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This is the science podcast for March 12, 2026.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up, freelance journalist Evan Howell

takes a trip to Cape Blossom, Alaska,

where eroding cliffs have revealed

an ancient glacier that may offer a glimpse

into a pivotal chapter

of Earth's climate history. Next on the show, machine learning, machine vision, and data

compression have come so far that an entire fish's life can be captured and analyzed. Researcher

Claire Bedbrook talks about using this approach to predict a lifespan in a short-lived fish.

Finally, Matthias Loretto is here to talk about tracking the relationships between wolves and ravens in Yellowstone Park.

His team was surprised to find that instead of following wolves around and eating their leftovers,

these scavenging birds use a different strategy to find

unpredictable food sources.

I saw you're a geologist turned journalist. So was this a story that you were super excited about

because of your geology background? When I worked in geology, I worked in really, really old rocks, hundreds of millions of years old rock, but I always had this fascination with the Arctic. I think that was what I was thinking I wanted to do. When I first got into geology, I loved big mountain cirques and alpine terrain. And so glaciology kind of fit in with that. But for whatever reason, my interest academically went in a different direction. And so I studied very old rivers and things like that. When I started writing, I just kind of latched onto this world, the cryospheric world, as they call it. Got invited up to Alaska, which I'd never been to. So couldn't say no to that. That was very cool. But this is just baby stuff for you, 350,000 years is nothing on the scale of box, right? It's true. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of deep time, this is just scratching the surface. When glaciologists talk, they talk about deep time being hundreds of thousands of years, but it's all relative. It depends on what you're trying to understand. If you want to get freaked out by scales, just go talk to a geologist.

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