Brent Minchew on Curiosity Unbounded, episode 14: Putting a glacier in its place

Introduction

Brent Minchew is an Associate Professor of Geophysics in the department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He studies the behavior of glaciers in response to environmental factors and is dedicated to understanding sea level rise and exploring viable interventions to stabilize ice sheets.

In this episode, President Kornbluth and Minchew discuss glacier-related sea-level rise and potential mitigation solutions.

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Transcript

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Hello, everyone. I’m Sally Kornbluth, President of MIT, and I’m thrilled to welcome you to this MIT community podcast, Curiosity Unbounded. Since coming to MIT, I’ve been particularly inspired by talking with members of our faculty who recently earned tenure. Like their colleagues in every field here, they are pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Their passion and brilliance, their boundless curiosity offer a wonderful glimpse of the future of MIT.

Today, my guest is Brent Minchew, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Brent studies how glaciers and ice sheets are changing in response to global warming and other environmental factors, how they affect those forces in return, and whether there are practical ways to stabilize them. His central focus is understanding the processes likely to drive global sea level rise. So, Brent, welcome to the podcast.

BRENT MINCHEW: Thanks for having me.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So climate change is, obviously, a growing global challenge, with rising sea levels, from glacial melt posing a major concern. As an expert in this field, can you explain the urgency of sea level rise and its immediate and long term threats?

BRENT MINCHEW: Sure. So I think maybe the best way to start describing this is to think about what our current projections tell us. So current projections of sea level rise put sea level to somewhere between 50 centimeters to about a meter or so above present by the end of this century. And those numbers alone don’t necessarily sound scary until you extrapolate that into the aerial impact of all of this. So if you take sea levels and you consider the fact that coastal areas have relatively small slopes, then as you increase sea levels more and more, you start to inundate larger and larger areas over time.

And if you consider the population and where the population distribution is, then we’re talking about, even for modest levels of sea level rise, the displacement of many millions of people. And if you go to the extreme end, which is 2 meters of sea level rise, which we think is entirely possible, then you’re looking at a displacement of minimum half a billion people, somewhere around in there. That is under current population locations, densities, and so forth. So this doesn’t take into account increases in population, the tendency for people to move.

It doesn’t take into account how the displaced people will end up displacing other people who are inland. It doesn’t account for any of that. So at a bare minimum, we’re talking about a half a billion people or so displaced. And so there will be all kinds of knock on effects from an economic perspective and so forth that goes to this. And then, of course, there’s the tensions that will arise.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: And none of these things are happening in isolation.

BRENT MINCHEW: That’s right.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: In the context of global warming. We’ve just seen with the LA fires, you’re going to have sea level rise. You’re going to have–

BRENT MINCHEW: That’s right.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Tornadoes. You’re going to have hurricanes, et cetera.

BRENT MINCHEW: And major stresses placed on freshwater resources.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes, yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: Which is something else that we’re very concerned about for sea level rise. So the seawater contamination of coastal aquifers, the salting of agricultural fields and so forth. And so we work a lot on trying to get an idea of what are the probabilities of these different outcomes. As a field, we don’t yet have good quantification of the uncertainties in all of this. We can’t really tell the world the likelihood of 20 centimeters of sea level rise, versus 50 centimeters of sea level rise, versus a meter, versus two meters. We’re just not at that level yet.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: And the average person can’t conceive of, as you said, of what that means.

BRENT MINCHEW: That’s right.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: It doesn’t sound impressive, but it is.

BRENT MINCHEW: That’s right. When I say a meter of sea level rise, people are usually like, I’ve been to the beach. Waves are taller than that.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: That’s right. That’s right.

BRENT MINCHEW: What’s the big deal?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So are there particular places that you focus on? What glaciers pose the greatest threats?

BRENT MINCHEW: So currently, the Greenland ice sheet is the largest contributor to sea level rise. And that is due to both melting at the surface, as well as the acceleration of glaciers themselves. And it’s the acceleration of glacier flow, the dynamics of glaciers that will be the thing that really sets sea level going forward.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So can you distinct for the audience, and actually for me, too, the distinction between a glacier and an ice sheet?

BRENT MINCHEW: Oh, sure. So a glacier is a river of ice. So a glacier we would distinguish as areas of ice that are flowing at some measurable speed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Got it.

BRENT MINCHEW: Whereas the ice sheets contain glaciers. So glaciers are special parts of the ice sheet, where the ice sheet is flowing fast and into the ocean. So all ice sheets contain glaciers, but not all glaciers are necessarily parts of ice sheets. And so the Greenland ice sheet is currently the largest contributor to sea level and will be for at least the next few decades, most likely. But Antarctica is by far the largest source of uncertainty in sea level. And that is attributable, basically, to one area, the West Antarctic ice sheet.

And so the special part of the West Antarctic ice sheet is this glacier known as Thwaites Glacier. And so Thwaites is a very special place. It’s the only place like it in the world really. And West Antarctica is unique in the world, in that it is what we refer to as a Marine ice sheet. And what a marine ice sheet means is that it is an ice sheet that is resting on the sea floor.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: So the bed of West Antarctica is about two kilometers or so below sea level, and the ice is in contact with the bed just because it’s thick enough.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: To be in contact with it. So as the climate warms, as we start to lose mass from West Antarctica, it thins and it has to. And that peels off big areas of contact between the ice and the bed. And that’s incredibly important because more or less 100% of the ice mass loss from Antarctica, its contribution to sea level rise is due to the flow of glaciers, because Antarctica is very cold. You get relatively little surface mass.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so the flow of glaciers is very sensitive to how much drag there is at the bed, at the base of the ice, the contact between the ice and the dirt or the rock that’s underneath it. And so most of its resistance is going to come from the contact between the ice and the bed. So as you thin this, you peel large areas of the ice off of the bed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: So it’s like taking your foot off the brake in your car. And so all the ice starts flowing faster. And because mass is conserved, once you flow faster, then you also have to thin faster.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so there’s a runaway effect that we refer to as the marine ice sheet instability, which is a buoyancy driven instability. A lot of research suggests that we’re either very close to or already in this state of instability. The mass loss from West Antarctica could, at this point, very well be driven by internal feedbacks.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: And thus insensitive, to some extent, to whatever we do with emissions.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Is there anything that can be done to stop this escalating effect?

BRENT MINCHEW: The answer to that question boils down to whether or not we’re really in this unstable state.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes, yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: Again, a lot of research over the past decade or so provides evidence to suggest that we are already in this unstable configuration. And if that’s true, then we could pull CO2 concentrations back to pre-industrial levels tomorrow, and it wouldn’t stop the demise of West Antarctica. It’s something that we’re going to need to deal with, no matter what we do with emissions.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So it’s more adaptation at this point than–

BRENT MINCHEW: It could be. Yeah. Those are currently the only options on the table. I should also mention that if Thwaites goes, the idea of projections that we mentioned before, the potential for two meters of sea level rise by the end of the century, that’s primarily due to what happens to Thwaites.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: That’s the big uncertainty.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so currently, adaptation is the only set of options on the table for us. My group here at MIT, as well as a few other colleagues across the glaciological community, are starting to address the question of, what else can we do about this. And so we’re working on this question of, basically, can you engineer Antarctica to try to stabilize the ice sheet.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: What kind of things can you do to–

BRENT MINCHEW: So there are, basically, three broad categories of ideas that have been presented. So one of the earlier ideas that was presented was, basically, pumping a bunch of seawater onto the ice sheet and blowing it out as snow. And so you just increase the mass of the ice sheet. There have been a few papers published on this, and it’s not clear to me that could work, that you could scale. The ice sheet is big.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: Thwaites Glacier itself is the size of Florida.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow.

BRENT MINCHEW: Right?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow. That’s a lot of snow.

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah, yeah, yeah, West Antarctica is a considerable fraction of the continental United States.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: These are huge, huge areas that you would have to deal with and distribute snow across. And you’d have to pump water, in many cases, over maybe a couple hundred kilometers of ice in air temperatures that are usually not much warmer than minus 10 C.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Right.

BRENT MINCHEW: Right? So you’d have to do all this without the water freezing. There’s all kinds of challenges with that. Another sort of category of ideas has to do with the fact that in Antarctica and Greenland, in Antarctica especially, the mass loss is really driven by the warming of the seawater local to the ice sheet, so the transport of warm, deep water to the ice sheet itself, that’s melting the underside of the ice. And that’s particularly challenging because ice is this truly amazing material.

So if anybody’s listening out there and is excited about material properties, you should totally study ice. It’s not very well understood, and it’s a fantastic problem because of its elegance. It’s just two hydrogens in an oxygen.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: But it has all of these fantastic material properties. It floats, for one thing, which is one of the reasons why we’re concerned about what’s happening in West Antarctica. Because it floats, expands when it freezes, that means that when you put it under pressure, you depress the melting temperature.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so, essentially, what happens is that you have warm water that’s coming in and it’s touching the glacier at exactly its most vulnerable point, which is the deepest part of the glacier, where it’s the easiest to melt.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: Right? And so melting temperatures in Antarctica will be a degree or so. off from the standard 0 degrees C. So it’s much easier to satisfy the sensible heat budget, basically, and melt the ice in these cases.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: And that sounds like it can be a positive feedback loop.

BRENT MINCHEW: Exactly. Yeah, there’s actually a local pumping effect, where the warm water comes in and it melts the ice. The ice is just compacted snow, so it’s fresh. So whenever it melts, it’s fresh water, which is buoyant in the salt water in the area. So it has to rise and it creates these turbulent plumes that go up, and that creates this almost self-sustaining pump, where the ice sheet pulls more and more warm water toward it. And so this class of ideas that we were talking about for engineering Antarctica, one of them is, well, what if we just block that warm water. Why not put a barrier on the ocean floor to try to block that warm water?

And this is probably one of the better developed ideas. It’s still very much in its nascent stages, relative to the complexity of the problem.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Interesting. This sounds like an engineering challenge.

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah, it’s a huge challenge. This one, also, you run immediately into questions of scale.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah, exactly. How big a wall do you need?

BRENT MINCHEW: Exactly. Almost certainly tens of kilometers long at its minimum.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: And how do you put that in the most remote area on earth?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Exactly.

BRENT MINCHEW: That is often inaccessible to ships, due to sea ice cover and so forth? It’s the stuff that I’m most interested in because it has the potential to actually stabilize the ice sheet. So all these ideas of instability that we were talking about before, they’re predicated on the assumption that the ice is thawed at the bed and it is sliding over its bed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so if you could freeze the glacier to its bed, then that is a stable configuration.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: And most of the edges of the ice sheet are frozen to their beds, and they’re relatively stable, and we’re not too concerned with them. And glaciers in Antarctica do freeze themselves to the bed as part of the natural process. And so we have natural analogs, natural phenomena that we can work on and we can learn from. And our current understanding of why glaciers in Antarctica freeze themselves to the bed is that there’s a thermodynamic feedback.

And basically, what it is that glaciers in Antarctica are flowing, essentially, because they’re flowing, to a good approximation. And what that means is that the flow is facilitated by the lubricating effect of the water that’s produced by the melting of the ice itself.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: And in areas where the glaciers are flowing, the primary source of heat is the frictional heating due to the flow. And so you create this actually interesting feedback loop where the drag at the bed, the resistance at the bed influences the velocity of the glaciers. So this is an interesting problem where, to a good approximation, the driving force remains constant, and both the resistance and the velocity change together. And they change together in a nonlinear way. And it comes from the fact that viscosity has a stress dependence to it. So the higher the stress, the lower the viscosity of ice.

And so when you start taking all these things into account, what you create is a situation where you can manipulate the drag at the bed. You can change the drag at the bed such that there’s no resistance at the bed. Right? So perfectly lubricated, like floating ice. And so you produce no heat.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: And then on the other side, the drag is so high that there’s no velocity, that the glacier can’t flow anymore. So you also produce no heat.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK, so you can manipulate it in either direction.

BRENT MINCHEW: Exactly.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so it also means that because there’s heating in the middle and a 0 at both edges, then there must be a maximum somewhere.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: So there has to be a point at which, if you increase the drag more, you reduce the rate of heating, which is counterintuitive, right?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I understand.

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah, but then that creates its own self-sustaining feedback loop where the glacier kind of gets itself into this mode, where it starts to freeze itself to the bed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so the idea then boils down to then how do you increase the drag at the bed?

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Exactly.

BRENT MINCHEW: And number one, flow is facilitated by the lubrication of water at the bed. Right? So one obvious solution is then, well, you drill a hole and you pump water out from the bed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Oh, interesting, OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: Like draining the oil out of your car engine while it’s running. It’s eventually going to slow things down. The second one is that, well, the water is all supplied by melting at the bed itself. And so if you just actively cool the bed, then you starve everything of the water. And then the third one is you would construct obstacles at the bed, which I don’t think that the obvious approaches are going to work where you build a concrete barrier or something like that. But there are things that we understand in the physics of the system, where you could manipulate water pressure and other things to get the glacier to drive itself down into the bed.

And so you get it to, effectively, ground itself. And so the logistics of this. How do you actually do this? So I’m very excited about an idea that uses these things called thermosiphons. And a thermosiphon is nothing more than a heat pump, but it’s a passive heat pump. So it works like the heat pump in your house, or there’s a heat pipe in your computer. The nice thing about the thermosiphon is it, at least in our preliminary work modeling these things, it appears as though the difference in temperature between the bed and the surface of the ice is enough to drive the heat pump itself.

So we’re taking advantage of the energy that is already in the system. So the way it would work is, you would basically drill a hole from the surface to the bed and you drop in a vertical pipe.

BRENT MINCHEW: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: To pretty close to the bed.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: And that pipe will be filled with pressurized CO2. CO2 seems to be the best working fluid that we have. And it’s pressurized to somewhere around 400 to 500 PSI. And the reason that you do that, of course, is that, at those pressures and under the temperature conditions that we see in the ice, the CO2 is going to be a liquid at the base of the pipe.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: And then it absorbs heat because, again, the bed is the– yeah, yeah, the bed is the warmest part. It evaporates.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yeah, evaporates. That’s the word. Yeah.

BRENT MINCHEW: And then the vapor rises to the surface, Where it recondenses.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: Releases its latent heat to the atmosphere. And the amount of heat that we’re talking about is trivial compared to what the atmosphere can handle.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: When we’re talking milliwatts per square meter, but it’s enough to manipulate the glacier. And so yeah, once it recondenses at the surface, it just rains back down to the bottom, and then this process continues.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: There’s more fluid dynamical complexities involved, but that’s the basic idea.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So how many years are we from being able to go from modeling to actually pilots, things like that?

BRENT MINCHEW: Well, that’s the trillion dollar question. I don’t know. So I think that we are spinning up efforts at ever increasing scales. We’re starting small and growing in terms of bringing in funding, attracting more people that have relevant expertise and these kinds of things, people who engineer thermosiphons. I should also mention that thermosiphons have been used for many decades to stabilize foundations in the Arctic.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Oh, OK.

BRENT MINCHEW: This is a very common tool. If you look at pictures of the trans Antarctic pipeline, you’ll see all of the legs of the trans Antarctic pipeline have these fins on top of them. Those are thermosiphons. There’s 120,000 of them. And they’re meant to keep the permafrost frozen so that it provides a good stability for the pipeline.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So this is sort of a writ large adaptation of these technologies.

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah, that’s right. They’ve been around for a long time. And of course, we’re looking at longer thermosiphons than currently exist. But all of our initial modeling and early stage discussions with actual thermosiphon engineers that have been doing this for decades suggest that it should work. And there are some field trials of long thermosiphons that have been done for geothermal applications. It’s an extremely efficient way to move heat from one place to another.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I think people would be interested in what it’s like to work in Antarctica. In other words, what are the adaptations just for human beings to be there in such an inhospitable environment? When you talk about the surface temperatures, et cetera, it sounds–

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I think Boston’s cold. That sounds crazy.

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah, it’s certainly cold there. So unfortunately, I’m not the right person to ask for this. I got into this line of work so that I could go to Antarctica and do stuff. But for one reason or another, it’s never worked out. So I’ve never actually been to Antarctica.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Amazing, yeah.

BRENT MINCHEW: So we do theory and we do satellite observations and so forth, and work with a lot of colleagues that have been to the field. The short answer is, it’s cold, and it’s windy, and it’s just kind of like that some of the time. And then other times, at least during the summer when people are actually doing field work, during the austral summer, it can get up above freezing. I never ceasefire to be amazed by how many pictures I see of my colleagues in short sleeves.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Short sleeves, yeah.

BRENT MINCHEW: But as a general rule, it’s very cold, and Thwaites has horrendous weather. It is definitely one of the most complicated places on Earth to work, and the weather is just really terrible. So one of my students went down a couple of years ago to work in Thwaites, and she was in Antarctica for 2 and 1/2 months.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow.

BRENT MINCHEW: Waiting to be able to go to the field.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: And then she was in the field, I think, for something like 10 days, but they were snowed into their tents for, like, seven of them. So they got about three days worth of work done for the year.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow. Wow.

BRENT MINCHEW: And so that’s a little bit unusual. It’s not always that bad, but that’s an anecdote that illustrates one of the considerations. So when we’re thinking about things like, could we actively stabilize Thwaites, we have in mind the fact that this is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth to work. And even under the best of conditions, you’re only going to be able to work for three to four months out of the year.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: And it sounds like even in the more hospitable months, you can face unpredictable challenges.

BRENT MINCHEW: Yeah, because we’re thinking about how many thermosiphons would it take to have an effect in this area. And the natural analogs teach us that glaciers can stagnate if only a relatively small area of their bed is frozen. You do not need to freeze a Florida sized patch of the ice. If you do it in intelligent ways, and you think about it in the right way, and all of this will come out in modeling, then a relatively small patch of ice will have a large impact on the overall flow speed.

And so what that basically means is, if I freeze a small patch right in the middle of this glacier, and I cut it in half, then I reduce its contribution to sea level by a factor of 16.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow.

BRENT MINCHEW: Right? All I need to do is cut it in half.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: So it’s like pinning it.

BRENT MINCHEW: You just pin it in place. And let’s just say as a conservative estimate we need to place 10,000 of these thermosiphons. Then that’s arguably doable.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Doable, yeah.

BRENT MINCHEW: You have multiple crews. You have multiple drills. You get crews to the stage that they can drill a hole and a day, day and a half somewhere around in there. You get a few months of working time. You scale according to these crews and recognize that you don’t need to drill 10,000 in a single year. You could spread this out over a decade and start having effects and so forth. And it gets to the realm of being realistic.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Right. So let me switch gears a bit. So I read that you joined the Marines at age 18– 17. Excuse me.

BRENT MINCHEW: That’s right.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: What attracted you to the Marines?

BRENT MINCHEW: A variety of things. Maybe the most important considerations are that it seemed like a real personal challenge. And at that age, I really wanted to test myself and to understand what I was made of and what I was capable of. I joined the Marine Corps in 1995, and this is obviously pre September the 11th. And so there were no large scale wars. But if you watched the news at that time, the Marines were out doing a lot of humanitarian aid in these very difficult situations and so forth.

And so I saw this as this opportunity to get out of my small town, see the world, to go to very challenging environments. And challenging places where people needed help and to, hopefully, actually, help them, to do some good in the world, and then to learn more about myself in the process and all these challenges. And so I really wanted to be that person that you could send into the most difficult and dangerous places, and I could just get it done. And I had no idea when I was 17 if I was capable of that, or anything like that. But I really, really wanted to do something like that.

And in many ways, I was extraordinarily lucky in my career. I got to have a front row seat to many major historical events of that time, and to participate in them. I was with Marine One for a while. I flew Yasser Arafat to Camp David.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow.

BRENT MINCHEW: The last time that there were serious peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And so I got to be there for that. I was at the Pentagon on September the 11, and so I got to play a role in helping to evacuate the Pentagon, which was a real honor, I think, to be able to play some role. Obviously, I wish the event wouldn’t have happened, but if it was going to happen, I’m really happy that I was there to help.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes, yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: And there to do something meaningful.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: I was one of the first Marines on the ground in Iraq.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Wow.

BRENT MINCHEW: We were all by ourselves in the north, so in Mosul. We did some counter-terror things in the eastern horn of Africa, so Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, that area. Got to spend a summer on the Eastern horn of Africa, which if you’re not used to heat, I’d strongly advise not going. I’m from Texas, and I thought I knew what heat was, and I was wrong. And then finally, I rounded out my career. We intervened in the second Liberian Civil War. And so we went in and we put an end to hostilities and provided this level of security that allowed UN peacekeepers, and UNICEF and these other organizations to come in and bring food to the people who were effectively being starved.

So I got to end my career finally doing the thing that I wanted to do.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: We like to think about MIT as being a place where people tackle hard problems, but it sounds like you had encountered many difficult problems and challenges before you ever got here. How did you wind up going from a 17-year-old Marine to a geophysicist studying glaciers and sea level rise at MIT?

BRENT MINCHEW: Accidentally in some ways, I guess. I like to take the nonlinear approach to life. After I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to college. I didn’t know what I was going to study, didn’t know what I was excited about. I just knew that I wanted to do something different. And when I was a kid growing up, my mom worked at the Johnson Space Center. And I remember going there as a kid and always being enamored by flight, and John Glenn was my hero. John Glenn was a Marine.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: So hopefully, you see all these connections like spokes on the wheel of my life. But I went to college and I decided to study aerospace engineering. I wanted to build rockets and do cool stuff like that, and so forth. And so while I was doing my undergrad, I learned a lot of stuff and I got very excited about formal education again.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: So I decided to just continue and get my Master’s in aerospace engineering. And while I was doing my Master’s degree, I went to a seminar, because they had free food there. I knew nothing about–

SALLY KORNBLUTH: As graduate students do.

BRENT MINCHEW: As graduate students do. So I went to the seminar, and it was about interferometric synthetic aperture radar, which is just a particular way of measuring motion. It’s the kind of thing that we do now in my group to measure glacier motion, and so forth, and how it changes. And I had never heard of anything like this before. I had never really encountered the idea of remote sensing in general.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: What more you could do from satellites other than take pictures.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Right, right.

BRENT MINCHEW: And I just thought it was the greatest thing since canned beer. It was just amazing. And I got really, really excited about that, and I changed my entire Master’s thesis direction to learn more about that. And I managed to work out getting an internship at the jet propulsion laboratory, because that’s where the people were that were building these radars and had developed all this process. And I was really, really excited about it, and so I wanted to go work with them. They had this experimental airplane and radar. I was a kid in a candy store.

And the first summer that I was out there working on this, I happened to just bump into the person who would become my PhD advisor.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: I see.

BRENT MINCHEW: In the hallways, just randomly. And so we started talking about things, and I told him that I was interested in learning this because I really wanted to study glaciers and learn more about Antarctica, because Antarctica seemed cool. It was like the sense of adventure.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes, yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: It’s this way to go there, and the whole thing. And he encouraged me to apply to Caltech. And so I applied and I got in, obviously. And then, I guess, as part of all of that process, I came to discover that it was possible for me to make a living as a scientist, which is not something that I had ever considered.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes, yes.

BRENT MINCHEW: It was just not something that seemed like it was available to people like me. And that summer was very much life changing, and the rest is the rest is–

SALLY KORNBLUTH: The rest is history. That is non-linear.

BRENT MINCHEW: Well, the rest is like the standard story. You learn a little bit, and you do this.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: That’s right. You publish papers.

BRENT MINCHEW: An opportunity opens up here, and you’re like, oh, maybe I’ll go through there.

SALLY KORNBLUTH: Yes. Well, fantastic. This has been a fascinating story. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m sure our listeners will have learned a lot, so thank you. And to our audience, thanks again for listening to Curiosity Unbounded. I hope you’ll join us again. And I’m Sally Kornbluth. Stay curious.

Curiosity Unbounded is a production of MIT News and the Institute Office of Communications, in partnership with the Office of the President. This episode was researched, written, and produced by Christine Daniloff and Melanie Gonick. Our sound engineer is Dave Lishansky. For show notes, transcripts, and other episodes, please visit news.mit.edu/podcasts/curiosity-unbounded. Please find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about the latest developments and updates from MIT, please visit news.mit.edu. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Curiosity Unbounded podcast. Thank you for joining us today. 

We hope you’ll tune in next time when Sally will be speaking with Christopher Palmer, an associate professor of finance at MIT. Christopher’s research looks at retirement planning and how people save, how renting or owning real estate factors into one’s overall quality of life, and the best way for consumers to shop for loans. We hope you’ll be there. And remember, stay curious.