Blue Dot

Dave talks to longtime friend and fellow astronomer and artist Tyler Nordgren. In 2017 Tyler invited Dave to join his viewing of the Great American Eclipse in Kimberly, Oregon and they'll discuss that experience as well as their mutual love for the national parks and Tyler's ongoing work with them to promote the dark night sky as one of their precious natural resources where "half the park is after dark!" Tyler's globe trotting eclipse watching came to a halt because of the COVID-19 pandemic but

Dave talks to two NASA climate scientists on the topic of global sea level rise. First, longtime friend of Blue Dot Josh Willis joins us to talk about the difficulties of collecting data from Greenland's massive ice sheets in a time of pandemic and discusses the rigors of peer reviewed research. Then NASA/JPL Postdoctoral Fellow Thomas Frederickse visits with us from the Netherlands. He led a breakthrough study on the water cycle budget that for decades has mysteriously underestimated the

Dave has been thinking a lot lately, like many of us, about the role that market-driven economic policies have on the environment, social justice issues, and the lives of people around the world. So when a copy of Manifesto for A Moral Revolution by Jacqueline Novogratz showed up in the mail, he read it and immediately decided to interview its author.

Dave talks to legendary NBC anchor and correspondent Jim Hartz. While perhaps best known for co-hosting the Today Show for two years from 1974-1976, our interest is in his incredible expertise as one of the leading journalists that covered the space program from the Gemini Program in 1966 through the first Space Shuttle Flight in 1980.

In the conclusion of our two-part series on surfing as a mirror of bigger issues like environmental stress as well as racism and sexism, Dave talks to two surfers with very different backgrounds but a mutual love of the world in the curl. Airrion Copeland didn't know how to surf when he was given lessons by a filmmaker who went on to enlist Copeland to produce the documentary White Wash about the history of black surfers. Now Copeland is the Executive Director of 5gyres, an organization

Dave revisits a conversation with two of the Deputy Project Scientists deeply involved with the Curiosity Rover, which has been exploring Gale Crater since 2012, and the new, yet to be named, Mars 2020 Rover that will be launching this July. Abigail Fraeman is the DPS for Curiosity and explains how the mobile science laboratory has furthered our understanding of how Mars was once a planet that was suitable for primitive microbial life.

After the killing of George Floyd, Blue Dot's Oceanographer Emeritus Bill Patzert called "Big Wave Dave" to ask him to check out a New York Times Opinion piece titled "The Long Strange Tale of California’s Surf Nazis," by journalist Daniel Duane. Conversations ensued about racism, localism, and the environment and how surf culture has reflected those complex currents through time since the Malibu explosion of the early 1960s.

Unlike the fictional Indiana, there is a real-life Dr. Jones and her name is Lucy. Dave talks to seismologist and disaster preparedness expert Lucy Jones. For decades, Jones has been a major TV outlet fixture whenever a major earthquake strikes in the west, particularly Southern California. Jones was one of the drivers behind the Great California ShakeOut simulation which began in 2008. Designed to prepare the LA area for the inevitable Big One on the San Andreas Fault, the program has been seen

Dave traveled to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) earlier this summer where he learned about many of the institute's scientific programs. In this episode we look at the use of sound to study the oceans and the life that inhabits them. MacArthur Foundation Fellow Kelly Benoit Bird uses sonar for her MBARI research to study how animals find food sources in the vast oceanic environment.

Dave is joined by Brendan Byrne for a conversation about the state of crewed spaceflight in the US in 2020. Brendan is the host of Are We There Yet, produced by NPR affiliate WMFE in Orlando. He gets to cover the space beat from the front row on Florida's "Space Coast" and had an amazingly personal and powerful experience covering the SpaceX Dragon Demo 2 Mission that launched astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station.