Our Chief Scientist and saying to you that the science is at the centre of everything we do and I continue to say that
and every time I see you so I'm saying it publicly as well.
So it's my honor to chair the panel session that we have on now and I'd like to introduce our panelists,
so first of all Professor Neroli Abram who is from the ANU and is the chair of the National Committee on Antarctic Research.
Then we have Professor Steven Chown, they will be speaking in this order so there is a reason for this seating pattern.
Professor Steven Chown, who's from Monash University and is the Director of the SAEF program.
Professor Matthew King who's from the University of Tasmania and is the Director of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science,
and Professor Nathan Bindhoff, University of Tasmania and who is the leader of the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.
Now our challenge is to address the topic which is, Antarctic on the brink, science for societal certainty,
and to do so in a snappy, nice 30 minutes and preferably leave a little bit of room for Q and A at the end,
but we'll see how we go.
So I'll hand over and welcome Neroli.
Excellent, thank you very much for the introduction. So I'm the the chair of the National Committee for Antarctic Research.
That's one of the national committees run by the Australian Academy of Science and that committee has
the role of representing the whole of the Antarctic science community in Australia and so we do that by
making sure that the membership on that committee has a whole range of diversity.
So that includes making sure that we have membership that covers research that's happening in both the universities and
in the government organisations who work in Antarctica.
Making sure that our membership covers different career stages and also addresses the different themes covered within the
Australian Antarctic Science Strategy.
It's an exciting time to be able to play a role in leading Australia's Antarctic science community.
The science challenges, you've already heard about some of them today, that we are addressing, they're enormous
and they will have huge impacts for the world.
And importantly, we've seen transformations in the science funding and the national infrastructure
that will really allow us to address these truly grand challenges, with the scale of effort that can only be achieved through
large and multi-disciplinary campaigns and by making sure that we are bringing together the whole of the Antarctic science community.
In the university sector, those transformations in funding are also allowing us to make inroads in
improving diversity and breaking down barriers as we train the next generation of Antarctic scientists.
Through the National Committee for Antarctic Research we
also connect with the international community, including through the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research and
we're actually this week in the delegates meeting for SCAR.
I apologize if I'm a little bit weary for those late night meetings that are happening this week, but I did want to end by just
sharing one of the discussions that we had last night in that international community, discussing about
preparations for the next International Polar Year so the last Polar Year was in 2007.
The proposal is to have the next one in 2032 so that will be 25 years on from the last International Polar Year
but the very strong message that came from the delegates last night, from numerous nations, is that we actually don't have that
long to wait. We need to be making those inroads now into these important scientific questions and using that
next International Polar Year as the destination for reporting the really important science that has to be done this decade in Antarctica.
Thank you.
Steven.
Thank you. I'm Director of Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future, or SAEF, which is a research and workforce development
program funded by the Australian Research Council through its special research initiatives program headquartered at Monash
but with partners across the country in universities, government organisations and others.
And with international partners including industry partners such as the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators.
That's essentially the private sector travel body for and one of Antarctica's largest activities which is tourism that
happens annually and is now reaching, for those who of you who don't know, numbers of about a hundred thousand tourists
a year, is the estimate.
We have three main priorities within SAEF.
The first is develop to develop an understanding of Antarctica in the earth system, especially to improve projections for what
might be coming in the future and how to mitigate the impacts of the change that is coming, especially in biodiversity.
The second of our main priorities is to foster an appreciation of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean's role in society,
and to ensure that the influence of these regions on Australia, and elsewhere, is firmly understood
both by members of society and, of course, by the policy makers that look after the policies that
are responsible for, in fact, keeping us safe, secure and living in a sustainable world.
The third of our priorities is to convey scientific evidence to policy makers to ensure that Antarctica remains
in the words of the Protocol and Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty,
"a natural reserve devoted to peace and science".
We fit well within the Australian Antarctic Program. We're complementary to the other large research programs based at universities.
We have partners in the Australian Antarctic Division and we have a seven year outlook of research that's essential.
That seven year window resonates very well with me, because essentially we have about 10 to 20 years really
to get on top of the problem and by the time those 10 to 20 years are up, either we will have succeeded in getting on top of
the problem or we will face the challenges that Tas van Ommen and Ben Galton-Fenzi raised in their earlier talks today.
And we will have much less in the way of extremely beautiful and inspiring biodiversity in the Antarctic.
Thank you.
I'm Matt King. I'm the Director of the ARC Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science based out of the
University of Tasmania but with seven university partners across Australia and various Australian government partners and about
20 international partners and we're interested in helping prepare communities for the climate risks that will emerge from
East Antarctica in the Southern Ocean.
We do that by recognising that Antarctica is a deeply coupled and complex system, that you need to understand,
the atmosphere, the ocean, the ecosystems, the sea ice, the land ice and even the solid earth in Antarctica because
they're all coupled together in very complicated ways.
And so we're trying to treat Antarctica as the deeply coupled and complex problem that it is.
ACEAS works in particularly in partnership with SAEF in areas that we align, particularly Steven's just talked about some of the
sea level aspects and climate aspects
and especially with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership also based out of the
University of Tasmania, and Nathan will speak about that in a moment, but ACEAS and AAPP
in particular are focusing on two big problems.
They're big problems in the sense that they're big scientific problems that require scale to actually tackle,
but they're big problems because they're societally important problems and those two amongst other things
we're working on is about sea level.
How much is sea level going to rise in the future?
In particular how much does Antarctica and East Antarctica
are going to contribute, and the role of the Southern Ocean and
the climate system either, in mitigating climate change or, exacerbating climate change.
Now Ben and Tas have already spoken about the sea level problem, just to remind you in the next 80 years or so,
somewhere between 0.3 and 0.9 metres of extra sea level will emerge globally and a large portion of that likely from
Antarctica but 0.3 to 0.9 is a big range but it's even bigger range if you consider the low likelihood but plausible scenario of
2.7 metres by 2100 and that scenario is entirely about Antarctica and processes that are deeply uncertain in Antarctica.
And to put some, you know, faces and names to that, that's tens of thousands of Australian homes that are either at high risk
or very high risk to coastal inundation.
230 billion of Australian infrastructure vulnerable to a one metre sea level rise and our Pacific neighbors, whatever happens in
terms of the contribution to sea level from whether it's Antarctica or Greenland, they feel it by about an
extra 20 percent, just because of some complicated physics that I won't go into,
but the Pacific actually feels the brunt of any sea level change.
Now the IPCC projections around sea level are as good as we can produce but we're also fully aware that there are deep
uncertainties in Antarctica where we know that the knowledge that we have makes us quite concerned
about whether those projections are going to be actually what might play out in the future or if it could be better or even worse.
There are surprises that keep emerging from Antarctica.
We saw some, just this year, a 40 degree heat wave in Antarctica. It didn't get to 40 degrees positive, it still stayed
below negative in some cases, but 40 degrees, you can imagine a 40 degree heat wave in Australia.
40 degrees warmer than normal, that is, and we saw the breakup of the Conger ice shelf which
didn't have major ramifications for sea level but these are the surprises we keep on getting caught
by and we need to get ahead of the surprises and that's part of the work that we're trying to do.
So in particular, thinking about sea level we're trying to fill in the gaps in the map of the things that we don't know.
There are large, voids where dragons might be lurking and we need to get on top of those.
We're trying to use data from past warm periods to give some constraints and what the future might look like as well
to rule out unrealistic scenarios.
We're trying to test whether the ice shelves, which hold back the ice on the continent, whether they'll break up or not and
over what time scales they might break up.
And we need to know more about the pathways for the warm ocean water, the ocean that's absorbed 90 percent of the warmth
and how that can get to the ice and melt it away in a very efficient way, in a way that's very bad for us as a society,
and Nathan's going to talk a little bit more about the ocean.
Thank you for that segue Matt.
I'm the program leader for the AAPP and the "p" is about partnership and our partners includes the
Australian Antarctic Division, the CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, Bureau of Meteorology, IMOS and UTAS,
and so we actually come at the funding of the AAPP in a slightly different direction to the two prior speakers.
Our mission is a very generic thing and will be reflected in many
of the conversations the role of Antarctica in the climate system and on marine ecosystems.
So if I take the segue from Matt, we've seen the extraordinary risks that cannot be ruled out for the Antarctic
ice sheet and its contribution to sea level going into the future and the ocean is an important player.
Antarctica is not freezing, is not melting from above, unlike Greenland.
Antarctica is actually melting from below and it melts from below 50 percent of the current melt rate is from
the oceans, and that's accelerating causing the mass loss, contributing to the mass loss around Antarctica,
and you saw the risks. The risk in West Antarctica and the emerging risk in the movie that Tas showed in East Antarctica
and that's a primary focus of some of our programs to understand that how those warm waters are encroaching into
the ice shelf cavities and melting and accelerating the melt rate. But it's not just a story about sea level rise.
We sometimes think it's all about sea level rise, or sometimes I do, it's actually also about other things,
the ocean is an enormous trap for heat coming into the earth.
In fact, in the last decade all of the heating in the planet went into the southern hemisphere, predominantly
into the Southern Ocean and predominantly, actually, just north of the Antarctic circumpolar current.
If you can remember Tas' Piccadilly Circus figure, where you saw the Antarctic circumpolar current going around Antarctica
just on the Northern side of that.
Most of that heat is trapped there. So of all that heat, 90 percent of that was actually trapped in the region just on the
Northern flank of the ACC.
That's an important thing.
It saves us actually from the disaster that could come, if it got to those ice shelves and the cavity itself.
But it's not just about heat actually, the ocean is an important sink of carbon.
Currently the oceans are sinking one-third of everything that's emitted by humans.
But in the projections that will decline. Between the terrestrial and oceans it drops to 38 percent in a high emission scenarios,
but it's a little uncertain and we study biological pumps, the processes by which in the sea ice,
by the ecosystems underneath the sea ice, in the uptake of carbon from the atmosphere,
in the biological pumps, you know, not simply just the krill but also the phytoplankton at the
drop out into the deep ocean and get sequestered.
I don't want to swear in this conversation so I'm not going to talk about the full detail of that but these pumps are a critical
element of thinking about carbon uptake.
We think about the atmosphere as well, the clouds, that are a central problem actually to projecting our future climate.
So I actually will pose a few questions to you as a kind of a difference here.
We've heard about the Integrated Digital East Antarctica project and the East Antarctic monitoring projects.
If you think about those, these are fantastic things. They're really frameworks, so what is it that we should be
measuring in East Antarctica? Should we be measuring the warm waters coming onto the shelves?
Should we be measuring the thickness of the ice shelves? Should we be understanding the acceleration of them?
What is it that we need to actually track that canary in this coal mine, so to speak.
It's a terrible pun, sorry, and of course we've got to make it kind of real time and so that's another part where
the sort of idea framework can work so we have suddenly, on time, right in this critical decade for actually
answering these critical questions around Antarctica.
Thank you very much.
Thank you and very well managed time-wise there, panel.
There's an opportunity for a couple of questions that I'll deliver.
So first of all, hinging off the partnership that Nathan was talking about, I'll ask the first question for Nathan,
and Matt can have a comment on and then I'll come to a separate one for Steven and Neroli.
So hinging off the partnerships, clearly there's a very strong university and public sector partnership in the science.
So we would like your views on how think that's going but also
on how you think we could leverage best value from that partnership, so over to Nathan and Matt.
Okay I'll give Matt a chance in a moment.
The partnership's an essential thing. If you think about it, Antarctica requires long-term sustained efforts.
The Antarctic Division is a conduit and a pathway to basically the only logistics provider to East Antarctica.
No one's going to do that from the university sector without getting into trouble.
So that partnership is super clear but there are new things we can bring to it.
PhD students, early career researchers.
We have a growing climate community and other paleo communities involved in, and related to, the research so
the footprint of expertise, logistics is actually central to solving these problems.
And you can look at the activities of the Antarctic Division and you can see how we augment them from the universities
by providing some of the deeper knowledge around modeling, around the biogeochemical cycles and so on.
And that is actually where we get power.
So Nathan's outlined some of the differences in opportunities.
I mean to answer Lynn's first question, I think actually the footing of the collaboration is as strong as it's been,
in I guess, the the 30 years I've been in and around Antarctic science between the Antarctic Division and the university sector.
I'm super excited by the opportunities that that brings.
One other area I think that, you know, the universities always have a struggle doing
long-term dedicated studies in everywhere around the world it's almost impossible to do, you know,
5, 10 year studies, 20-year studies, 30 year studies and I think that's super important for governments to be leading that.
One of the other areas is doing an analysis of where the, I guess, the university market fails.
Where over over a long period of time, the universities are just not investing in particular skills that Australia needs
for its national capability.
And may never do and yet, I can think of examples where Australia is sort of exposed at some times.
And so there's an opportunity to partner together to go actually who's going to do this piece of work because someone
has to do it and I think that collaboration and that discussion is going on and it's super exciting
as part of this decadal planning process.
Thank you Nathan and Matt.
I will now turn to Steven and then Neroli for another slightly different tangent to the questions but still based on this
really important partnership and well invested in partnership with a view that it delivers and
and is science for societal certainty, going back to our theme, so the question for you
is for many Australians, Antarctica seems a long way away and
I know it's not just science for Australia, it's science in terms of societal certainty in the issues that the world
and challenges the world faces, but how do you think and what opportunities do you think there are for making
the science that we're doing more relevant to the community?
Thank you.
I'd like to start also by answering one of Nathan's questions and that is, if he comes over to the SAEF SRI and speaks to our folk
who are working in value of information theory then answering that question of what to measure in real time will be answered
fairly straightforwardly, though implementing it will be much more difficult.
In response to the question, I think there are a few things that we could do.
The first one is to actually make the messaging fairly straightforward for society, and some
of those messages are already resonating in social media.
So, for example, what happens in Antarctica does not stay in Antarctica and then a small sea level segue
or Antarctica is like no place on earth which, of course, it isn't in places because there are, in fact, places in Antarctica
where there is no life.
Microbiologists have looked and there's no life and that's, of course, just quite similar to the rest of the solar system.
There are other messages where you can say that Antarctica is coming to a postcode near you and
that's not necessarily sea level. That's work actually that Neroli has done showing that
the southeastern fires, the huge intensity, is influenced by the southern annular mode, which in turn is a climate system
that may intensify the extent to which we see large extensive fires, so Antarctica is influencing everything around you
and I think with those really straightforward messages including for example, unhappy feet.
I mean that sort of resonates really well that we can start having society involved and then transfer the messages.
I do think that when we think about our words to society, it's not only for the policy makers but in fact,
it's for the people that the policy makers are responsible for and who elected them and I think if we get that message right then
we'll be speaking to all of our audiences as scientists and in a global setting Australia is proving to be really good at doing
this in the Treaty system, in the CCAMLR setting and in other international agreements where we are, in fact,
working for the benefit of society. Thank you.
Thanks very much.
So I think that we have a lot of strengths when we're thinking about how we communicate about Antarctic science
and the first one, of course, is that Antarctica is just an astounding place and I'm sure I don't have to convince
anybody in the room of that fact.
So I think it does make our job of communicating the changes, and the importance of Antarctica, a lot easier than for some
areas but I think one of the the major challenges that we face is that some of these changes in the way
that Antarctica will affect us in the future. When we talk about for example sea level rise, we start having to talk about
2300 and 2500 in terms of when those major impacts are actually going to be realised and so that is a challenge
in terms of how do we convey the message that, actually, it's the decisions that we're making right now in this decade that
actually set those things into motion.
So I think that we have a role in terms of working together as a community to to come up with the the way that
we tell that story in a way that resonates with the people, so that we can make sure that the policy decisions that we need
to happen this decade to stop those worst case scenarios are actually put in place and that we're playing the role
internationally to make sure that we bring the global community along with making those changes as well.
And I think the other aspect where particularly the universities have a role to play, is through that training of the next
generation of scientists but also just the next generation of the workforce in particular and
I think increasingly we're going to see that climate change is impacting every aspect of society and certainly we're already
seeing it in the university sector, that we can't train climate scientists fast enough to meet up with the demand
for the jobs that are out there and that's something that I think is a continuation that increasingly all areas
of our businesses and economy and communities are actually going to need this climate science
information and how that relates to Antarctica so I think the universities have an important
role to play there in getting that message out to the people that we're training as well.
Thank you very much. So thank you Steven and Neroli, and some terrific insights there.
I like the idea of Antarctica like no place on earth and a great opportunity to ensure that there's that relevance connection
and ability to translate it.
So we are now at time for our session so I think we must conclude at this point and can I just say, and if we could ask for
a round of applause for our speakers Neroli, Steven, Matt and Nathan.
Thank you very much.