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(wind whistling)
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(dramatic music)
- [Mariah] We primarily operate in the North Atlantic
and the science that's being done
in the North Atlantic right now
is almost always connects back to climate change.
And so we are getting the scientists up here
where they need to be so they can figure out
answers to questions about what's happening to our planet.
- [Kent] They hear about us out here looking at stuff,
and then it's related to global warming or climate change.
And everybody wants to, everybody wants an answer,
like, oh, what are you finding?
What are you figuring out?
And I have yet to work with a scientist
or talk to a scientist who's willing to say,
yes, it's this.
Like, you can't do that.
There's so much more to learn about it.
And each one of these different scientists
is basically adding to this puzzle
of information.
- [Alan] We who study climate of the past, of course,
live in a time world.
Everything we do is about telling time,
is about trying to figure out what happened at time,
and whether that's a hundred years ago,
a thousand years ago, or a million years ago,
we can learn from all of it.
- [Rob] Stratigraphy is 90% of geology.
And if you don't know where you are in time,
then those changes are almost irrelevant.
You have to know, you know, not only what is occurring,
but when those changes are occurring.
If we didn't know time, we might get records
that say ice sheets have changed in the past, but so what?
Right. So knowing the context of time
is, you know, fundamental to everything we do.
(crew member speaking faintly)
- [Kent] I feel like I spend so much time out here,
I've missed so much, so many things in my life,
having been to sea for so long.
So many things that I would like to be at home doing
with family, friends,
and feeling like I've missed out so much on life.
The one thing
that kind of makes it okay for me
is the trips I've supported doing.
It makes it worthwhile because of what we're doing,
what kind of information we're getting.
(dramatic music)
- To a lot of people, it's just mud, right?
I mean, I would say not to just a lot of people,
to almost everybody, it's just mud.
So these were pretty clever people that went out
and, you know, realized the potential
for just looking at mud,
for thinking about how earth has changed in the past.
It's pretty clever people who thought to look at, you know,
what were the tiny fossils within that mud
and how those reflect past climate change
and past warm and cold conditions.
Following the collection of these early sediment cores,
the field of paleoceanography and paleoclimatology
was developed.
And from that we recognized that Earth
has gone through some major climate changes in the past.
And so now, in 2023, we're at the point
where we can ask very targeted questions
and try to better understand processes,
what drove those changes in the past.
And so in BADEX, we're gonna be looking at Greenland
during the last ice age
when it was this big extensive ice sheet,
and what were the factors that drove it to become unstable.
- [Kent] You know, the scientists who are here for one trip
shouldn't see our struggles
or shouldn't see our, you know, all of the little details
that we do in the background.
They should just see their equipment going over the side
as it should be, or, you know,
things happening the way they're...
I prepare the ship ahead of them.
- [Pete] Well, I've been doing this work for 25 years,
but for 20 years before that,
I was a commercial fisherman out on Bedford Mass,
which is a whole 'nother ball game from this
as far as, you know, physical work.
And they're on a smaller boat, obviously,
getting beat up a little more than you get beat up out here.
Fishing's just a different ball game, you know,
it's like balls to the walls 24/7, you know.
Like, I've been doing it long enough,
I know what I gotta do, where I gotta be,
try to stay one step ahead of the scientist.
I do four months on, two months off.
So for four months I'm out,
I might be in four different countries,
you know what I mean, for four or five days.
So we get a little break.
That's the beauty of this type of work here, you know.
You get to see the world
and you get to do some crazy stuff, you know?
- All right, what else do we have to put on?
- [Kent] I appreciate so much
being able to just go down there real subtly, you know,
this, that and the other, and away they go.
And I come back up to the bridge
and it looks like there isn't really that big of a problem.
And he makes things happen. For sure.
(horn blaring)
- [Crew Member] Have a safe trip, Cap.
- Okay, folks.
Hi.
- Bless you out there. - Thanks.
- [Crew Member] The avenue rock bottom.
- [Mariah] I'm six weeks into a five-month hitch,
so I got on the boat in late June
and I'll be on until late November.
It's hard to be, you know, away from home for that long.
And at the same time, this is really a second home,
so it's not that hard.
- [Man on Radio] Got it. Stay back.
- [Kyle] It's good to be out at sea again.
You know, this is what we do and it's nice,
it's beautiful weather and it's just,
it's good to be out again, get into the routine.
I like to get into my groove.
I like the discipline.
You know, you gotta be, for me anyway,
especially at my age as my body's getting older,
I have to be very disciplined about how I eat,
the time I sleep, the time I work,
you know, I'm very, I gotta follow a regime very hard.
When I go home, I mess it all up.
This is a home away from home
because I spend more time here than I do at home.
You know, like, right now
I'm on a seven and a half month trip on the boat straight,
you know, so I'm here more than home.
I'll go home in late September when we get back
and I'm only home for about a month and a half
and I come back out, you know, so it's a strange life.
It's a hard life.
My family's used to it.
I've done it all my life.
You know, I've been on the water 47, 48 years
in one form or another.
And they're just, they're used to it.
You know, my kids are all grown up and gone.
My mother is still alive.
My oldest brother takes care of her.
She gets all emotional when I leave every time.
But, you know, that's what mothers do.
- [Shannon] In the 1950s and '60s, you had early exploration
where there was a lot of money from the military.
They were interested in learning about the sea floor,
thinking about, you know, submarine warfare
and other naval warfare.
There was a lot of money in learning about the ocean.
And so a lot went to oceanographic research.
And so before some of these early expeditions,
people thought most of the sea floor was pretty flat.
They didn't know the intricacies that we know today.
And in the Atlantic, what emerged were these hills
in the middle of the ocean basin.
And Marie Tharp was able to take
these echo sounder measurements
and actually put them all together,
all these different transects.
And what she identified was this long ridge
or a mountain chain.
- [Lindsey] Days can be so chaotic and crazy
and you can, you know, even just thinking
about anticipating this cruise
in this past year and waiting and waiting
and it feels like it's been forever.
And then pulling yourself back, kind of like,
almost like zooming out,
like you're feeling like you're on the space station
or something and thinking about your place in time
and how that's, you know, that one year
is absolutely nothing at all.
And, you know, in comparison to this vast amount of time
that has come to form everything around us
and even the samples that we're going to get, you know,
we go back ideally 20, you know, 24,000 years ago
to the last glacial maximum.
And in the scale of time,
even that is just like a tiny little snippet
of everything that's come before us.
And I think it's just kind of, I don't know,
I feel kind of like afloat and at peace with that
of just things are carrying on.
And even though you can get really ingrained
and worry about the small things,
it's like you're part of this much larger story.
And I think there's kind of a really great beauty in that.
- [Alan] The Earth displays changes on all time scales
and we can learn from all of it.
That now the interesting thing about studying the past
is we can learn about changes
that the Earth is capable of,
that simply haven't been witnessed
in our recorded history
simply because the Earth hasn't changed that much.
It's when something changes that you can study it
and figure out the mechanisms that make it go.
But it's really hard to understand that,
understand the long-term consequences of that.
And it's really hard to calibrate a computer model
to predict that if you haven't observed that happening.
Well, the only way you can observe that happening
is to observe what has actually happened.
Meaning you have to go to the past.
And so that's why we who are studying climate change
and changes in the ocean live in this time world,
we find ways to, and in this case,
what we're doing on this expedition
is taking sediment cores that are layered
and each layer is another time.
And it's very natural for us
to then go read the sediment core just we read a book,
but what we're reading is back in time.
We're reading the history of the Earth.
(crew members speaking indistinctly)
- [Crew Member] Pull up, Leo.
- We're supposed to be there at like 12:30, I think.
I haven't seen Cap yet to tell him that we're getting close
to the sea ice, but if I see him, I'll let him know.
All yours.
- [Chrissy] When I'm on here
and I start getting into a routine,
it goes by kind of quickly
and I just, I'm doing not the same thing every day,
but, you know, same schedule every day.
And I try and stick to that routine
and it goes by faster than you think it does.
Like I've already been on for probably like half my hitch
and I feel like I just got on.
- [Diego] You don't have a lot of free time, okay?
You're gonna work a minimum of eight hours.
You might be working 12 hours on some ships,
but then you have 12 hours to yourself.
A lot of ships,
you're not hanging out with the rest of the crew.
You finish your work schedule
and you go to your room.
So you have 12 hours of your own.
You probably wanna sleep, let's say eight.
So that gives you four hours to do whatever you want to do.
It might be a little less than four hours
because, you know, you want to eat
or you know, you shower
or like take care of your room, whatever,
you're left with, maybe three hours.
So you get to choose, like,
you have three hours to yourself, what are you gonna do?
You start your three hours of how are you gonna spend it.
You're gonna work out, you're gonna read a book,
you're gonna do a craft.
So you kind of fill them with something.
It's not like you can go out to the bar
and like have a drink with your friends.
No. You have to find something to do.
And usually, it's by yourself.
(waves whooshing)
- When I'm out here, I just, you know, like I say, I get up,
go do my thing, you know, get the day over with, go to bed.
We come into port, you know,
we like to play while we're in port, you know,
go out, raise some hell, have a fill, you know,
basic sailor stuff.
And then, but when I'm home, you know,
I got two months to do whatever I want to do.
If I wanna jump on a plane and go to East Bolivia,
I jump on a plane and go to East Bolivia.
If I don't wanna get up till 10 in the morning,
I don't get up till 10.
You know, for two months,
I can do whatever the hell I wanna do.
And that's the beauty of this job.
Like I say, it's a pretty cool job
and I'm fortunate to have it, you know,
and most of the people, all the crew's awesome, you know,
and the scientists, I'm gonna say 99.9% of them
are all cool in my books.
Once in a while you get your occasional schmuck, you know,
but I can deal with that, you know.
But like I say, they're all good people
and you know, everybody gets along.
Hold that. Jib in a little more, Leo.
Jib in a little more.
All right, good.
Boom up just a touch.
That's good.
- [Alan] We are time travelers, you might consider.
We will be traveling in time back
to see what this place was like 15,000 years ago,
20,000 years ago and so on.
So that's a time when the ice was melting rapidly.
And so by traveling in time like this,
we are going to understand how ice melts
during a warming climate.
We're gonna ask questions like, how fast did it melt?
How fast did sea level change?
What mechanism caused it to melt?
Was it a warming atmosphere that melted it from the top?
Or was it a warming ocean that melted it from the bottom
and snuck in under the ice?
And so the only way to do that
is by living in this time world
to see things that really happened.
It's not hypothetical, it happened.
(gentle music)
(gentle music continues)
- [Rob] 16, 16, 2.
16, 2.
- [Crew Member] They got this one?
- They did. - Okay.
- [Rob] You know, it's expensive to be out here, right?
So we wanna make sure that we use every minute of every day
doing something, you know, to address our question.
We generally spend a lot of our time coring
and a lot of our time collecting these materials,
but during the nighttime hours,
we spend a lot of time surveying
to try and identify those areas.
So it's always this back and to,
this jockeying of trying to find the next place to core
and then the next day coring it
and then the overnight trying to figure out, you know,
the context for that
and then the next place to core after that.
It's definitely two different parts to what we do,
but there's always something going on on the ship.
There's always something going on science-wise.
- Aaron and Rob wasn't up yet and I'm up here,
and said someone switch out with me, like when you do,
you know, like do a couple of come get me
if someone wants to switch out.
And every time they like popped in there,
I was like, does anyone wanna switch?
No, no. We went out there for this week.
It's freezing.
My ears and fingers were frozen
within the five minutes of my (indistinct).
I was like, how are you guys doing this?
And there were just smiles on their faces.
They didn't have it me so they like,
they think they got it figured out,
but like it could be off a little bit.
So we also have to see why it looks like that.
- [Crew Member] The second one is almost done
if you wanna see reconstructed,
but if you're tired, you can go to bed.
- That's 70, 80, 90.
- [Crew Member] I'm getting on this the high density layer
and the soft layer.
- [Kent] You do it once and you think forever like-
- 271. - You get back to like
degree four.
You do it twice... Probably easiest,
probably five, seven.
So yeah, starting at 21.
- Just let me know when you got half back on.
(crew member speaking faintly)
Sorry. Two-tenths.
You're right. Two-tenths.
- We're at two-tenth. - Okay, thank you.
The one on the starboard bow.
- [Crew Member] The one that's like sitting on it?
- Yeah.
Okay.
- [Cara] I think I was always, you know, like as a kid,
pretty interested in the crazy things
that live in the ocean.
I sort of got into it by being interested
in all those weird creatures.
I just, it always amazes me that it's deep down
and it's dark and it's so cold
and it's up here in the arctic
and there's still life like flourishing,
things in the water column, like a crazy dumbo octopus
and squid and tons of shrimp on the sea floor.
Many times it was covered in sort of these worms
that live in tubes, sea pens.
It's cool to see what's living now
and because we're looking back in time
and, you know, going back in the core
hundreds and thousands of years
and you know that that was at the sea surface at one point
and there were things living there.
So we just need to see it in the contrast of like the past,
what the sediment looks like from long ago
and then what's going on, what's living now.
(machine whirring)
- [Katie] Whenever I tell my parents' friends
or like my aunts and uncles that I'm going off to sea
on a research cruise for a month,
they hear the word cruise
and they liken it to the types of cruises
that you go on in The Bahamas
where they feed you all these fancy meals
and you're relaxing at the pool
and you're enjoying yourself, not working.
And it's funny because I tell them
that I'm going to be working 12-hour shifts
and it's going to be a lot of work
in the short amount of time and it's gonna be fun.
Like, it's gonna be really fun for me
because this is something that I love to do
and I'm gonna be with people that I'm excited to be with,
but it's also gonna be a lot of work.
So it's definitely not anywhere near a luxury
even though the dining food is very good, I will say.
(crew member speaking faintly)
- [Harry] I do ask the scientists
just because I'm curious nature of, you know,
what are they doing, why are they doing
and that kind of thing because that's always interested me.
And it is completely two different entities.
They depend on us
and if we didn't have them, we wouldn't have a ship.
- [Kenneth] Everybody has their little spot in the world
and mine is cooking.
And so if that's where it's gonna be,
then I wanna be the best I can be.
I'll call it as my zen.
And it's where if someone can come in from their day,
regardless of how it's going,
and especially if it's a crappy day
and take 10 to 15 minutes, enjoy what I've cooked
and forget about their day
and just have a nice respite from what's going on,
then that's, I did my job.
That's my zen.
You know, you kind of, you tried your best
to justify an existence
and if you're a cook, that's part of your justification
that you can transport people from where they are
to maybe just for a little while, just a little joy,
a little pleasure to get away from all the hubbub
that the world presents.
- [Kyle] Like, for us, it's important to make sure
that the science works.
It's gotta be...
If we come out here,
it's more than just keeping the boat running.
We gotta make sure the boat's running,
everything's perfect with the boat,
and then we gotta make sure
everything's working with science.
If there's something we can do to help them,
we try very hard to help them.
You know, that's part of our mission
is to make sure the science works.
'Cause if the science doesn't work,
then it's, you know, we're just out here wasting time.
- Hold on. - Yeah, we did 16 and change.
- 16 and change? - 16, 3 maybe.
- Okay, we're gonna come up.
- [Kent] Pete and my relationship
is one of the more interesting ones.
I was a young, you know, relatively fresh officer.
I was just becoming a chief mate.
But he came off of 20 years of fishing
and was pretty no nonsense
and had been around the block more than a few times.
I'm sure he did not wanna come out here
and start being told what to do by somebody,
15 years, 10 years younger than him.
But when there was a few challenging things
that kind of came up right away, mostly with rigging,
we formed a bond, an unlikely bond
in needing... You know what I'm saying?
- [Kent] To figure some things out
together. - That's why I think
you need it here. - It's been over-
- [Kent] So I was really aware
of the science equipment aspect of it,
which is kind of fragile
and delicate instruments and that sort of thing.
And he came from a very rugged, get it done,
turn it around, make it happen,
bang it around if need be, whatever.
And so I gave him a little bit of the, you know,
science equipment, you know, we can't slam that.
And he brought in a bit of the, you know,
let's get this done.
It just kind of, it went from there
and the bosun's the top dog on deck,
but that chief mate ends up becoming a captain
and now you can't get between them,
an established relationship of a captain
and a long time bosun.
And that's what Pete and I have been for 20 years now.
- Come on in, lad.
- [Pete] I know I couldn't work on shore
'cause I've been doing this since I was 18 on 19,
I forget what year I started, you know,
so there's no way I could have a regular job.
You know, like I say, everything's different.
You know, you might be doing ROV work,
you might be doing moorings, you might be doing this core
and you might be towing nets.
Every trip's different.
So it makes it a little not as mundane.
You know, who gets to see what we're seeing out here?
Nobody gets to see that.
I was thinking about some of the stupid stuff
that we'd done.
Like, you know, we'd cross the equator
and stop and hit golf balls over the equator
just to say we did it.
You know what I mean? (laughs)
There's stuff like that that nobody...
Who the hell you know has ever hit a golf ball
over the equator?
Who do you know who's seen polar bear
swimming around a hundred miles out at sea? You know?
So that's the beauty of this job.
Like I say, it's all different.
Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not so easy.
Sometimes it really sucks.
(machine whirring)
- [Cara] So most of our piston cores we did
were about 60 feet long,
but even the gravity cores that are 20 feet long,
we can't really deal with the tube of mud
that's 20 feet long.
So the very first thing we do after we get it onboard
is to cut it into sections
that are about 5 feet long.
And we use a pipe cutter through that.
So using it to cut through the PVC pipe
and then we separate it and put end caps on it
so that the mud doesn't fall out the end of the PVC pipe.
And then those, we call them the whole rounds,
the unsplit round of core section,
we label those so that we know
which part of the core it's at.
So we have to make sure the top section is number one
and down deeper and deeper.
And then we bring it into our MST van.
- [Crew Member] Big head.
- [Shannon] When the square liner comes up,
we can't see through it,
you know, so we don't necessarily know
what the sediment inside looks like.
And you can get a lot of information
just from how the sediment looks
because if you have a lot of critters
living in the sediment, they'll mix everything up.
And so you kind of don't really see these perfect layers.
If you don't have those critters, you might see these nice,
what we call laminations,
which just look like perfect little flat lying layers,
almost like pages of a book.
And you can see those in the MST van,
you can see ice-rafted debris
or these rocks that are carried from icebergs
and then dropped off, you know, farther off from land.
So you can see these ice-rafted debris in the MST van.
And the way that we do that is through these CT scans
where we can x-ray and see inside the core liner.
And we can also take these physical properties measurements.
So magnetic susceptibility, density of the sediments,
how they carry a current,
how they carry sound waves through them.
That helps us understand if there's major changes
in lithology or essentially like type of mud.
(gentle music)
- [Kyle] It's a different kind of life.
You know, we see things
that a lot of people don't get to see,
but then we also miss a lot of things in life.
You miss your kids growing up, you know, I was gone a lot.
I mean, when I was home, I always made a point
to spend as much time with them as I could,
but I've always been gone a lot
and that's probably the biggest, you know, family.
I've spent more time on this thing than I have in the house
in the last 18 years.
Last year, I took three months off
and that's the longest I've ever taken off
in probably 40 years.
You know, the longest single time that I haven't worked,
you know, it was kind of, I was getting edgy by the end.
That's why I was glad to come back, you know?
I mean, I work every day.
I'm out of here for about seven months right now,
and I work every day.
There's no days off.
So when I go home, I don't do anything for the first week.
I just sit around and look at what I wanna do
and make my plans of what I gotta do.
And then I just slowly come alive and get into it.
But, you know, it takes me a little while to throttle down.
(machine whirring)
- [Crew Member] New target test, 1, 2, 0, 0.
- [Man on Radio] 1, 2, 0, 0.
- [Crew Member] Roger.
- [Crew Member] That's the (indistinct).
- [Mariah] You know, this ship's the first ship
I've worked on with other women on the crew consistently,
except for tall ships in my early career.
You know, it's hard to be the only one of anything
in a group of people.
So, you know, I've been treated well mostly,
but it's still a challenge
when you're the only woman on a ship.
I'm not totally sure I'd still be shipping out
if I didn't work here.
I'm 33, and I think I would put up
with a lot less bullshit
than I put up with in my early twenties.
(drill whirring)
(tool whirring)
(fan whirring)
(machine buzzing)
- [Kyle] I like the isolation,
the fact that, you know, we have to handle it.
We don't have anybody to, you know,
we can't just make a call
and get a boat to bring us parts if something happens.
But that's, we're set up for that though, you know.
Before we leave, we supply up real well.
(machine buzzing)
To be honest, you gotta be patient
and you gotta be, you can't get worried.
You can't get worried about...
You can't be excitable.
You gotta get along with people.
That's probably the biggest thing
is you gotta be able to get along with people.
You gotta be able to understand that people have good days
and bad days, they have a bad day, you know, it's whatever.
You know, you gotta learn to get along with people
is probably the most important.
One of the things that helps, like, especially the crew,
I think, is the fact that we do get a new batch
of science every three to six weeks or whatever
and they're all energized and they're all excited about it
and that helps bring us back, you know, it keeps us going.
(machine buzzing)
- [Man on Radio] Come on down a little bit.
Okay. Hold that.
Keep it level there.
- [Crew Member] I'll just let it take it (faintly speaking).
(wind whistling)
- Hi.
How's it going (faintly speaking).
That's so much better.
- I know. Nice. (laughs)
- There's only like six of them on there.
- Yeah, I wrote on the Green past report,
I was like, 10 icebergs. (chuckles)
Are you ready? Do you want a minute?
Do you need to make some coffee?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- [Derrick] I start sailing in 1980, but before that,
my dad and all of my uncles and them were all seamans,
merchant mariners.
Originally, I was actually born in Barbados, you know,
so that is where I actually, you know, pick up,
like, going on ships and stuff like that.
Learning what I had to learn to be out here, you know?
And while my dad and my uncles
and all of them were going away and they come back,
you know, you see all the little gifts
and Twinkies that they have, you know, it was like,
they say, yeah, so one of these days,
I have to be out here.
- [Mariah] In my mind, the ocean
is kind of uncaring, right?
Like, we are on it,
but it doesn't really give a shit about us.
You know? And not in a bad way, like not in a malicious,
not caring way, but in a just like, whatever.
When it's calm like this,
I, you know, think it's pretty pleasant
and then it gets rough and, you know, I curse it.
The ocean is so big, right?
And there's so many boats on it and animals in it,
and I think it's kind of
doing its own thing most of the time.
- Yeah, you can go a little faster.
(gentle pensive music)
- [Rob] All of everything that's built up to this point
and then that is the moment
right before the cores come on back.
It's excitement, it's anticipation.
It's wanting to know, you know, did we get a core,
is a core gonna come back?
Is there gonna be mud on top of the core?
Which suggests that the core went too deep.
Is the core gonna be empty?
Suggesting we didn't get the weight ready enough,
or we chose an area that wasn't great on the sea floor.
It's also interesting because we're trying to hit
these really small areas on the sea floor
from two kilometers away, right?
So there's a lot, you know, we can design the best survey,
we can design the best tactics
to try and extract those sediments,
but at some point, you just have to let the core go
down to the bottom of the ocean
and what comes back is hopefully what you want.
But the ocean gets to decide
and the mud gets to decide what comes back.
So at some point, it's up to the gods of the ice
and the gods of the ocean and the gods of the weather
as to whether we can even get to those areas
and address our questions.
(gentle pensive music)
- [Crew Member] We're good?
- Yes. - We're good.
- 317, 1600 on two.
Power mode starboard stick, autopilot.
No contacts.
So we're steaming right now.
We're gonna start science or start a survey there.
I don't have way points yet, but you know,
those will come maybe.
But fun addition to the plan
is that way point is this way point,
right on the edge of the sea ice.
- Nice. - Yeah.
So we looked up the egg code for this
and it's like, was it J?
So it's five-tenths covered.
Some of it is new, like, one-tenth of that is new ice
and four-tenths of that is old chunks,
icebergs perhaps, old big chunks.
- [Crew Member] Okay, maybe we can shoot that,
maybe we can try to shoot that gap.
- [Crew Member] Maybe like (faintly speaking) 130.
- [Crew Member] 130?
No good right there.
- [Crew Member] Like, to the left,
if I say to the right of that sheet,
that's like two points.
- Right here. - Yeah.
(crew member speaks faintly)
- [Crew Member] That looks good (faintly speaking).
- [Crew Member] This is a great line
if we can carry this for about another mile.
- [Crew Member] Yeah, that's like behind the starboard,
this is starboard (faintly speaking).
There's some stuff in the (faintly speaking).
There's some stuff further off,
but I have to point starboard bow after this guy.
- [Crew Member] Okay, it's coming above.
It's coming up. Doing good.
Check your starboard side a little bit.
- [Crew Member] Okay.
(crew member speaking faintly)
- Look at it, Chrissy. - Okay.
All right.
Tell me where I (faintly speaking).
- [Alan] It would be naive to think
that every single statement made by every scientist
is 100% correct.
That's just not the way it works.
Every single statement made by scientists
in the course of doing their jobs
is an approach
toward the truth, getting closer to truth
in complex unknown situations.
Each publication of the scientific literature
is an approach toward truth,
but truth is always something we strive
to get closer and closer to.
We don't deliver it, signed, sealed, and delivered.
It's a process and it's important to understand the science.
We refer to the scientific process
and that is the forever job
of getting closer and closer to truth.
- [Chrissy] Radar looks clear.
(waves lapping)
- [Mariah] My mom was the first person
that ever took me on a boat.
Her job was going out in a Zodiac
and setting up the spotting scope near their haul out sites
and counting seals, monitoring the population.
And so, you know,
she would take me out in the boat when I was four years old
and get a scoop of marsh mud,
plop it in the bottom of the Zodiac
and I would be totally entertained
picking shells out of mud for hours.
- Down or sideways,
but this one is just paralleling this.
- Okay, we'll see.
We'll see.
This whole section was real icy last night,
but it was also pea soup fog, so maybe it won't be so bad.
- Yeah.
- All right. What's the next point?
- All right. 7107.744.
- Okay. - And then, 6056.085.
(water lapping)
- [Katie] I think when you see a scientist
portrayed in a film, or even some documentaries,
you see them as this person who isn't even really a person.
You're very disconnected from your personhood
and your family and the things that you love
and your friends and that they're just a scientist
and they're there to look at the data
and that's who they are.
No personality.
And I think I've noticed that in my personal life
that that carries over
with hearing other people's perceptions of scientists,
like actual scientists, not just the scientists in films.
I think it does a disservice to who we are as people,
even though that we love the work that we do
and we're all so excited to be here.
And it is, to some extent, our entire lives.
Our lives revolve around this.
Our friends and our colleagues,
it all blends together a bit.
But I think the way that scientists
are sometimes portrayed in films
is definitely not as human.
- [Crew Member] Sheet ice.
- [Crew Member] Crushed ice?
- [Crew Member] And also it's really comical to me
that our ice machine is broken right now.
(both laughing)
- [Crew Member] I didn't think about that.
- [Crew Member] Just go grab some.
- One, two, three.
(tube thudding)
- [Crew Member] Oh God. Okay, keep it together.
- Okay. This?
Should I slice all that?
- Oh, we have to go back.
- I'm gonna go grab Brendan.
- [Brendan] Don't panic.
Take your time. - I was like, you can't do it.
- Jiggle it.
Get in there with the DI water, right?
And really, and then just, like, cut along the top
'cause as soon as it starts unfolding, like, it goes.
I got started in this because I went out to sea
and just really enjoyed the whole experience of it.
The learning something new every day.
The pulling up a core
and putting it out on the description table
and standing around and you know, discussing
with the people that you're working with,
what story you think that core has
and what we can learn from it
and what future research could come from it.
It's just kind of an exciting thing.
It's a real privilege to be able to go out
and explore the world this way.
To be able to explore the world
in a way that gives the window to the past, right?
Like that, you know,
we're not just learning about the world as this today,
we're learning about the world as it was 20,000 years ago
and how different that was
as a world that's kind of difficult to comprehend
in some ways. - The muskox.
Yeah, really, Aaron just started like looking down
for shells again
and talking about like whatever conversation-
(all laughing)
- We just like collect some... You're almost eaten.
Oh my God. - And I be like,
can we just talk about (indistinct).
- It probably got... Scared away.
- [Crew Member] There's the helicopter-
- Oh my god. - That came.
So that it zoomed in and started herding of it.
But these wolves, I mean, other than our group-
- They're so close. - They had probably
never seen humans.
- [Crew Member] Yeah. Yeah, they don't know what to say.
- The captain went up for 12 to 15 hours
navigating through the ice with different watch leaders.
So he's gonna take a break.
So in that time while the captain was taking a break,
we get up on the shelf, nothing else (faintly speaking).
- [Pete] You gotta make sure
all your equipment's running right.
Something goes wrong in the middle of, you know,
you got a 10,000 pound anchor in the air
and something goes wrong,
it's not a good scene, you know,
especially if you can't get it down.
You know what I mean?
So you gotta pay attention to that.
You gotta keep up on your equipment.
You gotta make sure you know where everybody is.
Okay, you are doing that, you are doing that.
I got this. Okay?
You know, your other eight people that are standing around,
get out of the way, you know what I mean?
And you have to tell them that or they'll just stand there.
You're good?
- I mainly look at the phytoplankton.
So that's the fissures you can't see.
But they also have to find some species
that are associated with the ice that we have around here.
- Zooplankton, larger mesh size.
So we get the big ice.
Well, it's springtime, the ice is pulled back
and it's plankton party time.
- [Crew Member] Okay, get ready. Slow down.
- [Pete] You gotta keep everybody safe,
especially doing what I do, you know.
You gotta watch, you know.
That's why I'm trying to teach Keenan, you know.
Hey, dude, always look up, make sure you're looking up,
you know, don't just focus on this.
You got cranes coming around, you got, you know,
you got blocks up there, you got...
You know, look up, make sure...
Hey, holy Christ,
that thing's gonna come off there, you know?
So that's another thing.
You gotta make sure everybody stays safe.
- [Crew Member] It doesn't look good out there.
- [Crew Member] It's a (indistinct).
(crew members speaking faintly)
- [Pete] You know, the icebergs and all that stuff,
you go down the Southern Ocean,
there's icebergs the size of Rhode Island
for Christ's sakes, but the sea ice is a little different.
I haven't been up this high north, you know.
I mean, I've come up, you know,
knowing we were at Disko Bay, I've come up that high,
maybe a little bit high, but not way up like this.
I've never seen all this sea ice,
and I certainly haven't seen any polar bears.
- [Crew Member] Some sheet stuff to the left,
but we won't get it.
(crew members speaking indistinctly)
- Just like over there? - Yeah, right there.
Right here. - Okay.
- [Crew Member] The sheet is probably (faintly speaking).
(dramatic music)
- [Rob] The one of the most unstable ice sheets right now
is the Western Antarctic ice sheet.
It's got a lot of sea level rise in it should it melt
and it's marine terminating, meaning that it ends
in contact with the ocean.
So it can be strongly affected by ocean temperature.
And that's how Greenland was 20,000 years ago.
You know, ice was several hundred miles off
where the current coastline is right now.
It was set right at the shelf edge.
So it was grounded at the,
where the continental shelf goes into deeper water
and then it was interacting with ocean water.
So it's not a perfect analog
for, you know, Antarctica right now.
There's a lot of different variables
from a first order sense trying to figure out,
can the ocean cause destabilization
and collapse of some of these continental scale ice sheets
in a relatively short time period
is really important to understand
for how we think about, you know,
what ice is left on the planet.
And if all of that was to melt,
then how much would that contribute to sea level rise
and over what kind of timeframe?
(crew member speaking faintly)
(metal clanking)
- [Crew Member] That's it.
We just need to slide up there.
(water swishing)
- So surveying and then more surveying.
Is Cap not up?
- He went to shower 'cause you know-
- He's been out for 14 hours. - Yeah.
- Yeah.
I'm gonna make some coffee
while you finish your turn.
- You know, doing a swoop.
- Doing a swoop? Yeah.
- Kind of slow swoop. Sorry.
I could have picked it up
and just thought maybe... It's all right.
- I'm gonna be (indistinct).
Give me coffee or something.
- Okay, he's gonna... Thanks.
- I have. - We'll be asleep.
Can Keenan need more water? (laughs)
My jokes aren't funny, I'm just tired.
- Your jokes are always funny, Chrissy.
- It's not. (laughs)
Brittany's like, no, they're not.
I've stood watch with her.
- My sister also commented, she's like,
how do you take a video while you're driving the boat?
Autopilot, baby. (laughs)
- [Chrissy] But it's cold outside, so.
- Yeah, don't die.
- I won't. - Okay.
- [Chrissy] I mean, Brittany's got a license,
so you would be all right.
- [Brittany] I could never replace us.
- [Mariah] Plus, if you die, there's so much paperwork.
I'd have to write a report. Oh my god.
- [Chrissy] So nice to have friends.
- [Pete] After we hit, we're gonna come out of the mud,
we're gonna bring it up all the way to the top.
Now you come up, you get rid of the trigger arm.
So now you're just on that rope.
At that point, we bring it up, get it up as high as we can,
get it in the bucket and down.
Now it's clean.
Now I gotta get the crane over, take it from that bucket,
bring it around the side,
put it in the other bucket,
and then we're gonna start picking that up.
That brings the pipe horizontal,
get it up over the rail.
Now we just bring the bucket in, crane follows them in,
get the pipe on the rail, strap it down-
- [Crew Member] We're all the way in.
- [Pete] Get rid of the crane,
and then the scientists do their thing.
They extract the core and they do whatever they do.
- [Alan] A fundamental human drive is to understand,
understand our place on the earth, on the universe.
And I think we'll always do that.
So what we're here
on research vessel Neil Armstrong doing
is exploring for knowledge,
but it's a knowledge with a purpose.
Indeed, it's to try to understand the consequences
of some of that other kind of exploration,
that resource exploration
that has got us into the bind we are today.
And the need for some pretty major transformation
in the way we run our societies.
- Bridge, Mariah.
Okay.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Okay, let me fix that.
I mean, why not be right?
Yeah, well, you know, then we can judge Chrissy
if she doesn't park exactly on the spot.
- [Chrissy] All right.
(Mariah laughing)
- Okay. 627 should be 624.
That's definitely...
You were in a little bit of ice last night.
- Yeah, it's definitely come this way, right?
- I don't know.
I mean, we only have the...
It'd be cool to like be able to,
I can only go back 24 hours in our read,
you know, so like, I don't know.
- Yeah, we caught around here.
- This was icy, I think.
Parts of that.
Wait, wait, wait.
You gotta have
the full experience. - Sorry.
- Okay.
- Holy shit, that's a...
- [Mariah] Is that a seal or a polar bear?
Holy shit. Holy shit.
- Amazing. - Holy shit.
That's a polar bear.
(Mariah laughing)
- Slickers too?
Was that this morning? - Holy-
- Yeah. - Dude.
- [Mariah] Shit.
- This old snoop.
- Look, he's doing polar bear things.
- He's so cute.
(metal clanking)
- [Crew Member] All right, the end is coming.
- [Crew Member] The end is near.
- [Crew Member] 334511.
- [Crew Member] Got it. 60?
- [Harry] It's a labor of love and it's,
'cause I'm doing it for family, I'm doing it for, you know,
we're doing it for everybody.
It's like we're taking care of the heartbeat of the ship.
I mean, 'cause this is where everybody socializes.
Everybody comes here at least three times a day,
if not more.
- Nobody's grabbed any ice?
- [Mariah] Well, it's been so (indistinct).
- Yeah, you probably don't want that.
But it's covered. - I will lead it. (laughs)
- I was on a cruise once where...
- [Harry] For my life,
considering my background where I came from,
I've been lucky enough I've been to 24 different countries
and out of, I think, probably 22 of those,
23 of those, I've had a beer
or some type of adult beverage there.
And I wanna try to keep that going in Greenland.
(dramatic music)
(machine whirring)
- [Cara] The time on the ship is crazy.
I feel like it goes by super fast in some ways
and then in other ways
it's like you feel like those 12 hours
that you're on shift isn't gonna end
'cause you've been cutting so much core
and it feels pretty exhausting.
It does feel like a very long time since I've...
I mean, I know it's only been five weeks,
but a long time since I've seen my family.
There've definitely moments where I've been like,
oh, I'm so glad I came back out to sea
'cause I've been a long time
and it was definitely like, it's just so exciting to see.
It's neat to be in a group
where everybody's so excited about the research
and so excited about the mud
and the science and just that it's happening right then
in any unique place.
(waves roaring)
- [Kent] I don't enjoy a storm.
And one of the things that I think
that I have noticed in the last many years,
it just seems maybe I'm,
it seemed like the weather was more regular
and you get the occasional storm
or you get the occasional rough, you know, higher winds
and rougher seas and now it seems like the norm
is the rougher seas and the higher winds
and you get the occasional nice day.
I don't know if that's me just being tired of rough weather
or I don't, you know, but yeah,
and it's a absolute major factor
of life out here, for sure.
It gets tiring
if you're in rough weather for, you know, days on end,
holding onto your desk with one hand
and trying to type on the computer with the other,
it doesn't, you know, that sort of thing.
It's always better to be on the bridge
when you can see the horizon.
And, of course, you know, there's always the, you know,
people are down for the count down below
and not feeling well.
And I can't say I don't...
I dare not say we get a kick out of the scientists
getting seasick, but it's one of those kind of like,
oh, those poor folks.
But you know, you just like, this is normal
and you kind of forget
how it feels to be not feeling so hot in that stuff.
(waves crashing)
- [Mariah] Sometimes it's really pleasant to be up here
and watching the water
and sometimes if you're not in a good head space,
it can be really hard to kind of be alone
with all your thoughts.
I had an old chief mate tell me
that the best watch officers have a rich inner life.
And I think that is very accurate.
- [Chrissy] When it's kind of foggy like this
and we're in the ice limit,
we're kind of using, relying on the radars
and the Waymo's, which is a different type of radar
to navigate anything like that.
If there's any small ice,
we'll try and pick it up with that.
And then if that doesn't pick it up, Leo the lookout
will hopefully see it in time for us
to maneuver out of the way.
- [Diego] You can be looking at the horizon
for a long, long time.
So you have thoughts, you can tell pretty quickly
if someone is at peace with themselves
or if there is a lot brewing underneath,
you know, like you spend eight hours
with someone on the bridge every day.
There is a lot going on inside every person.
So sometimes I think when you are really at peace,
it's because you can, you're just chilling
and you're just making up stories
looking into the horizon.
Or if you have stuff brewing, then you're just getting,
you know, you can go down a bad,
there's some people that have gone bad spirals.
You know, I haven't talked to my wife,
I haven't talked to my girlfriend in a long time.
Like, I wonder how they are.
I wonder what they're doing, you know?
Some people go into a rabbit hole looking at the horizon.
- [Kyle] When I retire, I just wanna be able to,
I'm not looking to be one of these guys
driving around in an RV.
I'm just gonna be glad to be home.
You know, I've got a nice little house
and I just wanna be home.
I got a nice little weld shop and I can just putter in there
and make things.
I'll probably find some kind of job doing something
and I gotta do something.
You know, I can't just sit around.
I'll be dead in two years if you just sit on the couch.
But I just wanna not be rushed,
not be a prisoner of the clock,
not have to be here at a certain time.
Be nice to not worry about, you know, oh my gosh,
I gotta be here at this time,
or I gotta get this done before this date.
It'd be nice to be past all that
and move on to the next phase.
- [Rob] I think we will leave an indelible mark
on the climate,
but what that will be, I think is yet to be seen.
The optimist in me thinks that that mark
can be a little more blurry than, you know,
what we're projected to be.
But I think, you know, if we continue
on some of the same paths, then it would be a very clear,
rapid transition that's what we'll be known for.
We're going to see continued melting of ice sheets
and that's gonna continue to contribute to sea level rise.
Those rates of change might seem small over years
to decades, but you know, once we get out to centuries,
we're gonna see large impacts on, you know, coastal cities.
So the map of the world will be a little bit smaller,
but most of that we felt at the coastlines
and that's where most of our population,
most of our cities are.
So thinking about, you know,
what the world will be like in the future,
certainly it's gonna be, you know, a big change
to what we see now and how we deal with an ocean
that's constantly creeping to odds land
and creeping landward.
- [Alan] It's inevitable through living,
through occupying space.
We have impact.
Will we be judged in the future
by the damage associated with everything we do?
Or will we be judged
for the positive quest for knowledge
so that we can do better.
I think maybe, I hope,
I hope we can forgive ourselves a little bit
for where we are, but to not give up
thinking things are hopeless,
but to continue that exploration drive
to make things better.
- [Cara] I mean, this cruise was a huge...
I mean, it took a lot of planning.
The cruise was amazing five weeks,
but it's not over yet, I guess is what I would say
is because we've wrapped up the cores
and they're ready to go back to the lab
and begin being analyzed.
I mean, we've done a lot of the basics now,
but there's so many questions that the group on here has
and that others on land have about these cores.
So they're gonna be analyzed in detail when we get back.
So it was a huge effort to get out to sea
and do this for five weeks,
but the lasting impact will be a lot longer, I think.
- [Kent] You know, we miss, when we come out here,
we come out for months at a time
and miss all kinds of things.
You know, weddings, funerals, birthdays, anniversaries.
So when you know those things are coming up,
you just kind of like anticipating the next season.
You have to figure out in your own personal way
how to handle that feeling of missing out,
of not actually seeing, being there to see the details
of somebody having a super great time,
or even the time, you know,
the same thing on the other end of the spectrum.
There not being there to support somebody who's, you know,
gonna be having a super hard time
and just kind of hoping they get through it.
And when you get home, things haven't evolved
or changed so much that it's,
you feel like a stranger again.
You know, entering this world
that was surviving without you, without your presence.
And there's a part of that that's kind of,
doesn't feel good.
So you're in this space with however many crew,
you know, the rest of the crew
and the science party and you think, oh, you're not alone.
But it's still a very, it can be a very lonely life,
and it is a lonely life.
I can tell you that, for sure. Yeah.
(gentle pensive music)
(gentle pensive music continues)