On Thin Ice (rebroadcast)

Big Picture Science

Science, Technology

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2020

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Water is essential for life – that we know. But the honeycomb lattice that forms when you chill it to zero degrees Celsius is also inexorably intertwined with life. Ice is more than a repository for water that would otherwise raise sea levels. It’s part of Earth’s cooling system, a barrier preventing decaying organic matter from releasing methane gas, and a vault entombing ancient bacteria and other microbes. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, global ice is disappearing. Find out what’s at stake as atmospheric CO2 threatens frozen H2O. Guests: Peter Wadhams- Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University in the U.K. and the author of A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic Eric Rignot- Earth systems scientist, University of California, Irving, senior research scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Åsmund Asdal- Biologist, Nordic Genetic Resource Center, coordinator for operations and management of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Svalbard, Norway John Priscu- Polar biologist, Montana State University Originally aired August 14, 2017 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:49.0	That's Wired Science wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let me tell you about what I've got in this glass. To begin with, there's
1:06.1	hydrogen in it, and hydrogen is far away, the most abundant element in the universe, and
1:10.2	then there's oxygen, oxygen lets us all breathe easier and I've got them combined in a two to one
1:16.1	numeric ratio. So I'm just going to take a little bit of it here.
1:28.1	Okay, water, It's an essential ingredient for life as we know it. Now if I were to lower the temperature, what's in this class, the 32 degrees Fahrenheit,
1:31.2	zero Celsius, you would get solid H2O.
1:38.8	That frozen lattice of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, it's also essential to life and it's disappearing. I'm Seth
1:45.7	Shostak. I'm Molly Bentley. Welcome to Big Picture Science produced at the
1:49.4	SETI Institute where researchers investigate the nature and origin of life.
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