, and ask me what the GNP is. This is what’s facing us. This is the problem.
We lived in this camp for a month in Antarctica. This was after a heavy snowfall. We hated the snow. It scared me. Well, you can’t find fossils in the snow. But this is what Antarctica’s becoming more and more. It’s becoming a place where Joe and I can go down, my partner in all this, and that’s the two of us sitting right there and collect fossils and find things because it’s great. There’s no cover any more. But it’s not great.
We collected ammonites, this relative of the chambered nautilus, and what we want to do and find more than anything in the world is to understand at this particular time, right before that Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe, there seemed to have been rapid change in sea level. We also know that carbon dioxide was well over 1,000 ppm. Could it possibly be, and I hope it could, could it possibly be that we could hit 1,000 ppm and keep the ice sheets? We don’t know this. We’ve got to find out.
I want to worry about this, enough that I wrote a book about it, that will be out in a few months. It’s a subject that is difficult and difficult to deal with and no more difficult than any place in the planet than Bangladesh. To us a meter sea level rise seems like a terrible thing but if you lived in Bangladesh where the population well over 100 million that barely feeds itself, sea level rise is more than theoretical in terms of a hazard.
Little difficult to see here, but what we’re looking at now is the number of humans who would be flooded out of their habitations in Bangladesh based on rising sea level. And you can see by the time you get to a meter rise in sea level you’re moving between well over the 100 million being affected. The hardest part about rising sea level is that salinization, salt, moves laterally.
So how does science literacy come into this? Climate change we can see from the Deep Time has two enormous threats. In the long term, over the millennia, we keep doing what we’re doing we move back into this horrible hydrogen sulfide business, but that’s over 1,000 years. But the short term is sea level change.
How do we convince the populous that this is real, that this is not theoretical when on Darwin’s birthday 40% of Americans believe in evolution or the others here, 80% about UFOs? Fifty-percent believe in alien abductions. Half of republicans believe in global warming. How has it come to that? I would submit to you, and the bad news to me, is that we are part of the problem. We in this university, more than a few of us, science faculty, how do we hire? How do we fire? How do we promote? What are the means by which we decide this person should go on and this person shouldn’t, this person should be hired, this person should be cast aside? We do it through scientific publications.
Have you ever heard of a profession in the world where you can get hired at a front line to teach, to be a teacher, and you never have to take a course in teaching? I mean that’s our little secret, isn’t it? Yeah. Okay. The thing is we talk about outreach but we don’t do it. We do not take a line in the sand and say, “My Ph.D. student is going to publish four articles, one in Scientific American, and three in refereed journals.” We don’t say that person we’re going to hire has to have a demonstrated track record in talking to the public.
Culture change has to start some place. Culture change can only take place if we at the universities recognize that the public is not getting the message from us. We train their kids. We don’t train them. We have to change our culture. I’ve got a plan, a plan for the University of Washington. Everybody has plans. There is something called the thousand year curriculum a few years ago from one of these lectures. It was a great idea, very difficult to implement. Plans are expensive, but my sense is that we should improve science communication.
There’s a woman named Deborah Illman at the university who alone over the last 20 years has been fighting a very brave fight to try to improve science literacy at the University of Washington. I think we can do it fairly simply and I think we use the astrobiology group as a model.
We can do two things. First of all, we reward, we produce not just a teaching award, but an outreach award for people who actually go out and try to get science literacy out to the public. But secondly, we teach, and I think we can teach a minor in science communication and we do it through three courses. The first is science writing. The second is what Richard does: science through television and science through radio. But the third is the one that’s going to be the most important of all – science literate communication. And the way to get to the kids right now is by two words, two dirty words: video games. Video games. I have a 13-year-old. I know all his friends. They will spend every minute on them if they can.
I grew up in a culture where science fiction taught me a heck of a lot of good science. We have to realize that if you can’t beat ‘em, you got to join them. We’ve got to start making those video games that are science rich, that are science literate, I know, hold your nose, and teach people how to do this. How do you make that firstperson shooter that also gets across those principles of physics or biology or whatever you need to get across? Because whatever it is we are doing, it is not working.
So the plan is simple. I think what we do is we get a minor, three courses, or we make a certificate. Wouldn’t cost us any more. We have the faculty to do it right now. It just takes the will. And secondly, we go out and knock on some of those doors and fundraise. We become like MIT, which I think has the finest Science Communication Department in the world, or Santa Cruz, where multiple faculty unite and teach. These courses are not that difficult to put together. They might indeed produce a change.
I’d like to finish up. I want to finish up with my favorite video of all the science TV work that I did.
(Video playing: To see a nautilus swimming in the wild, Peter Ward must dive at night when they rise to the reef under cover of darkness. French underwater photographer Pierre Alabuttes will join him to search the shadowy nighttime sea.
Peter Ward: Okay, I like this scene because I think it’s a good way to finish for me, a nice metaphor for what we’re doing now. Here’s two guys heading down into the dark, they’ve got these flashlights, and they sort of know what they’re looking for. And it just feels like that way thinking about climate change and trying to figure out our way forward because civilization has some enormous challenges.
And so you’re down swimming around there, you’re looking for stuff, and you find it, and you find this strange alien, which we did finding these nautilus, and the next question is how do you talk to it? What do you do to it? What can be done about it?
My sense is that we have to do something in this university to improve science literacy. I really think in this juncture far more than simply educating people is at stake. I think in many respects civilization is at stake because the flooding ice caps and ice sheets are going to be real if we don’t stop emissions and they’re going to affect every one of us. Those of us with white hair not so much but those of us like my son, Patrick, enormously. And so I think all of us, it behooves all of us to try to work on this.
And with that, I’ll finish. Thank you very much.