It's Maria's MUDs and Stuff. What a great idea on iHeartRadio.
Welcome to Maria's MutS and Stuff with me today is Well, he's a scientist, he's an explorer, he's an author. It is Neil Shubin. So Neil, thank you for taking some time to talk about Ends of the Earth, your most recent book, and all of your travels and everything else.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Yeah.
So okay, So you've been going up to the polls thirty years, right, A.
Very very about three decades to both polar regions. Yeah, the late eighties. Actually, wow?
And how did that all begin?
Well, it all began when I was a student. I was training to become a fossil hunter, a paleontologist and graduate school and one of the professors, one of the profts, was leading an expedition to Greenland, the east coast of Greenland, and he invited me, you know, a small four person team who I be a part of, to a search for early dinosaurs and mammals and things like that. The problem was this, I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
I never really camped as a kid, so I had an all those you know, because basically, you know, this exhibition is going to be removed from about one hundred coup few hundred miles from the nearest settlement, you know, sub zero temperatures, small camp, living in nylon tents, you know, the whole thing. Anyway, So that was my first one, and you know, I was terrified. Yeah, I was hooked as soon as I got to these landscapes where you see the glaciers and you see the you know, you
see the tundra, you see the coast. It just changes you. Working in the polar regions, which I've done, you both in the Arctic and Antarctica for the last few decades, it really changes the way you see the world, honestly, and that's what motivated the book, that's motivated my research as a scientist too.
Wow.
I mean that's fascinating to me, especially the fact it's you know, growing up in Philly, you had cold temperatures, but not the same as what you experienced there.
Yeah. Plus I was in a house with a fireplace or a heater. Here I'm you know, in Niel tent delivery.
Yeah, Like, how do you how do you?
I mean, I guess I know from your book you eventually get used to the cold. But I mean the first time that you were there, that had to be like, how did you prepare for that?
Well, the first time I was there, I brought all the wrong gear, right, I just didn't know what I was doing, and so you know I had leather boots and all. Yeah, right, well, no it is. You know, we got it down to a little more of a science. And you know, you bring the right clothes, the right layers. You learn how the layer you're closed have, you know, wicking layers close to the body, insulating layers further out.
So forth you learn how to behave So for instance, an Antarctica where the temperatures well you know, can get down to minus twenty, you learn to change in your sleeping bag. You know, you learn these little tricks, and it's the little tricks that keep you going, you know, it's it's fueling the fires of your body, like learning you know, which high calorie foods to eat and things like that, not to overheat, not to underheat, all that good stuff.
Right. Yeah, like I saw in your book, you have all the rules and that's like your first two rules, right, don't get cold, don't get hot.
Don't get cold, don't get hot. Don't get cold, right because it's hard to heat up. And don't get hot because you'll sweat, and once you sweat, and you know, in those cold temperatures, it's not a good thing, not a good thing.
Yeah, I mean, it was fascinating.
Your book is fascinating, by the way, and especially for I mean I told you earlier. I really I don't tolerate cold, and the older I get, the worse it is. So it's fascinating to me just that you've done so much there and did it all in the cold, which is kind of like an insignificant fact to it all, if that makes sense.
Well, I mean, you know, what's the amazing thing about these places is for several hundred years people have made profound discoveries, scientific discoveries, which is a big theme of the book. Sure in these places, you know, so there's so you learn about yourself by being there, right, But you also learn about other animals, the other living beings, and how they adapt to these incredible landscapes and what their marvelous adaptations are. You learn about the cosmo because
you know the meteorites that hit there. We can work on you learn about climate change, you learn about our future, our past. There's just so many lessons, you know. So it's a really incredible place, such a privileged to work there.
Yeah, and speaking of those discoveries and the animals, ancient fish that were walking on land, that's like my fun, my fun part.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, So my team and I I was part of a team that did this, is we designed a series of expeditions beginning in the mid nineteen nineties to try to discover fossil evidence for the first fish to walk on land. You know, all life was in the water for a long period of time. Then at about three hundred and eighty three hundred and seventy five million years ago, that's a long time, long time ago, aged dinosaurs just
took their first steps on land, you know. So we designed an expedition up to the Canadian Arctic, largely because the they had that area in rocks that were not covered by ice. So if you had rocks of the surface that weren't covered by ice, they were kind of
the perfect rocks to hold fossils like this. The problem was, it took us about four working seasons over six years, you know, it took a long time to be successful, but eventually we found a fish about four feet long that has scales in its back and fins with fin webbings webbing, but it had both lungs and gills. It had inside its fins bones bones that correspond to our upper arm, forearm, even parts of our wrist, you know,
I mean inside of in in a fish. So it just goes the power of working in these regions, you know. So we weren't just camping there randomly, and we were there with it.
We were we were there with yeah mission, Yeah, you had a mission. Yeah, I mean it's fascinating to me.
And you know, then your Arctic wooly bear caterpillar, no, talk about that.
Well, there's just you know, when you encounter these special creatures that live there, it just again changes the way you see life. Okay, so here's a caterpillar, you know, just a regular counterpiar, but it's a hairy caterpillar. So can we stand the cold? It comes out for like two or three weeks in the just feeds voraciously. Then you know, it gets cold, and this is the Arctic summer.
And then as it gets cold in the Arctic, it freezes over and the thing has anti freeze inside its body that keeps it from you know, the ice from destroying its tissues. And then it freezes over, only to thaw again in June and feed for another few weeks in July, only to freeze again. So it does this freeze, thaw, freeze, the aw for seven years, then to hatches a moth, reproduce for two weeks, and then die. So think about
that life cycle. It's incredible, and it's incredible these special adaptations you see, these animals like this one has anta freeze inside its body, a chemical antifreeze. You know, there are all kinds of other creatures that have anti freeze in their and their blood and their bodies that keep
them from freezing up in these regions. And some of them they replace the water in their body with a sugar that turns their body when it drives out and gets cold, that turns their body entirely into glass, glass likes substance. And they exist as this glass like substance for I don't know for as long as it takes, could be decades. So when you had water, they come back to life. It's incredible, it is incredible.
It's like a sci fi movie.
Yeah, only for real, only for real, right.
It's true.
I mean you would think, like the way you're describing it, and it's like, wait, I think I saw that in a movie, you know, like an old Twilight Zone.
Well, you know, speaking of a movie, I mean it gets crazier. So, like, the ice of Antarctica is miles thick, right, you know, And so the Russians and others have drilled into the ice about two two and a half miles into it, and there are underneath the ice of Antarctica miles over two and a half miles of ice are lakes,
freshwater lakes that lie underneath the ice. And these lakes are are filled with living things, you know, microbes that have been removed from the rest of the planet for millions of years.
I mean just incredible, incredible.
And those organisms that live in those lakes, they don't live anywhere else on the earth.
Is Zachary, Well, there are relatives that there no not those species, but not those.
Species, which is again another amazing fact.
Yeah, and then you know you think about it, these things under the ice, there's no sunlight, right, there's you know, they have to have a whole different ecosystem. You know, the energy that comes into these systems is not based on the sunlight. Well, it's pretty incredible when you start to realize that. You know, there are about six hundred of these lakes under the ice in Antarctica, right and their whole world's yet to discover, that doesn't even know about. Yeah.
And even the plants, like, how there are plants there? How do they survive?
They're not going to Yeah, there are so like you know where we work up in Greenland and Nilsmere Island near the North Pole, there are no trees. So you know, when you're on this landscape, you don't see standing trees, so you lose kind of perspective that way. But there is a tree that lives in the tundrup there. It just doesn't grow up. It grows sideways. It's called the Arctic willow, and it hugs the ground as it grows.
It never rises more in a couple inches off the ground, and you see branches of it, but they extend, you know, along the ground, never rising high. So it's a it's a tree. It's a real tree with leaves and everything, roots and all that good stuff. In fact, the wooly bear caterpillar feeds on it, as do spiders and things like that. But yeah, it's it has all these adaptations not to grow up, but to go sideways, go sideways.
And this willow probably isn't anywhere else in the world.
Correct, No, it's a willow, so it's of the willow. Yeah, articulous. I don't like that, no way. Yeah, it's some pretty remarkable and remarkable organisms.
It is.
It sounds like everything up there is remarkable.
You know. It's been a great privilege for me to work in these places. And then, you know, I kept on coming back to that as as the writing ends of the Earth. I mean, you know, I was trying to tell the stories of the other scientists and explorers and the indigenous communities that have lived up there and worked there, and just their sheer breadth and importance of the things they've discovered has been remarkable. You know. It's been a real, real treat.
Yeah, And honestly, I mean the tone of your book is also a love affair from your perspective. I mean, that's what I got out of it, that you just you just love it there and loved working about it.
I love I'm in love with the landscape. I'm in love with these animals, you know, And I was writing, you know, a three hundred pays love letter.
No, but real, No, but for real.
It wasn't like you were just writing facts.
You know what I mean.
No, I mean it's just you know, I mean, yeah, I was sad when you know, sometimes when you're writing, you know, it's a real slock. This one. I just I just grew so much in these landscapes. It's been just such a part of me, you know, just standing there after the you know, helicopter drops us off for a camp and you know, we have all our food, and then they leave and there's the last other people that we see for you know, four to six weeks.
I usually just take a deep breath and look around me, and I'm a little bit nervous and scared, but I'm just excited to you know.
You're probably still in the law to a.
Lot to discover. Yeah, you're in awe and discovery. And part of it is, you know, there is a wonder almost like a childlike kind of wonder and awe that comes from being in places that are as dramatic as these. You know, we all experience that, right you go to the Grand Canyon or something like that. Sure, you know, you feel that wonder in awe of nature, you know, And yeah, the article, you just feel it every day when you step outside the tent.
Yeah.
I was going to say, the fact that you've been there so often and you still feel that way definitely says something about it there.
It really does. It really does. And you know, these the more I you know, we study these places, you know, we the more we realize how fragile they are. You know, they change on the you know, just on a dime, right, and they're very, very delicate, fragile landscapes that can be perturbed very easily and disappear very quickly. Of course, in the history of the planet, they've come and gone. Ice has come and gone at the poles many times. Yeah, you know, and that's effected the entire planet.
Yeah, And I'm I mean, we have to talk about it because there are so many deniers, which is very frustrating. But climate change, I'm sure you've seen an in three decades a change.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to deny just the fact on the ground. I mean, so if you look at a satellite and aerial photos taken of this region, say forty to fifty years ago, and then you compare them to satellite photos today, you could see that the ice is retreated. You know. Even more, you can use satellites or ground stations to measure the temperature of the Arctic
and it's very clear. You know, it depends on where you measure it, but you can average it out that the Arctic is heating about four to five times faster than anywhere else on the planet, you know, and that heating is only accelerating. And so what that means is obviously ice melts. As ice melts, the place gets warmer because ice reflects the sun where the ground does not, and so it just gets warmer and warmer and warmer. And you know, those are a effects we we as
a species and other species feel regularly. In fact, it's going to be an increasing part of our future as these areas melt.
Sure, sure, and I'm sure that there are you know, animals and plants species there that are probably dying out because of.
The warming up.
Yeah, what you're seeing is southern species that are warm adapt are moving north, and then the cold adapt species are retreating to places that are remaining cold, and those are those refuges are getting.
Fewer in numbers, getting smaller.
Yeah, I'll tell you. One of the things that's happening is so, for instance, killer whales, killer welles are now extending their ranges further north with you know, with each passing decade, to the point where they are now the leading predator in the Arctic region, you know, threatening the narwhals that are you know, the resident habit near the normal residents of that area, right, So they've displaced a
lot of other predators, you know. So if southern species moving north and northern species trying to find you know, over time refuges. Yeah, so it's definitely you know, dynamic, and it's changing very rapidly up.
There, right.
And I was I was going to ask you what was probably what you feel is the most dangerous part of being up there, But I have a feeling you just answered it by saying it's climate change.
Yeah, I think for all of us, you know, I think, you know, for the for the average listener, for somebody who's in Chicago or New York or LA. I mean, it's really the effects we're going to feel in our feeling now, and that is changes to the ocean the sea level, changes to global weather patterns, you know, changes to the salinity of the ocean. These are all things
that you know. The thing about it is, you know, you walk around during the day and you don't think about polar regions, right, but the ice at the poles is really a big part of our lives today because they only are eight percent of the surface area of the Earth, but about eighty percent of the fresh water. So so much of the water of the Earth is
locked in the polar regions. And that's dynamic, that melt, that co in trees, and so that is really sort of an invisible part of our lives because it shapes the coastal regions. It affects weather patterns, it affects with the currents and the seas, and all these things affect economies, political boundaries, you name it.
Yeah, yeah, And.
I feel like it's I don't know, is there one solution. There are numerous solutions.
I don't know.
Well, I mean it's we as a species are going to have to figure that out now because these areas are heating fast. But they're heating fast also politically, just witness the news. They're heating fast, you know, in terms of the economic potential that people are seeing up there, military, geopolitical, all that stuff. So you know, these areas are going to be increasingly part of the news, as you've witnessed in the last month, you know, obviously with the President
Trump talking about Greenland. Yeah, you know, it's but it's that's just the first of many salvos you're going to see from many different countries.
Yeah. Yeah, Well, people just need to wake up, you know, wake up. So what's next for you?
What's next for me? Is I am planning other expeditions. We're always planning new expeditions. We just finished an expedition in July to the to the Arctic, to her Island, probably looking at another one if we can get our act together. It takes about a year to plan for an expedition, so they just don't it's not like you just get on the plane and go.
You got it, right, Wow, it takes a year. I didn't take them.
Yeah, And now what we're doing is we're doing the research on things that we found over the summer. So we found new fossils uh huh up in Ellesmere Island in July and we're doing the research on them. Right now it's really fun.
Oh that's great.
And then so from that research that you did in July, the trip in July and the research that you're doing, will that be another book or another book will be from another expedition.
Well, those will be probably scientific papers, so we know we're going to be publishing the scientific results. So those talking to the scientific community. You'll probably read about a few of them in the news. And yeah, and so we're going to do that and there'll be another book somewhere in my future. I don't know, I can't. I just love this stuff so much. Yeah, it's really part of me.
And you just did this one.
But I think your stuff is just so fascinating and it's not like you know, it's people traveling to Italy. You know, you're going to a part of the world that not many people go. So we do need you, Neil Shubin, and we need your research and your books. So yeah, keep doing what you do. So tell me where can my listeners get ends of the.
Earth, well and see the earth? Think about it? To find booksellers everywhere, hopefully not the fine ones too, So yeah, Amazon, Online, Barnes and Noble, you know, your local independent bookstore. All the above, you know, so it's out there. It's on sale on Tuesday, February fourth.
Perfect well.
Thank you so much, Neil, Thanks for your time, Thanks for all that you do and keep doing it for us.
Please appreciate it. Thank you so much. Take care.
Shar has never been a radar operator in the Spot Seal Lader Bargator