Third Pod from the Sun

Check out this bonus clip from our most recent episode, Footprints from an Ancient World, where Renata Netto talks about what it's like to be a woman in her field.

Renata Netto spends a lot of time on beaches. The Brazilian scientist is an ichnologist, a specialist in the traces of ancient animal behaviors preserved in fossilized footprints, trackways, burrows, nests and other impressions. These “trace fossils” do not hold the animal itself, but a kind of geological memory of its presence on Earth, 60,000 or 600,000 or 600 million years ago. Many trace fossils are entombed in cliffs; the fragile fossils cannot come to the lab, so researchers must study them in the field.

In this episode, Renata recounts sharing beaches with surfers and bargaining for paving stones full of trace fossils. She describes the lost world of Earth’s first large multicellular life, the enigmatic Ediacaran Biota, which lived 635–542 million years ago, and the beauty of a shrimp burrow.

In the mid-1980s, scientists uncovered a troubling phenomenon: The ozone layer, which protects all living things on Earth from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, was rapidly thinning over Antarctica. The discovery set off a race by scientists to figure out what was causing the ozone hole, and eventually the realization that chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigerators, air conditioners and aerosol cans were reacting in the stratosphere and producing chlorine-containing compounds that were depleting the ozone layer. This work led to the signing of the Montreal Protocol and several key amendments, which banned most ozone-depleting substances and is considered one of the greatest environmental achievements of the 20th century.

In this second episode of Third Pod from the Sun’s Centennial Series, hear from two NASA scientists who started their careers just as the ozone hole was discovered, and who have continued working on and monitoring the issue for decades.

There are lots of weird, dirty jobs out there. Roadkill collector. Deodorant tester. Catfish noodler. Chicken sexer. But what about… whale poop collector?

Leigh Torres, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, collects the feces from these giant mammals to measure levels of stress hormones present in their bodies. The dirty job involves following a whale for some time and scooping the soft stool out of the water with a net. In this episode, Leigh describes the fascinating process of collecting whale waste and discusses what she and her team are learning about how whales respond to stress in the great big ocean.

Check out this clip that didn't make it into our recent episode, The Oldest Water on Earth, what old water smells like!

Tensions escalated between the United States and Soviet Union in the wake of World War II as the two countries stockpiled nuclear weapons and detonated hundreds of test bombs in the atmosphere. But this arms race had an unexpected side effect: scientists learned for the first time how air behaves in Earth’s upper atmosphere and how pollution, volcanic ash, and radioactive fallout travel around the globe.

In this inaugural episode of Third Pod from the Sun’s Centennial Series, researchers from NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory discuss how scientists’ understanding of Earth’s atmosphere changed as a result of the Cold War. Listen to one meteorologist describe witnessing nuclear bomb tests in on a remote Pacific Island and hear how scientists used their newfound knowledge of the atmosphere to trace radioactivity from Chernobyl, the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history.

Thousands of feet below the surface of the Earth is salty water that hasn’t seen the light of day in millions or even billions of years. Miners working deep underground had encountered and wondered about the origin of this water for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that scientists started to investigate where this water was coming from and what it might contain – giving researchers clues into how life survives in the deepest parts of our planet.

In this episode, Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Toronto, describes the process of going deep underground to find and research the origin of this old water, including the discovery of the oldest water on Earth. Barbara also describes how research into the origin of water on our planet and the life potentially contained in these fluids helps scientists understand where life might lurk on other planets, like Mars.

The ocean floor stores a vast amount of information about Earth and its history. Volcanic rocks that make up most of the seafloor tell scientists about the composition of Earth’s interior, and the sediments lying on top of those rocks document what conditions were like when they were laid down millions of years ago.

Scientists access this record of Earth’s past by drilling and extracting cores – long cylindrical samples – of the layers of rock and sediment. To do this, researchers spend weeks aboard a scientific drillship, anchored in place, braving the harsh conditions of the sea. Early in her career, oceanographer Dawn Wright, Chief Scientist at the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), spent several years as a marine technician aboard the drillship JOIDES Resolution, supporting ocean drilling operations all over the world.

In this episode, listen to Dawn describe her experiences during the months she spent anchored in the freezing Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica and hear how support ships have to “lasso” icebergs to keep them from damaging the drillship while it’s anchored. Ahoy, matey!

Northern fur seals spend more than half their lives at sea. But every summer, they congregate on the rocky, charcoal-colored beaches of Alaska’s Pribilof Islands to mate and give birth to tiny, black-furred pups.

Researchers take advantage of the seals’ short time on land to learn more about them and try to understand why their populations have been declining since the mid-1970s. Part of this research involves attaching GPS trackers to the seals’ bodies so satellites can monitor their movements from afar.

But it’s not easy walking into a fur seal breeding colony full of aggressive, 500-pound males – not to mention getting close enough to attach a satellite tag. In this episode, Noel Pelland and Jeremy Sterling, researchers at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, describe what it’s like to work with these beautiful yet unpredictable creatures.

Listen to Jeremy recount his experience crawling into a fur seal rookery full of cuddly pups with razor-sharp teeth and hear Noel describe what the satellite tags tell us about fur seal migrations. Find out how modern science is confirming what native Alaskans have known for centuries about seal migrations and learn what it’s like to watch male fur seals battle for territory with nothing more than a plywood box for protection.

Read more about tagging seals in the Pribilofs in this blog series from NOAA and learn more about how winds influence seal pup migration in this press release from AGU. And watch this video from NOAA to learn more about fur seals and their migrations.

Check out this clip that didn't make it into our recent episode, Inside the Boiling Center of the Solar System, with Dan Seaton, about what the sun actually sounds like!