Latest / Atmosphere with Emily Gracey / What Scientists Wish They Knew

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What Scientists Wish They Knew · Atmosphere with Emily Gracey

• Emily Gracey: We just wish we could see the plumbing. Very, very hard to predict. What we need to be able to do now is detect them in real time. We don't really know how it's gonna happen. There are a lot of places in the deep ocean that we have never seen, we don't know what's down there. It's the pace of warming that is the problem. We like to think of scientists as people who have the answers. But what of the most important questions are the ones we still can't answer? How do volcanoes really work beneath the surface? Can we predict the next tsunami, rogue wave, or rapidly intensifying hurricane? What is happening in the deepest parts of our oceans? And how quickly is our changing climate going to reshape the planet? What do you wish you knew? That question is at the heart of Dr. Ellen Prager's work. And this conversation. Because science doesn't begin with what we know. It begins with what we don't know. Almost all of them said what keeps me up at night is not the unknowns. What keeps me up at night is the knowns and people not understanding and preparing for it. Today we're going to explore the mysteries scientists are still trying to solve and the knowledge we already have that could help us prepare for what's coming next. I'm Meteorologist Emily Gracie, and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation. Each week I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it. Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around us. Well, Ellen Prager, I'm so honored to have such an amazing scientist as one of my first guests on Atmosphere. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this. This was really inspired by some previous Atmosphere episodes and we got to talking. And turns out you have a book. Well, you have many books, but very happy to have you on the show to talk about what we know about certain areas of science and more importantly what we don't know, right? So I'm so excited to be on one of the first episodes. I want to hear a little bit about you and your background before we dig into the science too, because you have a very fascinating background. you've lived underwater, you've educated your writer, communications. How did you get into science? So I was always really fascinated by nature, and I loved like Chakou Stowe and National Geographic. And all those sorts of things growing up. And I used to like climb trees and pretend to be a naturalist. And I was working as a lifeguard at a pool, and some of the other guys I worked with brought scuba tanks to the pool. And they're like, hey, you want to try these? And so I put a scuba tank on, I jumped into the pool, and they could not get me out. And so in college, when I discovered oceanography and a science where I could combine nature and science and the whole Jacques Cousteau ocean stuff with scuba diving. You know, I hate to say it, but I was hooked. Yeah. Just fell in love with it. I took a semester away. I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut for my undergrad, which was fantastic. But I took a semester away to study tropical marine science at what was called at the time the West Indies Lab. And the scientists there had like the coolest jobs ever. They would teach, go out on coral reefs and do research and it They were just people who I was like, I want to be like them. And so I started, you know, they became my mentors. I actually had a great summer job in between my junior and senior year. I rode my bike over to this lab we've gone on a field trip to. We're signed sweat and lived underwater, you call hydro lab to study reefs. So I rode my bike over there and I said, Hey, do you guys have any, like, do you need divers for the summer? And they said, Are you certified? Can you pick up these tanks? I said, sure. And so I got the job. I rode my bike back to the lab, and all the other students were like, my God, how did you get that job? And I always tell a story and I just say, I asked. I got to work with some of the, I would say, people on the forefront of coral reefs and in biology and in geology. I worked in physical oceanography for my PhD in reefs, which was fascinating. So I worked as a faculty scientist for Sea Education Association, where I went out to sea with my Undergrad students for six weeks on a tall sailing ship and taught oceanography. I ran a marine lab in the Bahamas. I was the assistant dean at the University of Miami's graduate school, Rosen Steele School of Marine Atmosphere Size. I worked with the USGS. But after a while, what I discovered was that I loved research. I loved working with people, but what I was really interested in was communication. And at the time I felt like there was so much great science being done, and there were so many kinds of fun stories that had to do with science that no most people would never hear. And so I started writing books, children's books, popular science books, doing a lot of public speaking, and really trying to reach the non-quire, the people who aren't necessarily already attracted to science. I wanted to talk to them too, but I really wanted to make science understandable. Entertaining and relevant for more people. I have a lot of the same goals. So no wonder we get along so well. okay. And now you are working with Storm Center Communications, chief scientist, right? Right. And you get to work with the lovely Dave Jones who you wound up marrying. Yes, partner, partner in work and in life. And we we As you know, we just got married about a year ago and we're so happy. We love working together. We have the same passion for communications. And it's it's a fun marriage, both the get and work alike, because he's a meteorologist. And as an ocean scientist, you know, so I have the the oceanside covered. He is the atmosphere. And we like to laugh and say, you know, together we have the whole world covered. You do. okay, well, let's talk about we're gonna go through like a broad range of topics today. And because you are an expert in all of these topics. And that's what I love about talking to you is like you know a little bit about everything. You know a lot about some things too. but you wrote a book that kind of hones in on a lot of these topics as well, because we often are, you know, especially in 2026, searching for answers, but they're not all out there, right? So I I want to know how, first of all, you kind of got inspired to dig into this topic of what scientists don't know. So, you know, I'd already written a couple popular science books. And I was thinking, I don't want to write just another like, here's what we know book. And I started thinking about science and what drives people to do science, and it's the unknowns. It's not what we already know. If you're a scientist, you're like, I gotta figure this out. I wanna know how this works. It's the unknowns. And so it really drives people to do science. It produces new technology, because people have to come up with new instruments to figure things out. And truthfully, it's really interesting to talk to people who are experts in their field and say, what do you wish you knew? So that was, you know, the idea, the concept was, what do I wish I knew? And one of the things I did in the book Dangerous Earth is at the beginning of every chapter, I sort of used a game changing event, whether it was in a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, or something in climate change, what we learned from that event. And then I went and talked to experts and said, What do you wish you knew? And the other thing about writing books, at least for me, is I can't write a book if I personally am not interested and passionate and fast with the topic. And so this one was so much fun and interesting to go to like volcanologists or you know earthquake specialists and say, What do you wish you knew? And and let them tell me stories. And I love that. And then Trying to take their passion and share it with other people. Yeah. And you you wrote this several years ago. So as we go through, I'm gonna be curious too if like some of these aren't things we wish we knew anymore, if like things have been discovered in the past five years to the point where these are no longer mysteries. But we'll get into that. let's start with you kind of mentioned it, the earthquakes and the volcanoes. Let's start with those. and I wanna hear I do love these like case studies that you brought up too, because I love natural disaster history. And I was born in Seattle, Washington. And so I was born shortly after Mount St. Helens erupted, but my parents told stories about, you know, like the ash on their cars and just what it was like living there during that time. So that was one of your case studies, and so was Mount Pinatuba, which is very fascinating as well. So tell me. Where we are when it comes to volcano science, what we know. And then we're gonna talk about like what there is still to be learned. So let me just say with Mount St. Helens and Mount Kinatubo, they're they're case studies, but they're really amazing teaching moments or lessons that we learned, so much so. But they also had some really interesting stories in them. One story I just relate is I talked to Robert Tilling, who at the time of Mount St. Helens, Was in charge of the US Geological Survey. And when Mount St. Helens started becoming active, they knew they needed more data. They needed more information. There was one seismic station on Mount Hel Mount St. Helens. That's it. But he had no budget. He had no money to send people to Mount Hel St. Helens. He had no money to put more instruments in. So he told me first I said so. He took out his credit card. And he paid for everything just praying that the government would reimburse him afterwards. And so that help I mean, it was still there was still a lot of surprises in the Mount St. Helm, but it helped a lot that we they put in more monitoring equipment. And you know, one of the things that comes from those cases for those incidents is having monitoring equipment on volcanoes is critical. But Here's one of the unknowns. Not all volcanic eruptions have precursors. They don't show earthquake activity. They may not show gas. They may not show a volcanic tremor, which means there's you can, it's a special kind of earthquake that's like a lot, you know, the magma moving through the rocks. It's kind of like pipes vibrating. And so, but not all volcanoes show precursors. So some erupt without them. But You're never gonna know if you don't have monitoring. And so there are hundreds, if not a thousand, some like fifteen hundred volcano, active volcanoes around the world today with people living dangerously close. And many of them are not monitored. So that's one of the important things about volcanoes is that you have to have monitoring, especially the people living nearby. But you also have to recognize that so let's say you start seeing more earthquakes or more. there's gas rising up being emitted. It doesn't mean the volcano is necessarily going to erupt. It could, but not necessarily. It's really hard. And so what we can do now is we can look at a volcano and talk about, well, this volcano, it's becoming more active. There's a chance it will erupt. Here's what we need to do to prepare. And we know enough about how volcanoes erupt to prepare people. Where not to live, to have an evacuation plan, to be worried about things like if you have a volcano erupt where there's snow and ice and you get what's called laha or mud flow, they can be incredibly devastating. But now there are warning systems that can that can warn of that, an alert, send out alerts. So we know enough now to prepare, and that's kind of be gonna be a running theme. That even if there's some uncertainty, if you know enough. Yeah, there's a lot you can do. But I will say one of the things about volcanoes was one of the most common things when I asked experts, like I talked to Don Swanson, a volcanologist who's in Hawaii. He gave me this incredible tour of Kilauea. And he and others all said, We just wish we could see the plumbing. You remember they would like a window into the base of volcano because all our information comes from indirect evidence. Right. It comes from earthquakes. It comes from gas being emitted. It comes from the lava once it's erupted. You can't actually see inside a volcano. They now have three-dimensional, like almost like it's called tomography. It's like CAT scans, but even so, you're sort of creating an image based on sound and other things. You're not seeing it with your own eyes, right? So the whole remember when you built a volcano in high school and you had this one, you know, pipe. Coming up, this cone shape that guess what? It doesn't really work like that. That's not one chamber from there's multiple chambers. There can be cut side dikes that are vertical sort of channels. There can be sills, horizontal channels, so a different bunch of magma chambers. There could be some some magma that's liquid and some magma that's actually crystallized. It's way more complicated. But again. It's not like have a window into the base volcano to see what it looks like. We have to learn from all this indirect evidence. But why don't we have a window? Like all these things we have to look inside the human body and see what's going on in there. How is that technology not advanced for us to see underground? Because how are you gonna dig down? Gets really hot, right? It's really hot. It's there's pressure building up. So it would be very dangerous, right? Especially an active volcano. Part of the problem is if you release the pressure, that's when you get an eruption. So it it's really hard, technically hard and expensive and dangerous. So we don't have it. Now there's nothing to say that we couldn't in the future if maybe there was more investment in it, but not so much right now. It's like we're drilling for oil, you know. Right. Well, and geothermal heat. I mean, think about that. In volcanic areas now, geothermal heat is becoming a very popular form of energy, renewable energy. As a meteorologist, it's always fascinating to me about what happens with a volcano when it goes into the air, too. Like whether it makes it into the weather pattern circulation, is there any way to determine that even as like it starts erupting? Well, that's a great question. You can't determine it. Exactly. But you can look at history for that volcano. So you can look at the ash deposits around a volcano and see how far and why they've been distributed. you can tell, like if it's a stratovolcano where you tend to have those cone-shaped and you have more explosive eruptions, it's more likely. if there is ice or water mix in, they tend to be more explosive. That's why the eruptions in Iceland tend to be explosive and you tend to get Ash going very high. so you can look at the characteristics of the volcano, you look look at past eruptions, and you might be able to say something about the pressure building up, but there's no sure way to tell from what you know you're what you're getting at from one eruption to the next. Not only do they vary from one volcano to the next, they can vary in one volcano from one event to another. So just because a volcano erupted one way one time doesn't mean it's gonna erupt the same way the next time, except when you're looking at stratavolcanoes versus like a shield volcano like Hawaii or the Galapagos, they have had some explosive eruptions in the past, but typically they're not. Catch up. I have a friend who lived in the Philippines in the late 80s and early 90s, and her family had to evacuate during Mount Pinatubo. And she asked me. About the toxicity of the air and why they weren't allowed to go back. So are there is there a way to determine like what's being spewed and how toxic it is? Are there different levels of that? Absolutely. And we're much better now at measuring those things, right? Taking samples, measuring them. So back when Mount Tun Canatubo erupted, we were less capable, but The big thing with that was that successful evacuation. Yeah. That was one of the big lessons there with Mount Tenetouba was they actually had enough evidence from the past, enough monitoring, and they made really smart decisions and they were able to evacuate a ton of people safely. And so that was a game changer in terms of how to respond to volcanic unrest and bring the experts in that you need to make those decisions. And I would say now. We are much better at taking because you've got sulfur dioxide. You know, you those are those toxic gases. Like I think I don't know if you've seen in Hawaii with Kilauea what they call a VOG. When when Kilauea are ups sometimes and you get those gases coming out of the volcano, carbon dioxide, the sulfur dioxide, and if you have wind, it it can create what's called VOG, which is volcan like volcanic fog. And they now you can imagine you can use the same kind of model for winds over the volcanoes, like for smoke, that you would for ash cloud or gas cloud. So we're much better at determining where that ash and cloud would go based on some of the modeling we can do now. Okay. I feel like we could spend all day on volcanoes, but we should move on because we have a lot of topics to hit. And I kind of got into earthquakes quite a bit in my recent episode with Sean Willsey. So we don't need to dig too much into earthquakes, but we didn't really talk about tsunamis, which is a huge part of this as well. So I I know that you use the case study the tsunami I think all of us kind of around my age remember is the one back in two thousand and four, five, four, four, though. So four. Yeah. So the Indonesian tsunami. So tell me about that, what we learned from it, what we still need to learn when it comes to tsunamis. Boy, there's so much packed into that. Gosh, from the science, there are some people who didn't expect that it could bring the that fall. It's a so first of all, it's a subduction zone, which means that when the earthquake happened, the land or the tectonic plates moved up and down, meaning the sea floor could move up or down, it moved up. And the reason that's so dangerous in a it was a big quake, right? Like it was 9.2, so huge energy, move the sea floor up. And what happens then is you can imagine. If there's a huge water column over the seafloor, it moves up. Well, water just can't sit in a hill. So gravity causes it to roll down, and you get a wave, and that creates that's the triggering event. So the size of that event, the fact that it was in a subduction zone and you had that vertical motion is what created the tsunami. But there was some question about how big an event could happen there. So that was kind of a surprise for some people. And we had never seen. Really, in our sort of human history where we records that big of a tsunami traveling all that far across the world. very quickly, you know, you have local tsunamis and distant tsunamis. Local tsunamis are when they happen and they hit someplace pretty quickly, and that was devastating in Indonesia, you know, in that part of the world, Sumatra, and then but it also went other places and traveled across the world. There are a lot of lessons learned. Big thing was well, couple things. We used to describe tsunamis as like you drop a pebble in a pond, you get equal waves traveling out from it. But what we discovered during that tsunami was that the the depths or the bathymetry of the sea floor can direct the energy of a tsunami in certain directions. So in certain areas you had much bigger waves than were expected because it they got directed by the bathymetry. And so that was something new that nobody had really identified before. The other really big thing was education and having an alert and warning system. Because in many places in where the tsunami did horrible destruction, the sea receded. And that is a clear warning sign that a tsunami is coming. But instead of running, people went out to catch fish, went out to see what was going on. And so that when the wave came in or the surge, it looks like a surge or a series of surges. It was incredibly destructive and a lot of people died. There is a wonderful story about a young girl who worked, who learned in a class that the receding of the sea could mean tsunami's coming. And she told people and her family to run inland. And she saved hundreds of lives. And so education and the warnings, the need for a warning system was one of the things that came out of that horrible event, was that people need to be educated what to do. And there needed to be better warning systems. Well, and it was interesting too, because it is so recent that it was at a point too where there were a lot of tourists out there with cell phones and cameras. Right. And so it was recorded, you know, it was just massively. So people even just seeing this on the internet and seeing it on YouTube were educated from like how destructive and how scary this could be. So and I I think people also underestimate the power of water. And it wasn't just The surge of water coming in or the waves of water coming is also it all then rushes back to the sea and takes, you know, all the debris with it. Everything is all jumbled up. And I think people think, look at that. You know, there's a small wave coming in. I don't have to worry about that. But, you know, even a half a foot of water can knock of Russian water can knock you off your feet. A foot of water, two feet of water can can float a vehicle. You know, and so. think that's you're right. Another big part of that was rushing water is incredibly powerful and it doesn't have to be that deep. Mm-hmm. Okay, so what do we still need to learn about tsunamis? well tsunamis are very hard well they're very hard to predict. We can say where they're more likely to happen because remember you have to have the two things really you have to have either vertical motion of the sea floor or you could have an undersea landslide because you have to displace volume essentially. And so, you know, some of the big tsunamis have been because of landslide that have gone down into water. So we can say where they're more likely to occur because we know where the tectonics are vertical or where you might have big landslides into water. Can very, very hard to predict. Hard to warn people for local tsunamis because they can happen so quickly. One of the things that a couple things have evolved We we've now seen tsunamis from satellites, but they're very hard to see because in the open ocean because they travel as very low waves very quickly. They're very fast. We also now have what are called Dart buoys, which I'm sure you've heard about, which are special buoys in the open ocean that basically they measure pressure changes over the over the sensor, and you can with a program take out regular waves and things like out, you can take out the noise so you can identify potential tsunami waves. And what happens now is if there's an earthquake anywhere that's 7.1 or higher in magnitude and it's in the ocean or in the coast in the coastal zone, that triggers the Dart buoys and the sensors to start recording faster and they start looking for tsunamis. But here's one of the biggest problems. Those Dart buoys take incredible maintenance. And it's expensive to work with instruments out y opening. A lot of them are not working now. And so keeping the system up, I mean, maintenance, it's I'm sure it's the same with weather. Maintenance for instruments is not a very sexy thing to invest in, but it's incredibly important. So important. Right. And so with the dart booti the tie gauges, which can measure when the wave comes on shore. A lot of those aren't working because we haven't invested in keeping them going. And that's kind of pretty scary. I'm like sensing a theme here with all of these of like observations and preparation. Yes. And education, right? And education. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, I guess part of the preparation. Okay. Well, you brought up landslides. Can we dig into that? How do we can we predict? Are they predictable? Can we predict a landslide? So there is now some predictive models. Not exactly when landslides are going to happen, but risk. There are models that take into account things like development, taking away vegetation, water saturation, you know, how much rain you've had. And so there are now water, there are now computer models across the world that show probability or risk of landslides. And, you know, think about burn scars. We've seen that in California, right? The wildfires where you have a burn scar where you remove the vegetation and you get a lot of rain. more likely to have a landslide or or debris flow landslides because of earthquakes. So can't predict them exactly, but we know where they're more likely to occur and where the risks are. Okay. All right. Well let's head into the ocean because we were already talking about tsunamis and you are an ocean expert. I saw you brought up in the book Rogue Wave. What is a rogue wave and where do they come from? Okay, I'm gonna keep it really simple. I'm not gonna get into any, you know, numbers or details. They are waves that are higher than your average wave or much higher than your average wave. Okay. And they're ha you know, it used to be that people thought they were very rare and they only happen, you know, every once in a while. But once people started putting instruments out in different places of the world, even when there weren't any people, they started seeing hundreds of rogue waves. So they're not that special, but what we've discovered is they tend to happen in certain places. So think about you have two waves that come together what's called constructively. And so you get two wave heights that all of a sudden merge and become one. That's one way. You can get constructive formation. And so instead of a small wave, also you have a big wave. They also tend to form where the wind is going against a strong current. And that tends to create rogue waves. And so we can't again predict a rogue wave, but we can now say where in the world they're more likely to happen. And with more instruments out there and with satellites out there, we're more easily able to identify rogue waves and see that they're happening. What we need, because they're not predictable in terms of when they're actually going to happen, how big they're going to be, we need ways for ships. If they're out someplace, be able to detect a rogue wave in advance. And there are sis they're trying to create systems right now that can do that. So that if you're a ship captain and you have a, you know, special radar that can detect a rogue wave, you can turn the ship into the wave. And there have been a couple of examples where captains have done that. They've detected a rogue wave. It's been reported, and they can turn the ship so they go right into it. And so there's less damage. Because the last thing you want to do is be broadside or have it hit. That way. It's not gonna be Titan and it's not gonna be the Poseidon Adventure, not Titan, the Poseidon Adventure. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie where they have a rogue wave and the ship gets hit broadside and it turns over and like the perfect storm though, with that one scene where the boat just goes. Right. So rogue waves are real. They happen more frequent frequently than we thought. they are it we can now detect them, but we can't necessarily detect them right when they form and when they're happening. Okay. Well, while we're in the ocean and scary things as you're swimming out there, rip currents. This is like an ongoing problem year after year. And it seems it feels like I hear more and more rip current issues every year. So where are we with prediction? Because I know the National Weather Service will put out some like alerts for high risk days. have we gotten anywhere with the science here? So the science, I think, has improved. I mean, one of the things is it used we used to think that you had to have big waves to create rip currents, but now we know you don't. It can be a low wave day and you can still have rip currents. And so it's really important that people know the warning signs. And if the red flags are up at lifeguard stations, they don't swim, and what to do with cotton one. So there are certain places where rib currents are more common because of the the nature of the coastline and the bathymetry. Often if you have a jetty, Or something like that, that can help create one. Because essentially what what a rip current is is you get water piling up on onshore and it needs some place to go. And so it funnels to a low spot on the beach and goes offshore. And so you'll get a rip or really strong current going offshore. I think we've been seeing a lot of rip currents associated with storm events or storm. I think there was just Manatee County. I was just reading over the when Arthur was out there, maybe happen like. Of rescues because it was a sunny day. It wasn't stormy on Flora's west coast, but it was a very high wave day and high water was coming onto the beaches and creating rip currents. And they had a lot of people who wanted to go into the water and they had a ton of rescues. So we also now have cameras out on beaches, and there are some clues if there's a rip. sometimes you can see sediment being picked up and brought offshore, or you can see an area of low wave in an area high, you know, where the rest of the waves are high. So people are trying to identify them with cameras on the coasts as a way to be able to warn people. But if that's really tough. that I think AI is going to be helpful in that. I think we're going to see more cameras identifying rip currents through AI. But the big thing is to know if you're caught a rip current and you're being taken offshore very quickly, do not try and swim against the current right back to shore. You need to swim parallel to shore to get out of it. Wave your hands. If there's lifeguards, call for help. And if you can get out of the rip current, swim back. But don't panic. I mean that's the big thing. You can float for a while, wait for help, you know, get somebody's notice or try and swim back outside the rip current. And let me say a lot of people call them rip tides. They really no tides, rip curve. Because a riptide is something, right? But it's something different. Well, there's there are bores, what are called tidal bores, which go up rivers and these like giant waves. There's certain rivers where they get these waves. It's like a commonly used term. Like people use common it's branded on things. So well, I remember tsunamis were also called tidal waves. And they really have ver nothing to do with tides for the most part. So That's another one, tidal waves or rip tides. Just get tides out of there. Can we talk about sharks? Because this is definitely something that makes me nervous. and I know it's one of those where it's like they're not they're not out to eat people, but there's some unknowns from your book. It that sounds like there's some unknowns. What do we know? What do we not know? There are a lot of knowns or a lot of there are some unknowns about sharks, but known is people make terrible shark food. We are sharks don't hunt people. They want, you know, seals, fish, squid. we we don't have the blubber, the oil. We're we're terrible shark food. but remember, sharks taste things by biting, unfortunately. That's how they know what they're eating. And so a shark, if if it's murky water, sometimes a shark will mistake a person for a fish or something else, some sort of prey. take a bite and typically they realize that it's not food and they spit the person out. Now that doesn't mean it's not gonna be tragic or terrible, but they don't eat people typically because we're not good food. There are unknowns with sharks. We don't know some like where a lot of them reproduce. We don't know where they spend a lot of their time because the only time we ever see the shark is when it comes up to the surface. I was talking to a shark expert who had been working with sharks for years and had never seen sharks reproducing ever. Which is kind of shocking, right? But remember in the ocean They want their privacy, Ellen. I know. But we don't we only see when they come out surface. We don't see when they're underwater what they're doing most of the time. I I've been in the water with sharks and sometimes they'll come in to take a look and then they go away. and and they're unbelievably graceful, you know, powerful creatures. I will say there has been some misinformation about people ride a showing like filming somebody, you know, riding on a fin and saying, well. They want love or petting. That is ridiculous. You know, they are top predators. They're wild animals. You know, for the most part, you don't know what they're gonna do. And so you have to respect sharks. And, you know, what I always tell people is don't go in at dusk or dawn, because that's in the ocean. That's typically when sharks feed. you know, you don't wanna be wearing a lot of shiny jewelry and splashing around if you think there are sharks around. and and don't swim where people are fishing. Or you know, I do a lot of open water swimming and it used to drive me crazy. where they allowed people to fish with bait and they're swimmers. there was never an issue, but I just thought that makes no sense at all. So there are some things to do, also swim with groups. but again, sharks are wild animals. The ocean is where they feed and accidents do happen. So but You know, again, there's a there's still a lot we don't know about sharks. And for the most part, they are not feeding on people. It's mostly it's it's either mistaken identity, there's like somebody's spear fishing and they go after the sp the fish on the spear and they get the person instead. A lot of times you see films where they're artificially baiting the sharks or tummy and the sharks, you know, are tacking and shaking their heads, and that's not necessarily how they naturally feed. You know, so our vision of sharks feeding isn't necessarily how they even feed. It's those are artificial situations. And I am very much against shark feeding operations for diving or snorkeling or whatever. I just don't think it's good to associate people with bait and fe you know, food. Yeah, I agree. do you know, I've always been curious when I'm at the beach and I like I'm swimming, are they ever hiding under the water or do they always kind of make themselves Visible. It depends on the shark because some sharks are ambush predators. I'm sorry to say, like tiger sharks, others. And they it's interesting, they say if you see a tiger shark, make sure that they that shark sees you seeing it. Right? Because they're ambush predators. They won't own they want to attack when you don't see them. But if the s like if you're in the water and there's a tark shark and you look at it and you know it sees you, then they're like, I can't get this thing. but there are a lot of sharks. I mean, I've been snorkeling and diving with a lot of sharks that want nothing to do with you. They're swimming around all the time. you know, lemon sharks, I've been in lemon sharks, black-tipped sharks, white-tipped sharks. I've been in the water with bull sharks. They're they're unpredictable. I don't I don't want to really swim around bull sharks. but I mean that's the other thing, is it depends on the kind of shark and how they feed, what they feed on. So again You just have to be if there's a big bait ball, if there are a lot of bait fish, don't go out swimming if you think there are sharks around. If there are seals in the water, probably not to be good to be out there. Right. So there are dolphin. Dolphins are fine. Dolphins, I mean, they're fine, although dolphins are wild animals. I've been chased out of the water by dolphins when they were mating and they didn't want snorkelers in the water. And they would actually rush right at us and turn. And it was basically a signal to say get out of the water. But like as far as sharks though, like I heard someone say I was doing an open water swim and there was a dolphin out there and somebody was like, No, that's good. If there's a dolphin out there, it means there's no sharks. Is there any truth to that? I would say no. I mean, if sharks and dolphins can be in the same place, there is there are a lot of anecdotes that dolphins will chase sharks away or whatever. I wouldn't count on that as a safety measure, but you know, if they're dolph I would say if there are dolphins in the water, a lot of dolphins around, there probably aren't a lot of sharks around. You know, or at least ones that could go after them, obviously. Gotcha. okay. I well, one more question about the ocean before we get into weather, deep ocean. It and I've heard, I think I've even heard you say this that there's places on Earth in the deep ocean that we know less about than we do like outer space. So what do we even know what we don't know about the deep ocean? Are are there goals there when it comes to deep ocean exploration? There are. The deep ocean is very difficult, costly to explore and study. And so there are a lot of places in the deep ocean that We have never seen, we don't know what's down there. We do know there's probably not any big giant creatures that we're not seeing because they would have to feed in places where there's the most productivity, which is typically in the coastal zone. but for sure, there are a lot of smaller species that we've never seen or identified living in the deep ocean. Less than 1% of the deep ocean has been actually observed with human eyes. We've Explored remotely now more than that, probably less than 10%, or map less than 10%. And most of the mapping of the deep sea floor is done through satellite altimetry. It's not done from, you know, actually measuring the deep ocean. And so there, we know there are a lot of seamounts we've never discovered. There are all sorts of things. Well, I talked to Larry Maher, who's at the University of New Hampshire, he's an expert in undersea mapping. And he said that every time he goes out, To map a new place they discover like giant undersea canyons or rivers or seamouts, things that he never knew were there, you know, in that one spot. He said it's it's so exciting because it's always so new. If you think about it, we only have one planet. The ocean covers more, I I like to say just under three quarters of the surface. And I'm not against space exploration, but the magnitude of investment we've made in exploring the ocean and And technology for mapping and studying it is minuscule compared to space. And so we need to do more to understand the deep sea. And I mean, look at what happened with the airplane that went down in the think in the Indian Ocean. It went down in a very deep place, very remote, incredibly hard to search. Still haven't found it. Yeah, every time I interview somebody about space science, they It's it it causes a lot of excitement, but also they talk about how that we're doing this to learn about the origins of our planet. But can't we do that with ocean exploration too? Well, not only the origins, what about the state of the planet and what's happening? And what about things like a a lot of that what goes on the deep sea impacts the shallow zone where we get our fish from, we get our seafood from, where trans we transport. Huge amounts for our economy. I mean, the deep sea is also a part of the system that distributes heat on the planet. It's the life support of the life support system. You know, something like half the oxygen on the planet in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton in the ocean. distribution of heat, but coming back to climate change. If that big ocean circulation is changing, it's going to change the distribution of heat on the planet. And that's incredible. incredibly important, not only just for living, but think about the economy, farming, society. Look what's happening right now. We we just saw on the news in France a deadly heat wave, something like 40 people drowned because they're trying to escape the heat. So the ocean plays a critical role in that. Okay, well that segues to our next topic, which is hurricanes. there's been some stuff learned about hurricanes in recent years, new developments. What have we learned and what do we have left to learn about hurricanes? Hurricanes certainly, you know, one thing I can very apropos right now is where we are, I'm not such so much learning, but understanding the importance of ocean observations for hurricanes, understanding not only sea surface temperature at the surface, but subsurface sea surface temperatures because that fuels hurricanes. And You know, now we've got undersea gliders that can travel autonomously under the ocean and get those subsurface temperatures. And that's a big thing right now is getting those subsurface temperatures for intensity. You know, getting better. We I think we've gotten a lot better at forecasting the track of hurricanes, but less so in terms of the intensity, especially when a storm is getting close to shore and intensifying rapidly. So I would say see what you think, but it for me, one of the biggest things right now is getting better at Forecasting rapid intensification so that people, you know, in enough time so people can better prepare or evacuate. And to do that, we need subsurface temperatures from the ocean. Mm-hmm. Okay. yeah, rapid intensification. Certainly. We've seen in recent years a lot of those. Also, I I saw in your book you talked about like the wobbles when a hurricane wobbles. We don't know why it's wobbling, right? I, you know, I think that comes down to natural randomness and all the factors involved. You know, I mean, we know that there's so much going on in the atmosphere, you know, and it's not a steady state system. And so if you have one small change somewhere else, it can affect the steering currents for hurricane. Or if you have something happen in the ocean, it can affect those steering currents. So I think it's just there's so many factors involved. And you know Based on my conversations with experts, the wobble is something people don't think they're ever going to be able to forecast. They think they're going to be able to see it on satellite imagery, right? So we can see when a wobble is happening, but we're not going to be able to forecast it. Yeah. And also observations, preparation. Preparation, knowing. I think that's a great point, Emily, in that. Knowing that a hurricane could wobble and it could really impact landfall. And so instead of thinking the landfall is a point of land, it has to think of a much larger area because it could wobble. And that that's really important and something that most people don't think about when they're making preparations or responding to a forecast track that, okay, if this if this hurricane were to wobble, you know, I might be in the direct path. And so it's an important thing to keep in mind. I'm gonna throw a curveball at you. this wasn't in the book, but it's like my own personal curiosity, something I've noticed that we don't know much about. clear air turbulence. When you're flying in an airplane and all of a sudden you get really bumpy, it seems to be something that is still surprising the airline industry. Meteorologists are working on it, but there still seems to be a lot of mystery behind this. Do you have any knowledge on this topic? I do not. See, I'm very happy to say when I don't, but there's a guy in UK, Williams is his last name. Paul Williams. Paul Williams, that's it. I'm sorry. Paul Williams. He is He's doing a lot of work on that. Yeah. He's I sat on a panel with him, and he was fantastic. He's doing a lot of work. So if people are interested in turbulent air turbulence, Paul Williams is the person he is the expert to go to. And he's he's Gotten really good about talking about it, the increase in it because of climate change, expectations. And yeah, it's a fascinating topic. Okay, let's talk about climate change. This is the big one that was kind of like looming over here, but I wanted to save it for last because it's such a big topic. and kind of divisive too. So tell me the basics of because you know, our audience is broad. We want to explain to people how things are working and how we know they're working. So explain to me. How we know about climate change and the connection between greenhouse gases and temperatures. Okay. So I just want to say in the book, I tried to give just the basics and make it very understandable. And so I probably won't do it as good as justice because I spent a lot of time, you know, writing in a way that I think people can understand. But the basics are that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs. Long wave radiation coming off the earth. When the sunlight, the radiation from the sun comes through the clouds, hits the earth, it's shortwave. It comes through that CO2, the clouds hits the earth, warms it up. The Earth emits longer wave radiation and clouds and what we call greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere absorb that long wave radiation and it creates warmth. inside that it's like a blanket over the earth. So it's shortwave radiation coming in, but long wave radiation going out, being absorbed by carbon dioxide and clouds and methane. So the more carbon dioxide you have in the atmosphere, the more warmth that is being absorbed. Now some people say, but it's such a it's a trace element. There's not a lot. Well there are a lot of things around us that are very potent. Think about fentanyl. You can have a tiny bit of fentanyl, it will kill you. Just a trace amount of carbon dioxide can start to warm the planet. But the more and more we put in there, which is what's happening, because of fossil fuels, when things burn, reduces carbon dioxide or methane, it's building up in the atmosphere. And over time, it's heating the planet. And at a rate that is unnaturally fast. And that's an important point. People say, but the planet's been this warm in the past. And you're right, but it's the pace of warming that is the problem. And so we people, wildlife, some plants and other things can't adapt fast enough because of that pace of warming. And so people say, Well, you know, let's just change our infrastructure to, you know, because it's hotter. Well, we can't do it fast enough. And we're really seeing that. And for me, One of the big things when I asked the experts, what do they wish they knew about climate change, the glaciologists, the people who are working on the melting of land ice and glaciers said, Well, you know, the last time we lost this much ice, there was nobody to observe it. So we don't really know how it's gonna happen. We don't really know how fast it's gonna happen. And they've all said to me, and this was a couple years ago. It's happening faster than they expected. And part of that is because they don't know the mechanisms. Like in the glaciers now, what we're seeing is that where you have glaciers that go into the ocean and you have ice shelves, there's warm water percolating up under them, and that's melting the ice shelves from below. That wasn't necessarily something that glaciologists predicted. And so how fast climate change is going to happen and how fast we're going to see the impacts. That was one of the big unknowns. Not that it was happening, not that we didn't know the earth was warming, that the land ice was is is melting and that's causing sea but sea level to rise. But it's the pace is a big unknown. Well, and it seems like all these unexpected things that pop up are just kind of making it worse. There there don't seem to be any like good surprises. Right. Well, and again, remember, there was nobody on the planet watching the last time it happened. And so Our understanding of how climate change is happening, how fast it's happening, and what the impacts are going to be exactly, we're kind of guessing in we have to look at trends and evidence that we can see now. We've never seen it before. I think that to me is really interesting and alarming at the same time. Yeah, because we have seen warmering temperatures. We've seen CO2 levels high before, but how long ago was that? Well, something like three million years ago, I think CO2 levels were close to what they are today, but sea level was, I'm just gonna say tens of feet higher than it is today. Much higher. And so one of the questions with climate changes as ice sheets melt, because remember, it's not ice that's floating on the ocean like the Arctic ice, it has to be ice. That's on land, once that melts and goes into the ocean, not only how fast sea level is going to rise, but how far. And in the past, when the earth has been warming like this, with this much CO2 in the atmosphere, sea level has been much higher. And that is scary. I personally don't think we know exactly how fast that's going to happen. Is it going to be in fits and starts? Is it going to happen faster than is predicted? For me personally, that's a big unknown. And why is it happening at faster rates in certain places than others? Good question. Partly because of where things are on the planet, you know, are there contributing factors? Is it someplace like in the Arctic where it's happening much faster than in other places? Because what's happening is ice is melting. It uncovers the dark ocean. And so the ocean starts absorbing heat faster. So it's not just the ice is in the Arctic is melting. Is that now the Arctic Ocean is warming faster because it's absorbing heat? One of the big questions, and it was been in the news recently, is the big ocean circulation system, some call it AMOC or the meridial overturning system or the ocean conveyor belt. There's some evidence that that's slowing. And if that big circulation slows, it can have devastating impacts in certain regions and the weather, like Europe. Could be drastically colder because the Gulf Stream brings warm water north and it swings over and hits Europe. if that were a collapse, those that system would change dramatically. The Gulf Stream might stall, you get much higher sea levels on the US East Coast, it would have really big impacts. But the ocean circulation isn't just one big s conveyor belt, it's a series of systems. And some evidence suggests that if one part slows, another part might speed up. Or compensate for it. And so there that's a really big unknown. And right now, there is evidence that it might be slowing, but there's not enough evidence to say it's it's about to collapse or what exactly is happening or will happen in the near future. But we that's one of those things where it's really hard to get data. We need more data. We need to keep the instruments that measure these things in the water maintained and maybe even put more in. Tell me about this role of scientists and talking about what we don't know. Because there is also this battle sometimes with the public where they see scientists as people who know everything. So why is it important to share this information of the unknown? And how do we hold on to trust from the public, especially like meteorologists just doing a forecast on TV? Right. So kind of an interesting story. I'm not going to name any names, but And earthquake specialists would not talk to me for the book because they felt that if they we talked too much about the unknowns, people wouldn't listen to what we know and prepare enough. And I get that, but I I wanted part of the book in the last chapter really speaks to this is that it's not the unknowns that drive preparations and response. And understanding is what we do know. And so you can continue to research the unknowns. And I was really struck by scientists across the fields I was researching. Almost all of them said, you know, what keeps me up at night is not the unknowns. What keeps me up at night is the knowns and people not understanding and preparing for it. And I thought that was a really interesting perspective of what keeps you up at night. It's the things that we know, but people aren't paying attention to, whether it's hurricanes, earthquakes. I mean, I I talked to this wonderful, he's passed away since then, Robert Yates. He's a seismologist who wrote a book called Earthquake Time Bombs. And he's he talked about how there are certain cities like Venezuela, Carran, other places that are densely populated and at risk of. major earthquakes and they're not prepared. And he really was wanted people to understand that if you live in this area, you have to understand you're at risk of a major quake and you have to be prepared, know what to do. And so I came away with the unknowns are fascinating, but it's the knowns we have to worry about. Hmm. Yeah. And there's definitely a movement in weather forecasting to move towards confidence forecasts too. Like how confident you are in this scenario playing out. So I want to ask you for a confidence forecast. And I've been asking a lot of my guests this, like looking into the future, like a time capsule in 50 years and what you think the earth will look look like, what you think people will look like, will we have made any changes? Like I and I it can be hopeful or can be realistic, whatever you want to say, but what do you see for the earth in in 50 years? I I think humans are incredibly smart and ingenious. And I think that we will continue to innovate and produce technology that can help us. I think, however, that the earth that we know or I grew up with is not going to be the same in 50 years because I don't think we're gonna affect climate change fast enough. And so I think there are going to places that people live in now that they won't be able to. And maybe there are places where people haven't lived before, they will start living. And so I think the distribution of people on the planet, I might I hope that we will f be focused on alternative energies and you know, solar, wind power, geothermal power will be much more significant in the future. And I and I think that's totally possible. so I'm hopeful that there will be a lot of innovation and I think the younger generation is going to be more caring for the planet, for I hope for the wildlife, for the plants, everything on the planet in the ocean. But I think they're gonna be some hard times ahead before we get to a place that's more balanced. It kind of goes back to your solution for all of these, which is to observe and prepare and educate yourself. Right. And and and you know, educate yourself. And look at what we know. I mean, it is interesting to look at the unknowns and and be aware of that. So you can make good decisions, but look at how much science and you know, this investment on sci in science is so important. We as society gain so much from that. in how we live, the quality of our life, health, you know, everything. And so sometimes it's like a pendulum where it swings one way and then next. And I I feel like science is facing a really difficult time right now and scientists and trust in science. And I hope the pendulum will swing back. And through communications and innovation and leadership, science will take a leading role in society again and people will start trusting scientists and investing in science again. Thank you to Dr. Ellen Prager for joining me on this episode of Atmosphere. If you want to dig into these topics even more, check out our book, Dangerous Earth. You can find it on Amazon. If you have questions about today's show or weather in general, you can always find me on social media. On Facebook, I'm Meteorologist Emily Gracie. And on Instagram, just search Atmosphere Podcast. You can also find me on Substack. Just a heads up, we'll be taking a couple of weeks off in August so that I can enjoy a summer trip abroad with my family. It's a short hiatus though because I already have some great episodes lined up for late August and early September. So stay tuned and catch up on any of those episodes you might have missed so far. If you're looking for even more weather content, be sure to check out Weekly Weather Brief, a quick rundown of the week's biggest weather and science stories, hosted by me and fellow meteorologist Karen Jerriman. New episodes drop every Friday on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. Thanks for taking the time to slow down, stay curious, and explore the atmosphere.