Mammoth Journey

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A 17,000 year old tusk contains a remarkable story of the lifetime travels of a woolly mammoth which roamed the grasslands of Ice Age Alaska. The animal travelled 70,000 kilometres over the course of three decades before his premature death north of the Arctic Circle. The University of Alaska's Matthew Wooller tells Victoria Gill how his team pieced together the mammoth's life from isotopic clues captured in the tusk. Also in the programme: The search for storage capacity underground for all the hydrogen we'll need for a net zero carbon economy, with geoscientists Katriona Edlmann and Eike Thaysen of the University of Edinburgh. How the 1987 Montreal Protocol (which phased out CFCs) saved us from an even worse climate crisis than the one we're facing, with climate scientist Paul Young of the University of Lancester. Probiotics may protect corals from death by bleaching, with marine biologist Raquel Peixoto of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to tell you why I love podcasting.
0:04.5	I'm Sasha Johansson, I'm an Assistant Commissioner for the BBC and I work on making podcasts.
0:11.1	My real passion is discovering unbelievable on her stories and working with the biggest
0:16.9	stars who can really bring those stories to life.
0:20.1	I love the whole process of making podcasts from the spark of an idea to hearing the final
0:26.0	edit.
0:27.0	There's nothing like it.
0:28.0	What makes BBC podcast special is that we're working for you, so whatever we commission
0:32.6	has to reflect the things that you care about and love, wherever you are in the UK.
0:37.0	So if you like this BBC podcast, there's so much more to discover.
0:40.6	Have a listen on BBC Sounds.
0:42.4	Hello, you lovely curious minded people.
0:44.7	This is the podcast edition of BBC Inside Science, originally broadcast on the 19th of August
0:50.4	2021.
0:51.4	I'm Victoria Gill.
0:53.1	This week we're travelling across a 17,000 year old Alaskan landscape following the chemical
0:58.7	trail of a woolly mammoth.
1:01.3	And we're finding out how a global treaty, signed in 1987, turned out quite by accident
1:06.7	to significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
1:10.8	The Montreal Protocol really wasn't extremely successful climate treaty without trying to be
1:15.1	a climate treaty.
1:16.1	We'll also be asking how in a warming world scientists might be able to use a probiotic
	...

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