How to be a scuba diver in Antarctica with Professor Lloyd Peck

Welcome to Polar Diaries, a podcast where polar scientists from around the world share their icy adventures and incredible research from the Arctic and Antarctic, hosted by me Octavia Braille. I would like to thank all of the students who voted for me during the November 2023 climate zone with the IMA scientists get me out of here scheme which is funded by STEM ambassadors and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Thanks to your support I've been able to start this podcast. If you enjoy this podcast please share it far and wide. I will also be releasing a T-Milk page very soon where you can get your hands on some Polar Diaries merchandise. Very exciting. Now without any further ado, sit back, relax and enjoy your travels to the frozen regions of the world. On this first episode of Polar Diaries we are joined by Professor Lloyd Peck all the way from Antarctica which is very exciting. I first met Lloyd a couple of years ago when I was teaching biology at Harris School in London and his fascinating lecture on marine organisms in Antarctica certainly made me excited to begin my own PhD in Antarctic biology. Lloyd completed his PhD at Port Smith University in 1983 and since then he has been at the forefront polar biology where he leads an innovative team of scientists who investigate animal adaptations in extreme environments. Lloyd is a science leader with the British Antarctic Survey and he has spent over 30 years studying like in the polar regions. He has had 20 field visits to Antarctica where he has been a chief scientist four times. Lloyd is interested in ecological and physiological adaptations of marine organisms to low temperatures, intense seasonality and ocean acidification. Lloyd has a special interest in the inability of polar organisms to make functional proteins in low temperatures and why this results in very slow rates of growth and development. Another of Lloyd's research interests is how unique adaptations to extreme environments can be exploited for the benefit of wider society. Alongside his role with the British Antarctic Survey Lloyd is a natural environment research council individual merit scientist, a research fellow and honorary lecturer in Stoology at Cambridge University. He is also an occasional contributor to the all-party parliamentary committee on biodiversity. Lloyd has 24 years of experience lecturing undergraduates at Cambridge and other universities and he is also a visiting professor in ecology and marine biology at Sunderland and Port Smith University. Lloyd was awarded the Polar Medal in 2008 in recognition of his outstanding research in polar environments. Lloyd was also the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 2004, back when the lectures were televised on Channel 4. This is only a very small snapshot of Lloyd's incredible career working in the polar regions and I'm very excited to learn more all about his underwater adventures in Antarctica and the amazing animals that survive and thrive there. Welcome to Polar Diaries Lloyd, thank you so much for taking the time from your busy research schedule to chat with me today. Well, thanks to the big builder, I just hope it lives up to the introduction that you've given. Oh, I'm sure it will. It's so exciting that I'm chatting to you while you're in Antarctica. To give some context to the listeners, it's currently 6pm here in the UK. What time is it over there for you? It's three in the afternoon here and don't forget that the Antarctic sits over the South Pole so different parts of the Antarctic continent have very, very different times. So there are parts of the Antarctic now that are in the middle of the night, parts are in the morning, parts are in the evening and it just happens that where I am on the Antarctic peninsula is three hours different from the UK. Fascinating. Now, Antarctica is, as we know, an enormous continent. So where exactly are you and how did you travel there? So Antarctica is twice the size of Australia. It's about one and three quarter times the size of Europe, so it's big, yeah. And there are two ways we get in. We can either fly from the UK, either via the Forkland Islands or via South America or Ponturainus to here at Elfway Go, or do what I did, which was fly to the Forklands and then get a ship from the Forklands in Ashyeet, the Sadebid Attenborough and spent five days on the ship getting from the Forkland Islands to the station here. And how was the journey? Was it all easy sailing? It was one of the better ones I've been on. We only hit one patch where there were waves over 10, 15 feet, making it a bit uncomfortable. The last few times I've been through the Drake Passage, we've had 25, 30 foot waves and it has bounced around a fair bit. This was a pretty good trip. We did get in the lead of the peninsula as quickly as we possibly could though, so we minimised the amount of time where the waves were big. Hmm, amazing. And even though I've spoken to a lot of people who have travelled to Antarctica for fieldwork and I'm hoping to do so myself soon, I still, I guess, struggled to picture exactly what the research bases look like and I've been very lucky that a minute ago you showed me your amazing view from your office, but could you paint me a bit more of a picture of what the research base actually looks like? So our station at the moment is very different from the way it has been in the past because it's been rebuilt. So it's a very large building site at the moment. We have 300 containers as part of the building programme here, so just outside the laboratory door we've got a massive container stack and we're getting a new building in the process of being built. But it's a station where we normally would have 100 people on station in the summer and 20 to 25 in the winter time. It's got an air strip, a 900 metre air strip so planes can arrive and take off and go further into the Antarctic from here. We have a regular supply flight from South America or the Forkland Islands with a dash seven aeroplane which is in the process of being replaced because it's come to the end of its life and we fly twin knotters into the continent itself. So to do deep fieldwork they have to lay depots of fuel and fly to a depot, refuel, fly further on to a depot. So they have a lot of work laying out the depots and taking fuel further in. At the start of the day we have here, we not only have the Forkland Islands to run aeroplanes, we have met people giving weather predictions so the aeroplanes can fly and then where I work in the Bonnele laboratory which is a 60 metre long facility. We have scuba diving facilities, we have a recon pression chamber, a decompression chamber. In the laboratory we have the ability to host around about 25 scientists at any one time when it's full although the main because of the build numbers are really quite low. And we have all the basic standard lab facilities, we don't have anything really advanced, we don't have electron microscopes, we don't have GCMS but we have basic good quality lab facilities microscopes and molecular lab to allow us to do extractions, a chemical analytical lab with fluorometers and standard pieces of kit like that. So we're reasonably well appointed field laboratory. Fantastic. So I know that Antarctic researchers can of course only carry out field work during the Antarctic summer which is winter to us in the UK. So what is a weather like at the moment and how cold does it actually get during the winter months? So actually it's not quite true that we only work in the summer. What happens is we have a complement of scientists that are there all year round. Part of my research group is in Antarctica 365 days of the year. In the winter time we have a science team of two scientists and three and helps support people at a diving officer of boatman and a marine operator who helps facilitate what we do. In the summer time there could be up to 20 hours. Temperatures now are a little bit below zero, sometimes getting slightly positive, snow is intermittent. So one day last week we had 10 inches of snow in 24 hours and then it's melted again. There's a fair bit of ice in the sea but the sea is not frozen at the moment. So we have ice pieces from the size of your hand up to the size of a four-story block of flats floating around in the bank where we work. We work in from small boats, 5, 6, 7 metre and rigid inflatable boats and we do a whole range of things from deploying small pieces of equipment. But I think all the CTD that measures the conductivity, the temperature and the depth and it profiles that and we do that every week. With a winch over the side of one of these boats we scuba dive, we collect samples. We're currently doing a big biodiversity survey. In the winter time it gets down to maybe -30-35 here so it's not one of the colder places in the Antarctic because we're right on the coast and if you go further into the continent it gets down below -80 in the centre of the continent near and off every year and a big area of the size of France goes below -70 in the winter time in the middle of the Antarctic. But we're on the coast, we're a station that stages work into the deeper field in the summer. Even now if you go into some of the very deep field sites that we work the temperatures will be down to -30 also -40 in the summer time there. So interesting, it's very difficult to imagine temperatures that are that low to be honest. What does your daily routine look like at the moment? What times do you kind of get up when do you have lunch and what do you do during your downtime? I get up about quarter past seven and obviously do all the kind of standard things you do when you get up. Then going to breakfast and we have breakfast in a dining area. We currently have four chefs and we have 160 people on station so those four chefs are cooking our lunch, time and our evening meals every day. It's the only time I get professional chefs cooking me two meals a day, seven days a week and the food's good, the food's really good. One of our chefs recently came to us from being the pastry chef in the Savoy and the puddings were ridiculously good. The food's generally very good on station. I get up, I have breakfast and then we have a briefing session at half past eight and during that briefing session we work out the field work that we're going to do during the day. We have a group that I'm in working, the scientist working in the lab with the boatman and the diving officer and the support team. We sit down at half a state and spend ten minutes working out what pieces of work we're going to do in the seat. That's all predicated by things like what the weather's like because we don't work when the winds over about 20 knots. We'd have to find a very protected area for us to work in a wind like that. We also don't work when the leopard seals and killer whales are around so we lose a fair bit of time to dangerous animals or to weather. We have our brief at half a state. We then start going into our field work at about quarter nine, preparing the diving cylinders, the diving kit, getting the boats ready to go out and then running the field side of the work during the day as long as it's a daily come work. Lunch is at one o'clock and lunch yesterday was bacon and egg rolls. We had about five different types of salads. The vegetarians had chili vegetarian rolls and there's usually two or three different types of things at lunch. Dinner time is a proper full cooked dinner and it can be a whole range of things that you would normally have. That's a hub of six. I, when the field works not on, I'm attending to all the other sides of the sort of jobs that a scientist in my place has. So I've got three PhD students that need my input into their projects. I'm a manager of a team of ten or so, established scientists and maybe another ten or twelve early career people. So there's a lot of signing off bid forms and doing admin and bureaucracy associated with that. So that's usually done. I usually do that in the evening. So I'm usually back down here after dinner and working through to about ten o'clock. So the working day for me is about half past eight till ten o'clock in the evening. And down time, I'm not very much down time this year because the project I'm on has taken a lot of time. I've done a lot of scuba diving so I've done 18 dives in five weeks that I've been here and I've been out doing other work on the boat. So we've got a lot of other work apart from the diving and that means that I've been spending the evenings trying to keep up with all the admin side of the job. Which is great. I would probably choose to scuba dive in my down time if I had down time. And that was an option. Lots of people here ski during their down time. So we have a reasonably good ski slope and we have two or three different levels of skiing. The risk is it is which people can take and go and spend time up on the local glacier. We have lots of clubs. There's a poker school on this year. We have three or four tables of poker. There's a knitting club. There's a film club. There's all sorts of activities going on. We have football games, football matches. There's darts in the bar. There's film nights that the scientists give talks once a week. The scientists on the social and giving science talks. And the one last week was one of the visiting scientists here. It's been eight years working in the Sarangetti. So the talk was about the Sarangetti and mostly about will the beast migrations and how our understanding of what the migrations are like is way better now. Because we've now got a few years of tagged animals and we can follow their movements. So there's a lot going on on station. And I haven't had much down time at the moment. No, it doesn't sound like it at all, but it sounds absolutely fantastic. And you've actually already answered a couple of other questions I had because I was going to ask about whether what the food was like and whether you had fresh fruit and veg. So that all sounds amazing. And actually kind of staying on with the food. I didn't actually realise that you were kind of allowed to bring so much fresh produce with you. But I assume that that's all fine now, is it? So most of our food is frozen. And things like frozen raspberries, frozen strawberries, they make great puddings. So they're great. We don't have fresh things called freshies. We don't have fresh veg and fresh fruit very often. Maybe once a month, the plan will go and come back with a palletative fresh food. And then we'll have bananas, apples and pears and maybe oranges for a week. And then for two, three weeks we won't have any of those and we'll be back on to tinden and frozen. So again, the chefs are good so they can make all of that into something really nice. They bake their own bread so you'll often wake up in the morning going to the dining area and they'll be a smell of freshly cooked bread going on. And that can make things quite difficult if you've not got access to them and you're sitting there eating cereals or eating tinned for breakfast with some yoghurt maybe and you can smell this fresh bread wafting around the place. Yeah, so the food is good and the variety is good enough and we have a lot of frozen vegetables so the diet's pretty good. There's always a vegetarian option. We've got somebody here with a nut allergy so we have nut free food as well and there's often a vegan option. So we are kind of catering to much wider set of dietary requirements than we did even five, six, seven years ago. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And I think you mentioned that you've been out there for about five weeks so far so how much longer have you got out there this year? I've got another two weeks and by season seven weeks this time when I arrived I had to spend three or four days training like everybody does so you don't actually start your work or the first three or four days and then you spend your last two, three days packing all your equipment up and getting it ready to be sent back filling out all the right forms that are always customs forms, that there are bills of lading, there are declaration forms and you have to get all that well in advance so that the ship side can know how much material there is on what sorts of material, whether it has the chemicals and things like that and it all has to be shipped back in the right way. So we have to attend things like that at the end of the season as well. Fantastic. And you've said that you're doing a lot of scuba diving in Antarctica which sounds unbelievable. So could you perhaps tell us a little bit more about how you prepare for those dives and how cold the water gets? So the water where we are here goes between minus 1.8 in the winter time and plus one and a half in the summertime so the temperature is not that different from season to season and it's always cold, the water is always cold. The big difference is how cold it is on the surface because if you go out and it's minus 15 and it's a bit windy you get very cold very quickly and then when you come up from the dive in your wet and you're coming back on a boat or a ski doe if the seas frozen then you get a lot colder on the surface than you do in the water. We dive with 8mm near-preen dry suits so they seal at the wrists, they seal at the neck and we have under suits so basically padded quilted onesies that we wear to keep us insulated and what I find is that if I'm moving around underwater I don't get cold. My longest dive down here was 76 minutes and you can't stay in the water 76 minutes if you get really cold. Dives regularly half an hour to three quarts an hour and we dive on. Two cylinders so we have a main cylinder and a small extra cylinder which is a completely separate air supply because one thing that can happen down here is that your diving regulator can freeze open and then you get what's called a free flow and you basically lose all the air from your cylinder very quickly and if that happens you need a separate air supply to be able to come up safely. So we dive with a small what's called a pony cylinder which is about 10 times smaller than the main cylinders and I need because I wear a lot of under suit to stay warm. I dive with 19 kilograms of extra weight on as well so my total dive kit the suit, the under suit, the weights, the cylinders and everything else that we have associated with it weighs 68 kilos so when I climb into the boat at the end of the dive I'm climbing with 68 kilos of kit on and we dive from about and it has a ladder over the side that we climb up at the end of the dive. There's nearly always ice in the water, small amounts of ice so we have to be careful to avoid that. divers pairs, we have a link line which is three meters long so every pair of divers is linked together with a three meter rope and one of the pair has a surface marker boy so the boat can see where we are at all times. We also have through water communication so we have a speaking system but because of the ice sometimes that doesn't work very well because you get lots of reflections and lots of interference and if we lose verbal communications we then communicate through the rope to the surface marker boy with poles on the rope. Yeah diving is really interesting here it's the most seasonal place anywhere so in the wintertime there's nothing in the water the sea freezes on the top and we use a five foot chain saw to cut holes and the visibility can be 100 meters maybe more than 100 meters because the water is so clear I did a dive in the summertime it's almost the opposite of that because the water becomes very productive where we are I did a dive two weeks ago where I was less than two feet away from my buddy and I couldn't see them and that was because of the amount of life in the water the phytoplankton in the water and both of us thought the other one had a major buoyancy problem because we looked at the rope connecting us and it was gained vertically upwards and we both thought that was because the other one was going up in an uncontrolled fashion but then we realized that it was purely because we were very close together and we just couldn't see each other. Well and with your dives what are you looking for and your research is all about kind of animal adaptations so tell us a little bit more about your research and any kind of notable amazing adaptations that you've seen. So this year I'm actually involved in a in a very detailed and survey of what's living on the seabed and we're doing that in three ways we've got an RIV remotely operated vehicle which we're using to take video surveys of the seabed to give us a kind of landscape coverage where are the really big things so we've got sponges that are two feet high two foot six high and we've got other things that are living things that are big on the seabed and we're plotting out where they are with the RIV then we have a drop camera which basically takes a picture of half a square meter at very high resolution and from that we can count everything that's living there down that's down to about five millimeters long and then after that we're collecting sediment from the seabed and we're sieving that on a one millimeter sieve and then we're identifying all the animals down to one millimeter so we're getting a really detailed understanding of what's living here and we're doing DNA surveys as well and we'll almost certainly find some species that have not been described before because we're looking in quite some detail so that's part of our work is describing the biodiversity identifying what's there looking for the patterns in the biodiversity and we're using those surveys and we now we've been doing surveys like that for about 10 or 15 years and we're using those surveys to tell us when things change and what's changing in the ecosystem in relation to the environmental change so we're doing straightforward biodiversity. We also collect animals and bring them back to do more of the adaptations work so I've been involved in the past affair a bit looking at why some groups grow to giant size at low temperatures in Antarctica we have sea spiders that are over 50 centimeters across from leg tip to leg tip they're three to five thousand times heavier than the biggest sea spider is in the UK which are a centimeter or a centimeter and a half across and that and the UK ones are typical of temperate zones and my group showed that that was related to the amount of oxygen in the water and how quickly the animals use the oxygen so because it's cold their metabolic rates are really low they use much less oxygen they can therefore build more body for the amount of oxygen that's available and we've been looking hard at cellular adaptations and why it seems really difficult for animals to make proteins at low temperatures and we think it's to do with the fact that when water gets close to freezing it becomes sticky and the viscosity inside the cells goes up and we think that interferes with the mechanism that makes proteins so to investigate that we're collecting we're doing a lot of work on one of the local fish which is like a bit of a lab rat we have over a million of these little plunder fish in the bay around us and we bring some back to the UK and when they there are two ways we do the work we are the take cells from their tissues and then growth cells and look at the cells and look at how the cells function and look at the mechanisms inside the cells at zero degrees we're building a system now with Clemens Kaminsky's group in the centre for biotechnology in Cambridge and told look at live cells actually at zero degrees and nobody's built a system to do that before and we're also when those fish breed in our aquarium we're using the the eggs and the early stages to give us better ability to grow cells and by growing the cells we use less animals and it's much better on the environment and we are looking at how fast proteins move through cells we're looking at how the various bits of the cell move around and how quickly and how the the various different conditions in the cell affect all those processes so that's quite exciting from the science side is we might be able to work out what it is that gives those problems making proteins but that problem making proteins then feeds into clear problems at the whole animal level so development rates are 10 times maybe 20 times slower than they are elsewhere in the world and there's a snail down here that is the best for example I've seen so far that when they lay a brood of eggs on the seabed it takes 10 years for that brood to develop little snails walk away from the brood which is ridiculously slow and we think that's those issues everything grows more slowly and develops more slowly but we think those problems are related to these issues with proteins it's just fascinating and I think in your lecture that I went to see a couple of years ago I think I remember you talking about the ice fish and some of the things to do with kind of hemoglobin and blood so could you remind me a bit more about the ice fish yeah so every animal with a backbone on the planet so all the mammals all the birds all the reptiles the amphibians the fish they all have red blood cells they all carry oxygen around their bodies with hemoglobin and hemoglobin is what makes the red blood cells red except for 16 species of fish that live in the Antarctic and these 16 species of a group of fish called Chinnick Theodized Fish they don't have red blood cells they are the only animals with backbone out of all the millions of species of animals with backbone they're the only ones that don't have red blood cells they can do that because it's really cold and their metabolic rates are very slow and they can survive on the around about 3% of oxygen that circulates in in our bodies and red blood red blooded animals 97% is carried in the hemoglobin but these fish survive on the other 3% so they can only do that because their metabolic cost are really low so they're classically low activity if you have one in the aquarium it won't feed unless you put the food right in front of it mouth and we know they interact with each other and they reproduce but nobody's seen them doing that and they are very very low energy animals and there are other payoffs so they have bigger blood volumes they have bigger hearts they circulate more fluid so those adaptations have come in to kind of offset some of the restrictions of oxygen but they don't have these red blood cells and again we think that's something to do with the low temperature making water and liquid stickier and you're likely would have having a heart attack is higher because your blood stickier and red blood cells make that problem worse so one of the advantages of not having them might be that it reduces these problems with your circulatory system but yeah we have these 16 species of ice fish and some of them don't have myoglobin which is a pigment that animals have in their muscles which makes them the muscles red and and that carries oxygen and holds oxygen as well these fish some of these fish don't have that and then they're almost invisible because they can make their bodies almost translucent and make some very very hard to see in the water column so they they almost look like ghost fish some of the species that have gone as far down this adaptation as you can go yeah it's absolutely fascinating I remember that really sticking out to me when you when you were talking about the ice fish are there any other animals and that you're focusing your research on so our standard lab rats are the local sea urchin where we've worked out there's between 50 million and 250 million of them in the bay that we work on and they're very easy for us to bring back to the UK they're spawned very easily we can we can look at their reproductive cycles we've been collecting them for 25 years now and looking at their reproductive cycles for 24 years and we're doing that in in a few species and in the more temperature-sensitive ones we know that they they they have real problems reproducing in the warm summers now so when temperatures get up to a degree in a half some of our more temperature-sensitive species don't reproduce and the ones we're doing that work on are the very common species we have a very common brittle star on the seabed here we're going to a very common red starfish again where there's probably 20 to 50 million of them in the bay here. So they're very easy for us to get, they're very easy for us to keep. And again, we can get them to spawn in the lab so we can look at how temperature affects their ability to develop. We can look at how ocean acidification affects them, we can look at how freshening the melting of the ice and making the water less saline. We can look at all those effects on these animals that we know how to keep them and we can keep them in really good condition in our aquarium. And also we can bring those animals back to the UK and we can use very much more sophisticated approaches on the animals we've got back in the UK in the aquarium in Cambridge. And of course you've been to Rantartick and many times and you've also been to the Arctic a few times as well. So what are some of the adaptations and differences between the animals in the Arctic and Antarctic? The Arctic is much younger as a cold environment than the Antarctic. So the Antarctic has been cold for at least 20 million years and maybe 30 million years. And there have been areas that are close to freezing for that period of time around Antarctic. Maybe not the whole Antarctic but certainly really is a big area that has been cold like that for 20 to 30 million years. The Arctic is only three to four million years old and even then it's a very different environment because the Antarctic is a very large continent isolated from the other continents by a big ocean that circulates around and stops things coming in and out because it circulates and isolates the continent which means which means you can get new things evolving because they not got contact with other parts of the world. Whereas the Arctic is a shallow ocean and during the big glacial cycles the ice goes from the surface down to the seabed everywhere and cuts it off and anything living there then gets either killed if it's in high Arctic or it has to move down the continental margins and those continental margins run from the Arctic all the way down to the tropics. So things basically move up and down the coastlines. So the drivers and the ability for new things to evolve are much stronger in the Antarctic than they are in the Arctic. Having said that there are some things that are parallel. So and all the fish in the Arctic that live at below freezing temperatures they all have antifreeze as the Antarctic fish do. So they both have antifreeze and it's the same chemical the antifreeze chemical even though it's evolved from a different part of the genome. So it's come from very different DNA in different places in the gene complement of these animals but they've ended up with the same molecule. And the reason for that is that antifreeze works by by sticking like cling film to a growing ice crystal and the shape is really important. So the molecule has to fit the shape of the ice crystal and there is a limited number of molecules that can do that. So they have the same antifreeze molecule. You do see large size in some groups of animals in the Arctic but it's nowhere near as as impressive as it is in the Antarctic and that's probably because it's a younger environment than it hasn't had as long. And you don't see as many unique species in the Arctic as you do in the Antarctic and that's almost certainly because these continental margins come up from lower latitudes into the Arctic and allow species to basically migrate up and down during glacial cycles. And I think some people that are not involved in polar research might be quite surprised by how rich in life the southern ocean and the Arctic is as well. Yeah, no you're right. The biodiversity is really unexpected and nearly everybody that I talk to, I give a talk to or who visits here and we recently had a group from the UK environmental audit for the polar regions that were looking at the our station and our operations and we had six MPs here looking at whether the UK government's getting value for money for what we do down here and they themselves were amazed when we showed them the variety of life we have on the seabed here. So we have probably 20,000 species or more living on the seabed in the Antarctic and to give you context the South America is thought to have around 25,000 and Europe's thought to have about 30 to 35,000. So actually not that very different from here and the variety of life is astonishing and in some groups it's more diverse in the Antarctic than anywhere else on earth. So again the sea spiders we have 24% of the world's sea spider species living on the seabed in the Antarctic on an area that is around about 10 or 11% of the world's continental shelf. So that means they're two to two and a half times as diverse as sea spiders anywhere else. The amphipod crustaceans things that you might recognise as sandhoppers or sandflies they're more diverse here than the average for the world. Some of the some of the polychee worms are more diverse than you than they are for the average for the world. So the idea that that the polar regions are deserts for life just not true on the seabed in the Antarctic and again it's probably because the environment's been around long enough for lots of species to evolve and it's diverse enough to give lots of different types of habitats and it's and that's that combination of there's enough productivity lots of productivity in the summertime in the in the regions near the coast with this variety of habitats and how long it's been around means lots of species have been able to evolve. Some of them are astonishing we have a 40-armed starfish that is 80 centimeters across and looks like something that you just I've never seen. We have feather stars that are 15-18 inches tall so really huge compared to elsewhere. We have a ribbon worm that's a big predator that gets up to over two meters long and it's thicker than a person's thumb and it's one of the big predators on the seabed and I've seen them catch fish if they can trap fish in crevices in rocks and fill the hole they're letting golf the fish as the fish tries to get out so we have some really I mean everybody's aware of the sort of the penguins the whales and the seals and we've all seen those those gorgeous David Attenborough programs about wildlife, love in the freezer and the programs like that but for me the the really interesting stuff is all on the seabed because the animals are biologically different from animals anywhere else and some of them are just utterly, utterly bizarre. Yeah yeah it's absolutely fascinating and of course as we all know climate change is affecting the entire planet but actually even more so in the polar regions so could you perhaps tell us a little bit more about why that is and whether you've actually seen any changes since you've been going out to the Antarctic. So the station I come to at Roddara and if people want a lot where it is it's about two thirds of the way down the Antarctic peninsula and where when I first came here in the 1990s the nearest big glacier the Sheldon Glacier which is about eight to ten kilometers away from the station was two to three kilometers further out than it is now so it's gone back a long way just in the time I've been coming to the station and I can now sit in a boat where there were 200 to 400 foot high ice cliffs when I first came to the station and a long way further out than where we can go in about now. So the Antarctic peninsula has been warming over the last 50 to 100 years 70 years now to be really rapidly the air temperatures have gone up lots we now have summer temperatures over 15 degrees in some parts of the Antarctic peninsula which is just ridiculous the high compared to what it was even in the 1970s and 80s and 90% of the glaciers on the Antarctic peninsula have gone have receded massively and we've lost ice shells on the Antarctic peninsula and the big part of the Antarctic hasn't worn significantly over the same period and part of the reason for that is because of the ozone hole and that with a couple of other factors has made the wind circulating around the Antarctic stronger and slightly tighter which has kept the main Antarctic continent colder and it looks like that that is starting to ease now and one of the big indicators of that is that if you look at the extent of Antarctic sea ice this last five or six years it started to decline really quite quickly and it looks like we're starting to go into a sea ice loss scenario very similar to what happened in the Arctic and has been happening in the Arctic for the last two decades so it looks like sea ice is starting to go it looks like and other parts of the Antarctic than the peninsula are starting to warm and there's a fair bit of concern about the West Antarctic ice sheet and there's a lot of work going on a thing called the Thwaite's Glacier and it's been in the media a lot over the last five or six years where we've been looking at the processes that are causing these coastal glaciers and ice sheets to melt fast and there was even an article last week and in the news about how we might stop this part I putting a curtain barrier up along the front of some of the big glaciers to try and stop warm water coming under Underneath. them. So there's a lot of interest in society in the major with these. But yeah, we are warming. I think we're starting to get into a warming phase where a much bigger part of the Antarctic is going to start warming significantly over the next 10 to 20 years. It's worrying. The cold in the Antarctic helps to drive the ocean currents in the world. It's sinking cold water, the poles that drives all the major currents around the globe. Say if we warm up enough and it actually it's not a lot to reduce those pumps driving the world's ocean currents, then things everywhere will change. Warm currents keeping the UK warm, coming from the tropics are likely to change direction and become less. Cold up wellings that make very productive areas around places like the Galapagos could easily decline. We don't have a great deal of understanding of how rapidly that might happen and how much warming we need for those processes to start to decline in their strength. Do you think there's anything in particular that's the biggest risk to Antarctic marine species? Is it the warming of the ocean or is it ocean acidification or is it a combination of everything? It is a combination of everything. Lots of species will not be affected markedly by acidification, but some will. If they are key species in an ecosystem, they could have a very big effect on that ecosystem. At the moment we don't have enough information on enough species to know which ones are at risk, but we do know some are at risk. The warming is a problem because although some of our species can survive 234 degrees of warming, we know that out of the 20 or 30 we've looked at in detail so far, maybe 456 can't cope with one to two degrees of warming and we're already at least a degree up from where we were 100 years ago on the Antarctic Peninsula. We know that some species are already getting close to the edge of what they can cope with. Then you've got all the issues about when we have an environment that doesn't get covered by ice in the winter time, which will probably happen in the next 40 years or so, alien species from warmer waters will be able to colonize and start out competing some of the species that are unique and endemic and live here and don't live anywhere else. Yes, and that was actually leading on to my next question. My own research is investigating a non-native insect on Signe Island in Antarctica. But are there any marine non-native species in Antarctica and why are they a threat to native biodiversity? So there are currently no established populations of non-native species. Some non-native species have been found in Antarctica, so the blue muscles that we all know, when we have mole-marine air, it's the same type of animal. They've been found in the Antarctic and some seaweed that have been found in the Antarctic that are not native to the Antarctic. But none of them have been found in what's called self-recreating populations. So we think they're the ones that have come down on ships and have either colonized initially from the ships, but none of them have been found to be reproductive. So it's still thought that it's too cold for them to become reproductive. The issue with non-native species is that usually, and it's been seen around the world a lot, when you get an alien species invading, they suddenly become dominant in an ecosystem. So we know that some of the oysters that we brought into the UK in the early 20th century have dominated the oyster populations around the UK and pushed out the native ones. And that happens a lot with introduced species. And it's thought that in Antarctica, because he's been isolated for so long, that the competitive abilities of the native species will be poor compared to any aliens if and when they can establish. So people are quite worried about alien species coming in because of that competition problem and how fast alien species usually come to dominate systems when they can get established. And very briefly, just going back to your research on proteins, what does the warming of the sea do to animals at the cellular level and has there been much research done on that yet? So there has been some, it's been very patchy. So there are problems with oxygen-free radicals. So when oxygen is used in cells, it has a state where it's called a free radical and that free radical is very strong in its ability to interact with other chemicals. And the fact that it is a very strong reactant means it damage you cells and animals have a capacity to deal with that to a certain level. But when things warm up and the metabolic rates of the animals go up because they're warmer, their ability to deal with this damage from oxygen, charged oxygen molecules becomes less. And that cellular damage is known about and it is an issue with warming in Antarctica because it looks like the animals can't cope very well with that damage from oxygen-free radicals. And we also know that that cell division is really slow in our animals and we know that warming up causes things like larval development to go much quicker. But it also causes it to then have more errors and the error rate goes up faster than the cell division rate. So we know that an increase in temperature is affecting the cellular ability to control when things should happen during development and we're quite interested in processes like that. So there are all sorts of things. At the moment, animals developing very slowly has advantages for some species because they are floating stages in the water and some species can be in the water for 60 to 150 days, which means they can disperse very, very long distances. When you warm them up and you cut that down from 50 to 60 to 250 to my IB20 or 30, then the distances that they can travel are way less. And you affect the ability to disperse and their ability to colonise new areas, which then affects how well you have the capacity to respond to climate change. And we also know that things like the ability to produce new genetic material goes down as our animals warm up because they reproduce less, their fewer offspring, their fewer chances of producing a genetic change that will mean that they can survive the warmer temperatures. So the warming is a problem on many scales. It's not just the individual's ability to survive the warm environment. It's also the ability to produce the next generation and the reproductive stages that are needed to keep going as a population. Yeah, and it's so interesting. It's such a unique area of research, really understanding how climate change is impacting the molecular machinery essentially of all of these animals. And I'm also really interested to hear how the research that you're doing could be used for industry and biotechnology. So there already have been some uses of low temperature products from the polar regions. Antifreeze is used to make ice cream smoother in some products. We now have the ability to grow tomatoes in areas that might get frost because the antifreeze gene has been put into make frost-free tomatoes. There are various products, especially in beauty products that have been taken from Antarctic seaweeds and Antarctic animals. There's a range of things. But there are two or three key areas that are likely to be important. One is if you want to find enzymes that work at low temperatures for biotechnology, the place to look is in biodiversity that's evolved and adapted in those low temperature conditions for millions of years. And we have 20,000 species that have done that. So currently there are a few countries trying very hard to find those biotech products. The UK isn't one of those at the moment. But there are lots of countries looking for those low temperatures solutions. There are also payoffs for things like cryopreservation technologies. And already products from Antarctic animals have been used to help the when people transfer transplant organs from one hospital to another hospital. That low temperature transfer of organs now involves the use of some products from Antarctic animals to help maintain the functioning of those organs as their move from place to place. There are also, we know for instance that our Antarctic fish have a very different relationship with the types of molecules that cause Alzheimer's disease and then worn bloodied animals do. And there are a range of medical potential uses from the things we're looking at at the moment. There's a paper recently looking at a molecule from an Antarctic starfish that looks like it might have anti-council properties. So if you think about where. you're going to find new products, it's where you've got large amounts of biodiversity that's unexplored and the Antarctic is definitely one of those areas. That's absolutely fascinating. I really didn't know anything about any of that, so that's so interesting. Thank you. And I know that you've worked with stakeholders in the past and you've sometimes given evidence to Parliament, I think as well. Do you enjoy this side of the work and do you have any notable success stories in terms of policy changes? I don't enjoy it in the way that I enjoy grappling with the questions about the animals and trying to understand how animals function at zero degrees, four degrees colder than your fridge. And those my big buzzes are when we find some data that makes me change the way that I think the world works and that our animals are not doing the things that I thought they were doing in the way that I thought they were doing. But I do see it as really important that people like me talk about what we do and talk about the environment and do it for the public and do it for stakeholders and do it for policymakers. Because I think when you have some understanding of the way the world works that most people don't have, you will be holding to try and make as much use of that as you can for the benefit of society. So I see it not as something I particularly enjoy, but something that I think is very, very important for us to do. And I take that really seriously and try to do that as well as I possibly can. If I was really selfish, I'd just spend all my time doing the signs. But I do think it's vastly important that people like me do if you like get on the podium and do talk about what we see as the issues with the world, what we see as the benefits of doing work in our areas. Because otherwise, science interested people and policymakers and politicians just wouldn't get that information. And I think it's really, really important that they do. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no point in doing all of this science research if it's never going to be translated into anything useful. And as we're coming towards the end of this episode, I'm just hoping to know a bit more about what you think you would like to see for the future of polar research. And do you think there's anything that we should be prioritising with increasing climate change? So I do. I think we know basically what's going on with climate change. We know what we're doing wrong. We know what we don't have to do about it. There are areas in science that we don't know very much about. And there are potential great losses in biodiversity and potential great losses in biodiversity across the planet, not just in the Antarctic. We don't have any Antarctic zoos. We don't have any marine zoos and conservation initiatives for Antarctic things. And that is really difficult. I mean, there are people talking about trying to make a cold zoo somewhere in the world and and building massive cold areas to try and do conservation projects like we do in some of the big zoos that we've got or elsewhere in the world. But I also think we should be trying to get an understanding of the genetics of all the species that we possibly can from the polar regions. If the world warns the first place is to disappear of the cold ones. And if we lose those species, then they're gone. However, if we do have their genetic prints and we have their genome sequenced and we have enough variety in these species, I think in hundreds of years time, if we get the planet cold again, we could reconstruct those species. And we might even be able to reconstruct food webs and we might be able to reconstruct ecosystems because technology is advancing so fast that I think in in a few hundred years time, people might be able to go back and say, okay, we've got those cold areas back. Let's put those cold animals back. But to do that, you need the information. So I think we need to sequence everything in the Antarctic and we need to understand how it functions and we need to understand not just have a sequence from a genome of an individual, but how variable is that in a population? We need that. It's a big job. It needs funding. It's not a very sexy project for governments to fund. So we need somewhere to be able to start moving down that road. Thank you so much, Lloyd, for taking part in polar diaries. And I wish you the best of luck for the rest of your field season. And I hope you do get your trip to the Antarctic that you clearly would like to have and that would probably help with your research too. Thanks for asking me. Thank you so much. [Music] [Music]