The Life Scientific: Liz Morris

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

0:32Liz Morris:What you think of my new saddle, Lizard? Oh, yeah, it's swell, mate. Proper comfy. Just one of the upgrades I've added to this puppy. What else have you got on here? New air intake filter, quick shifter, and a beefy muffler. Well, that's why you ride with Geico Motorcycle Insurance. So you can cover your custom parts and equipment. Now let's hear that muffler purr. All right. Hang on tight to my love handles. It feels good to ride with help. It feels good to Geico. Imagine a frozen white world at the far reaches of the globe. Temperatures plummeting down to a bone-numbing minus 57 degrees Celsius.

1:14All around you, nothing but snow, ice, silence, and the occasional snowmobile. That's the happy place of today's guest. A glaciologist who was among the first British women scientists to work on the planet's coldest continent. Antarctica. Liz Morris is an emeritus associate at the University of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute, where her work focuses on polar ice sheets and how they're affected by climate change. Liz has crossed the Greenland ice sheet, she's had a glacier named after her in Antarctica, and she was once attacked by a penguin in South Orkney. Argumentative flightless birds aside, Liz's fascination with the physics of ice and her determination to break into a male dominated world have made her a trailblazer in glaciology.

2:02But she's also a living embodiment of the phrase, love what you do, saying, my body, heart and soul simply feel happy in cold regions. I'm not sure how cheerful I could be at minus 57 degrees, but you know, each to their own. Professor Liz Morris, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. I'm going to have to ask about that penguin attack. Well, yes, I'd waited for a long time to get to Antarctica. And the moment when I first set foot on Signy Island was a very, very important one for me. And I thought, well, we must have a photograph of this and started to pose.

2:40And I was just getting ready to look noble, heroic and all the rest of it when this small penguin came up and pecked me in the knee, which meant that I fell over backwards. My arms and legs were flailing in the air and there I was in deep snow. looking very unheroic indeed. Was the photograph, did that snap you in mid? No, my friends were kind enough not to do. Liz, you've spent years working in the Antarctic and in Greenland. You're clearly passionate about these freezing parts of the planet, but you said they sometimes scare the living daylights out of you. Can you give me an example? Yeah, I think there's only been a couple of occasions when I've felt you know we've got to back out of this this is not going well really because of extreme weather the example I can think of was going early in the spring to the Greenland summit which is at 3200 meters so quite high altitude and the temperatures were very very low unseasonably low in fact minus 58 and we found really after the first night camping in that temperature We just could not keep ourselves warm.

3:50We could not get the stove to light. Nothing was going to work. So really, we had to back out of that pretty quickly and not continue with the trip. Well, obviously, being terrified occasionally hasn't put you off. What's the appeal of ice and glaciers for you? I think there's the obvious one that they are incredibly beautiful, especially in the Antarctic, where you have very clear air so that you can see for miles and miles and miles. But there's also the fascination of ice as a material, because as a physicist, you'll know that ice is a really quite extraordinary solid, lighter than its liquid form, which is odd.

4:30And because it's near its melting point most of the time, on this Earth anyway, it does really interesting things very quickly. I mean, people who live in the north talk about the midnight sun craziness that comes over them. And I think the effect on your serotonin levels of constant 24-hour daylight is to make you really remarkably cheerful and happy. Of course, if you have to live there through the winter, I suppose the opposite is true. In fact, Liz Morris, that love of the cold started for you at a very early age during the London big freeze of 1947. Well, according to family history, when I was just able to walk, you know, I would have been one or so.

5:11I went out into the snow and sort of refused to come in because I was enjoying myself so much. It's continued ever since then. You grew up in Chiswick, where both your mother and father were teachers, I believe. Yes, they were both English teachers. And I think, actually, it was very good for me as a child early on to see two parents who both had equal qualifications and were doing equal work and had equal respect for each other. And at the time, of course, I didn't know that that might be unusual. Clearly, they've set a good example for you. You say they were English teachers, but you then bucked the humanities trend and very sensibly, in my opinion, chose physics.

5:53Well, yes, I did love English. I did love poetry and reading. But since I was reasonably good at physics and was interested, that was the obvious way to go. Well in 1965 you went off to the University of Bristol to study physics and on to do a PhD under the renowned glaciologist John Nye who had a novel idea for your thesis. he did he sort of very boldly decided that what he really wanted to do was have a student make a model glacier and because you're using ice which is a very strong material and you're trying to deform it you therefore have to have a very large sturdy model equipment to hold the glacier in if you like and this involved you know two inch plate steel and large lead weights and things which hadn't been seen in the laboratory ever before and one very small physicist trying to make this enormous contraption work.

6:48What were you trying to learn? Well at the time everybody was interested in how ice could move over a rough rocky bed as it does with a glacier and we thought there were two processes going on one of which was plastic deformation so the ice bent its way around the obstacle. But the other was regulation. And regulation is a process by which you can melt ice under pressure at the upstream side of the bump and then refreeze it at lower pressure on the downstream side of the bump. And the meltwater moves over the bump in a thin layer. So we were interested in the playoff between these two processes.

7:32So we had a bump, if you like, which we were moving through the ice and looking to see what happened. I mean, glaciers move traditionally very slowly. Presumably, you can't wait that long to do your PhD. You have to speed everything up. In fact, it was really right at the end of my PhD, but before I got this thing to work, trying to keep things at 0 degrees centigrade was also very, very difficult. So it was one of those PhDs where at the very last moment, you finally get some results. Right. But once you'd gone through this rigmarole of building your own glacier, you were hooked. Glaciology was where you wanted to be.

8:09Yes, I was absolutely determined that I wanted to be a glaciologist. And of course, the place to do glaciology in the United Kingdom was the British Antarctic Survey, because they had the largest glacier in the world to work with. And I really, really wanted to go to Bass. But at the time, they didn't accept women scientists there. and so I had to move on and I did a postdoc at the University of East Anglia and that actually gave me some quite wonderful experience working in the Alps under the Argentier Glacier. What were you doing there? There was a hydroelectric power scheme which involved drilling tunnels under the glacier to try and capture the subglacial stream at a high altitude and we had ways of getting in underneath the glacier and popping out underneath, hopefully where the stream wasn't because obviously we didn't want to get swept away by the stream.

9:09So we could go out into cavities underneath the glacier and actually put in instruments to measure the pressure of the ice on the rock. So we put in a pressure transducer and then let the ice flow over it again and recorded the pressure as the ice flowed over our instrument. So just to orient myself, the stream, the liquid water that's flowing, that's underneath the glass? That's underneath the ice. It goes in channels and the channels can move. So one of the alarming things about that bit of research was that you could at any time find that the stream was going to move into your cavity. So you certainly didn't want to hear the noise of rushing water or any loud bangs or anything like that.

9:55But the project became a lot tougher after an equipment failure. Well, yes. In those days, the sort of instruments you used to record data were the size of a small fridge and not very reliable. So we had a data logger, which promptly failed. So I actually was then, as the junior member of the team, was detailed off to live under the glacier, just writing down the results every hour rather than having them recorded electronically. And that was a little bit trying. You say live, you mean... I stayed there for a week. A friend brought up supplies, you know, bread and cheese and a bit of water, this kind of thing.

10:36But otherwise I was on my own sort of writing things down. Wow. Well, you already had a good idea of where you wanted to go in your career. You wanted to get into the British Antarctic Survey. But we've mentioned there were obstacles. Yes, because they still had this policy that no woman could go to the Antarctic and do Antarctic research. It's crackers, right? Of course it's crackers. Yes, absolutely. So you got yourself a job at a Bass Sister organisation, the Institute of Hydrology, doing mathematical modelling, primarily, of course, relating to water. But you did manage to bring snow into your work, specifically on a project studying the effects of acid rain.

11:16That's right. I was very lucky in that I had a very able director and he was happy enough for me to say, well, look, there is something going on with acid snow. And the fact that when you get the first snow melt in Scotland, the impurities in the snow are leached out in that first melt so that you get a wave of acid water into the upland streams. just at a time when the trout, for example, are spawning so that you have vulnerable eggs being subjected to an acid pulse. So this is something that's worth doing. And so you had to create a model that would predict what the effects of acid rain would be?

11:59Yes, we showed that those pulses occurred and how to predict when they would occur. It was also around this time that you got the chance to go to Norway to assist on a project by measuring snow density? Well, there was another group at the Institute of Hydrology measuring moisture in the soil using an instrument called the neutron probe, which uses the fact that fast neutrons are diverted and lose energy when they hit hydrogen atoms. So if you have a source of fast neutrons in wet soil, then the hydrogen atoms interact with the fast neutrons, slow them down and turn them back so a detector can pick them up.

12:41And therefore, the count rate of your detector is related to the amount of water in the soil. Because water contains hydrogen. So the more of these neutrons, subatomic particles, bounce back, the more hydrogen, the more water, the higher the moisture. That's right. And of course, we saw that that would work on snow as well, because snow has hydrogen atoms. Well, it's only water, right? It's only water, exactly. Exactly. And so we could get the density of snow by doing this. Right, right. So this is the first time the neutron probe had ever been used on snow. Well, it had been used a long, long time ago in the States and people had abandoned it because it was just too difficult.

13:21And I think the problem there was that they were taking measurements about every metre or so and not getting anything very interesting out. and what I did was to make measurements every centimetre or so and then you started to pick up variations in the density which were quite meaningful and worth knowing. You just had to make measurements at very, very fine intervals and that, of course, took an awful long time to start off with because each measurement took a minute and then you would, by hand, have to lower the instrument down and then you had another minute. So you can imagine going down to 10 metres over a day, you would be pretty exhausted by the end of all of that.

14:03Fascinating. So it was used to measure the amount of moisture in soil. You're using it to measure the density of snow or ice. Yes, that's right. You'd been with the Institute of Hydrology for a decade when finally there was the moment you'd been waiting for. The British Antarctic Survey dropped its ban on women scientists. And in 1986, you were made head of their new Ice and Climate Division, going in as one of the first wave of women and a department leader, no less. Were there any dinosaurs that you had to confront who believed that it wasn't a good idea to have women scientists? Oh, yes, there were quite a lot.

14:41And we had the most wonderful committee, which was called the Women in Antarctica Committee, which was designed to make sure that it took the longest possible time to allow anyone to get to the Antarctic. And they would be using every trick in the book. I was really quite fond of the head of the committee, but he would sit down and he would explain very, very clearly to me that men were actually elephant seals. And what would happen if you put female elephant seals with male elephant seals is an awful lot of roaring and savage fighting and generally bad behaviour from the males because they wanted to grab hold of the females.

15:22and it was really no good me saying, but actually, you know, I think human beings are human beings, not elephant seals. So, you know, we had some fun for a few years. That's a nice word to use, fun.

15:38Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies. And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunch boxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market.

16:05Liz Morris:Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Summer Savings Event is here at Apple Vacations. It's the perfect time to bring everyone together for the getaway you've been dreaming about. Book between July 24th and August 27th and enjoy up to 55 % instant savings. From relaxing beach days to unforgettable moments with the people who matter most, your next vacation starts here. Travel through July 31st, 2027. Start your vacation today at applevacations.com or through your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts.

16:37Well, Liz, the following year you got the opportunity to go to Antarctica. We're going to come to the fieldwork in a second, but what was it like being there at last? Well, it was sheer joy. It was absolute happiness. I've never been so purely engaged with anything and feeling I was in the right place, the right time, doing the right thing. And on that trip, you became, I believe, the first British woman to undertake tent-based fieldwork in Antarctica. Yes, and there were a few ideas around which made things a bit more difficult. For example, they decided there should be a rule that I should never be alone with a man, which was the reason why we had a three-person field party.

17:21And that made things a lot more difficult because up to then, every sort of logistic thing that Bass did was done in pairs. It was all set up for twos. And that was dropped very quickly after that first field season. So you had to fly out there, be dropped off with your tent and your snowmobile and then off you go. So what was it you were doing there? On that first field season, we had already some sites in which the strain and the relative movement of the ice shelf, which we were on, was being studied. So I was actually resurveying those strain networks so we could look at change. Right. In 2001, you left the British Antarctic Survey to join Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.

18:11Was that a tough decision, leaving the organisation you'd worked so hard to get into? It was very tough, but the circumstances at the time meant that it was the best thing to do for my division during a very complicated management reorganisation. And looking back on it, of course, it brought me back into science. And although it was a bit terrifying to suddenly find that I was no longer sort of trying to support other people's science, I was actually going to have to set up a research programme of my own. And in the end, it worked out. So what was your research programme? Well, of course, it was back to my dear neutron probe because I felt there's something here.

18:55So I, first of all, got in touch with a small firm in North Wales and together we really revamped the whole thing so it was automatic and we could do about 10 metres in three hours rather than standing around for days on end. We developed it so that it could stand up to the conditions it was going to be used in. And then I started putting in research proposals to use it. So once you had this new innovative piece of kit tested, polar ready, you were off measuring density profiles in places like Devon Island in Canada's Arctic archipelago, the Agassi ice cap right up in the high Arctic. But it was the Greenland ice sheet that became a major focus for you and which you would cross, I believe, eight times between 2004 and 2011.

19:46So tell me about that project. Well, that was absolutely amazing. It was basically part of the Ground Truth programme for a satellite called Cryosat. So what we had to do was see whether what was happening on the ground matched what we thought the satellite was doing. Right. OK, so let's talk expeditions. You're preparing to cross the Greenland ice sheet, which is something like 600 kilometres from coast to coast. So a 30-day trip with a tent, a skidoo, and just one other person this time. How do you get ready for that? Well, it's very difficult if you don't have a big organisation behind you.

20:28Obviously, the British Antarctic Survey has worked forever and a day, and the Antarctic has an enormous organisation. I had nothing like that in the Scott Polar. so I basically had to do everything myself. So that meant a vast amount of planning beforehand and some of the things worked, some of the things didn't work but in the end we did it and the top bit of advice that I got when I first joined BAS make sure you have redundancy for everything you can possibly have redundancy for do you have a fuse for every bit of equipment that you've got etc, etc, etc and it's all got to be written down in interminable lists.

21:09Tell me, what's the food like on a trip like that? Everybody else but me thinks it's dreadful, but I'm really quite fond of dried food. They're basically army rations. And a whole month in freezing conditions with just one other person for company, it's got to be pretty mentally challenging. Do you ever get fed up? Do you fall out? Well, I think you have different sort of relationships with different people, obviously. Some people, you know, sort of been instant friends. Some people have been more in professional relationship. You know, we're going to make sure this all works. But you wouldn't quarrel because you can't afford to quarrel.

21:51Both of you have got to be working really well together. Did you ever encounter any problems, things going wrong on these trips? I think the one which aggravated me most happened in Greenland, where we were using skidoos which were prepared for us by the Americans who had Summit Station. And in the middle of the traverse, in a fairly inaccessible point, the oil lines on one of the skidoos came off. And so the engine blew up because it wasn't getting oil. and then we had the satellite phone calls to somewhere in Colorado where they said well we can't get a Twin Otter there without putting an extra fuel tank in and if we put the extra fuel tank in we can't put the Skidoo in so that's not going to work.

22:36Oh it's just the weight of the plane? It's just the volume inside the Twin Otter and so in the end the Americans came out dragging a spare Skidoo behind them and delivered the replacement Skidoo and so then the project could carry on. And you just had to stay put and wait for them to go. I mean, some of us might consider being stranded in the middle of an ice sheet like that the perfect opportunity to panic. I get the impression, Liz, that you kept a calm head. What do you do when you're waiting for your rescuers to turn up? Well, they called themselves rescuers. In my view, they were just resupplying a skidoo.

23:13They were just the AA. They were the AA bringing a skidoo, yes. I mean, let's not get overdramatic about this. I think the thing is that if you've got food and fuel and a tent, what's to worry about? Of course, the whole point of recording the snow density data in Greenland and in other places that you visited was to help build a really sound scientific picture of how climate change was affecting polar ice shelves. So what were you and your colleagues seeing? that there were changes in the density of the snow and there were changes in the amount of snow you know just as there are differences in rainfall from year to year here the question was were these long-term trends or was it just natural variability and in order to work out it was a really complex bit of physics because the density of the snow would be affected both by the fact that there was perhaps more weight on top of a bit of snow because there'd be more accumulation or it could be affected by the fact that the temperature had gone up and therefore the processes of densification were quicker because you've got a higher temperature and you had to untangle all of these things and try to work out a theory which would mean that if somebody said, right, in the future, I think the accumulation over the Greenland ice sheet is going to be this and the temperature is going to be that, you could then say, right, well, this is what's going to happen to the height of the sheet.

24:54Right. And by the end of the work, I could say, now, look, you know, the bit I know about, you would have to wait for seven years to detect a trend. Right. But then the seven years are up and you are saying it And then you've got the problem of getting people to listen to what's going on and getting people to understand that there was climate change going on. It was affecting the ice sheets. And, you know, could you please think about what's going to happen in the future? So it sounds like you did have a problem convincing people or perhaps more importantly, governments to sit up and take notice of your findings.

25:29Yes, I think it's the usual thing when you tell people things that they really seriously don't want to hear. It's quite difficult to get through. Going back to 2006, Liz, that's when you also semi-retired. Although you continued working on the Greenland project and other projects. Then in 2014, you made a final trip to the Antarctic to train a PhD student on your instrument, the neutron probe. going back to Antarctica was it bittersweet that final visit yes uh I think the parts of it were wonderful because I could go back to Rothera base where I'd started off from and I could see the effect of all those years and it was very very good to for example walk into the bar and see you know a whole group of middle-aged Dutch lady scientists with their beers feeling at home that That was nice.

26:25It was sad to see quite so many people, new buildings, etc. But that is always, you know, the old romantic doesn't like to see progress. That's progress. That's how it is. Well, Liz, for years, you've dedicated yourself to advancing our understanding of how climate change is transforming our planet. And unfortunately, last year, the world hit the 1.5 degree global warming threshold, which was previously dubbed the point of no return. What exactly does that mean for our polar regions? Well, I think probably the latest estimates are that it's likely we'll probably get up to, say, half a metre of sea level rise by 2100.

27:09But it could be up to a metre, which would be really drastic, if some of the things which we fear might happen in the Antarctic or in Greenland happen. So there's a low likelihood but high impact scenario, which is really quite dramatic. So what's your message to the world in light of this situation? What can we, what should we be doing? We're in the game of slowing down change to try and make sure that it doesn't happen so fast that we absolutely can't cope with it. So we don't want a city to suddenly drown and then all the people in that city to have to move elsewhere. We don't want a whole area of land suddenly to be uninhabitable.

27:55So I think the message is do every little thing. Don't worry about not being able to do the big thing. Just do every little thing. And we do have this wonderful capacity to look at the world, try to understand it and try to work out how we can make things better. I mean, that is the hope for humanity is science. and the possibility to use it for good. Liz Morris, thank you very much for sharing your life scientific. Thank you very much. And thank you for listening. I'm Jim Al-Khalili and my producer is Lucy Taylor.