Climate scientists spend a lot of time studying the past to predict the future. Now, you might be recalling all the times we’ve talked about the danger of thinking you can figure out the future just by studying the past. That certainly stands, but the fact is, you have to start somewhere. Going back to what has come before can provide a valuable baseline for understanding how one thing affects another and can contribute to the development of the climate over time.
One of the places scientists go to help understand the climate of past ages is the ocean, specifically the ocean bottom. They collect samples and study them for levels of a variety of different elements including calcium, strontium, magnesium, lithium, barium, and several more. These can give a snapshot of the past, giving scientists an idea of how much carbon is present in the ocean, the rate at which the crust is breaking down and more. However, these results might have been skewed because they left out contributions of groundwater.
Some scientists have brought up the idea that groundwater might be contributing these elements to the ocean but those concerns have typically been dismissed as insignificant. That, however, has changed with a new study by Kimberley Mayfield. The University of California doctoral candidate did her thesis on the subject. She built a library of hundreds of groundwater samples by begging them off of anyone she could. While still preliminary, that study shows that a surprising amount of the above elements are getting into the ocean from the groundwater when it leaches out into the rivers.
This is also important for the climate in other ways as these elements also contribute to the growth of phytoplankton near the mouths of rivers. Phytoplankton are tiny little critters that form the basis of significant parts of the food chain. When there are more of them, it can help fuel populations of other species of marine life. However, if other factors are depressing the fish population, the plankton can grow out of control and wind up using other resources and wind up choking out other life.
No doubt Mayfield’s study will help drive other work that will improve our understanding of the ocean and its effect on the climate. It’s also a good illustration of the TARTLE model at work. No, she didn’t use TARTLE but what she did is use a system that isn’t very different. In getting groundwater samples from many different people in many different walks of life, she unknowingly adopted a very TARTLE-like process. She solicited data straight from the source and used it to draw her conclusions.
Future researchers can do the same through TARTLE’s digital marketplace. What’s more, it would be possible to conduct research into what is going into the groundwater. By asking users to share data on how much bleach, detergent, and other household items they use, scientists could get a solid picture of how much of all of that is getting into the groundwater. That information could then be combined with data from groundwater samples. If the process is repeated for several regions it would be possible to see clearly how much environmental impact one person has based on his daily habits. We would actually be able to develop a more accurate climate model using information that covers every stage from the manufacturing of various products, to those products being used, to the groundwater and out into the ocean. This kind of analysis has become possible only recently but it will be sure to be invaluable in the near future. That’s the kind of thing TARTLE makes possible, we open up the opportunity for average people to contribute to the greater understanding of the world we live in and how we affect it.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Climate scientists spend a lot of time studying the past to predict the future. Now, you might be recalling all the times we’ve talked about the danger of thinking you can figure out the future just by studying the past.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Jason Rigby (00:18):
(singing).
Jason Rigby (00:29):
Dude, every time you have that cup, Starbucks is so amazing. And we were talking to the designer and we're looking at some Starbucks stuff the other day. But just to have like the Whale Tail, the Chinook salmon and then Bigfoot, they just encapsulated everything. Chopping wood, Mount Rainier, apples.
Alexander McCaig (00:47):
Yeah, the captured the stuff in here.
Jason Rigby (00:48):
Yeah, I mean, I'm from there, I mean I would-
Alexander McCaig (00:50):
[crosstalk 00:00:50] a mountain goat.
Jason Rigby (00:50):
... probably say that's where I've lived the most, is Washington State. Yeah, they have a ton of mountain goats and I love watching them like move all around. They literally have no F's.
Alexander McCaig (01:00):
Don't hop on shiftiest rock.
Jason Rigby (01:03):
You do rock climbing.
Alexander McCaig (01:03):
When I rock climb and I like step on a chip, I'm like, "Dang, that's small." And it's like a quarter of an inch and I'm like, "I can't believe my foot supporting it." The goat's just like...
Jason Rigby (01:11):
Yeah, they just bounce off of it.
Alexander McCaig (01:13):
Just what it is.
Jason Rigby (01:13):
I wonder how many of them die?
Alexander McCaig (01:15):
All the time.
Jason Rigby (01:15):
Oh, they don't care?
Alexander McCaig (01:17):
No, they die all the time, and what about those big hawks or eagles that rip them off the side of the cliff. You seen them?
Jason Rigby (01:21):
Yeah, I've that. Yeah, that's crazy, bro.
Alexander McCaig (01:24):
Great footage. Yeah. What does it have to do with Santa Claus?
Jason Rigby (01:27):
Oh, dude, that was great. All right. It was just like this big hawk just pulls big poor-
Alexander McCaig (01:39):
It was just flipping through midair.
Jason Rigby (01:40):
Yeah, yeah. And it's like, "Hey, let's talk about Santa Claus kids."
Alexander McCaig (01:43):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (01:51):
(singing).
Jason Rigby (01:51):
Yes, Buzzard's Bay. We're going to talk about that.
Alexander McCaig (01:54):
I used to row there.
Jason Rigby (01:55):
Yeah, you were a Collegiate rower, right?
Alexander McCaig (01:58):
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. So I did rowing in Buzzard's Bay. I rowed down in Princeton, I've rowed all over the place, the world.
Jason Rigby (02:09):
How much is like a single rower?
Alexander McCaig (02:11):
A single?
Jason Rigby (02:12):
Like, are they fiberglass, wood?
Alexander McCaig (02:15):
They're like [crosstalk 00:02:16].
Jason Rigby (02:16):
I mean, if you wanted to just-
Alexander McCaig (02:16):
Carbon fiber.
Jason Rigby (02:18):
So let's say I buy my lake house and I wanted to have a rower there just for morning exercise.
Alexander McCaig (02:22):
Like, the machine?
Jason Rigby (02:23):
No, no. A rower-
Alexander McCaig (02:25):
Like, a boat?
Jason Rigby (02:25):
Yeah, Like a small one where I could row out on a lake.
Alexander McCaig (02:28):
Like a single. Probably like 10 plus G's.
Jason Rigby (02:30):
Really?
Alexander McCaig (02:31):
Yeah. You get big boys are like 55k. The one with eight people in it, carbon fiber all glassed up-
Jason Rigby (02:37):
But they have a single one?
Alexander McCaig (02:38):
... hydrophobic coating. Yeah. Singles, doubles, quads, eights.
Jason Rigby (02:41):
I'll have to[crosstalk 00:02:40] that'll be quite cool. Be better than a kayak where you're going like this because you get like full-
Alexander McCaig (02:45):
The full body motion. Even da Vinci appreciated rowing because it was a full movement. What am I talking about? Oh, that lake, groundwater. Nobody wants to build on like dirty like polluted land, do you? No, so up in Buzzard's Bay, in Massachusetts, it's on the hook, if you're looking at a map.
Jason Rigby (03:10):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're looking at one right now.
Alexander McCaig (03:11):
So Cape Cod is in like the hook area, and then underneath that's Buzzard's Bay, on the other side of that arm. So these climate scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and other places have found that for a long time we've lacked certain data that has come from groundwater isotopes. And these isotopes define in the soil of the ocean what climate used to look like and what sort of life-sustaining elements are going into the water so that it feeds the phytoplankton, which is the basis for a huge majority of ocean life. And those elements are... Can you name them, please, so we sound smart?
Jason Rigby (03:55):
The elements here, they measure the level of these elements and others in deep sea sediments to reconstruct certain aspects of Earth's history. For instance, they can look at how intense the breakdown of Earth's crust has been over time or how much carbon has been stored in the ocean. So they're getting all this from groundwater until now. Though a piece of the data has been missing, the groundwater piece.
Alexander McCaig (04:15):
Yeah, nobody was doing a good job collecting that groundwater data.
Jason Rigby (04:19):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (04:19):
And now we have the technology to put these into our large datasets and run these through these models, these climate models to see what effect this has had in the past and what maybe it'll have in the future. What are the isotopes? I know it's closer towards the beginning. What's it say up here?
Jason Rigby (04:33):
I'm reading it right now.
Alexander McCaig (04:34):
Rontium, strontium? What was it?
Jason Rigby (04:39):
If you see that word... Oh, this is talking about nutrients, phytoplankton. Oh, here it is. "So important climate"... Ooh, Lithium.
Alexander McCaig (04:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so keep going.
Jason Rigby (04:49):
"Lithium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and barium."
Alexander McCaig (04:54):
Yeah. So all of these things are leaching out of the groundwater and they go into the saltwater of the ocean. And from that, it creates a chemical mixture that is conducive for phytoplankton to go in and use that as energy, along with the sunlight to keep splitting into more cells. And then from that, larger organisms feed off of it and larger and larger through the chain of events through the entire ocean. But what you find is that not only is it that accruing towards the phytoplankton blooms, it's also going into the substrates that are on the water, the actual crust.
Alexander McCaig (05:27):
So as you dig down into the crust, you can check those levels of those elements against how much you were receiving from the actual groundwater now. And so it can tell you the differential of what the climate used to look like, the amount of decay and breakdown it's had, and where we are at this very moment in comparison to our past. And so this piece has really helped out with all of the research that has been on just the larger state and health of the ocean affecting our climate. Now we can pull in the fresh water data to come in and pair with it because we really only had 50% of the picture. And now you have that again, they call it the Santa Claus because it's delivering the presents, which is the data-
Jason Rigby (06:04):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (06:04):
... on these isotopes to all these researchers that needed it for the climate models.
Jason Rigby (06:08):
Yeah. That's what he said. He said, "I consider myself a geochemical Santa Claus."
Alexander McCaig (06:12):
Yeah, it might be a she.
Jason Rigby (06:14):
Yeah, Kimberly Mayfield.
Alexander McCaig (06:15):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (06:17):
Yeah. Santa Claus I was thinking dude.
Alexander McCaig (06:19):
Two for two J.
Jason Rigby (06:19):
Yeah, I know, I got two for two, bro. She said it with a laugh, though. She says the research part for her doctoral thesis at the University of California, Santa Cruz took years of chemical analysis and lots of begging groundwater samples off strangers and colleagues.
Alexander McCaig (06:35):
Yeah. And so this is akin to everything else that we see in big data, everyone's trying to solve for an unknown but they make so many guesses because they're missing that key component. And for a majority of us, if you're not studying climate research, the key component is human beings.
Jason Rigby (06:50):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (06:51):
Hands down. But can you read the final quote from the gentlemen over at Woods Hole oceanographic Institute, which is in the Cape or Falmouth, I think. I want to talk about-
Jason Rigby (07:05):
Yes, the senior scientist?
Alexander McCaig (07:06):
It's a little bit of a misnomer here. So let's talk about it.
Jason Rigby (07:08):
He said, "Certainly there'll be more accurate because this is something that really hasn't been accounted for." And then, "We want to improve climate models for reasons that I believe are obvious at this point. If you ground truth, a model, and you know it does a very good job of understanding and predicting climates in the past, you know that it's going to do a good job with climates in the future."
Alexander McCaig (07:28):
That's your number one problem. We've seen this in finance and what do they always say to get rid of their liability? "Historical gains are not indicative of future earnings," or whatever it is.
Jason Rigby (07:40):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (07:40):
"Historical data's not indicative of future earnings." It will predict and some sort of extrapolated pattern. Is it going to be accurate? Probably not. Is it great that we've solved for this unknown? Yes. But the past is not indicative of the future.
Jason Rigby (07:58):
Exactly, right.
Alexander McCaig (07:59):
The now, the moment is indicative of what's going to happen 10 seconds from now. You need to look at those moments, not time in a linear fashion, right?
Jason Rigby (08:08):
Yeah. Unless you can manufacture the future. I know, speaking of finance, these machine algorithms looking at all these candlestick patterns-
Alexander McCaig (08:17):
Charts.
Jason Rigby (08:17):
... charts and stuff from the past. But actually because there's so many of them trading now, they're actually creating a future based off of the past just because the model-
Alexander McCaig (08:29):
So the algorithm's forcing it to do.
Jason Rigby (08:29):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, is forcing it to do. But it has nothing really to do because they said candlestick patterns are about 20% accurate. It's almost as accurate as a hunch.
Alexander McCaig (08:36):
Candlestick patterns are 20% accurate, and 85% of the trading that goes through the financial systems are done by robotic algorithms.
Jason Rigby (08:44):
Yeah, people don't realize that.
Alexander McCaig (08:46):
So we have 16% accuracy on all trades and it's mostly run by computers. 16% trading accuracy, what a joke. It's form-fitting the future, it's just saying this is what it is.
Jason Rigby (09:02):
Yeah, as long as they can create. And then what's funny is you look at these big, especially when you're... What do they call those guys, the big billionaires and stuff like that, that have the funds for the elite?
Alexander McCaig (09:14):
Fat cats? What?
Jason Rigby (09:15):
Yeah, no not fat cats.
Alexander McCaig (09:19):
Robber barons. Come one.
Jason Rigby (09:19):
No, the ones that have... and they have like a little safety bonus in there to make sure at the end as long as they're getting like 8, 9% increase and their special funds, and you have to have like over a million dollars before you can invest in them. People are yelling on-
Alexander McCaig (09:31):
I don't want to say like blue sky funds or something like that.
Jason Rigby (09:33):
Yeah, I know. I've read books on these guys and everything else. I have a book right there.
Alexander McCaig (09:39):
Well, apparently you need read another one.
Jason Rigby (09:40):
Yeah, I know. Exactly. But they have all these, they're not ETFs or any of that, they're these special funds that like 1% of the world invests in, and they have these guys that control them.
Alexander McCaig (09:53):
We'll call them SPVs, special purpose vehicles.
Jason Rigby (09:55):
Yeah. And they have these guys that control them. And they said they went through all their investing and decided, and it was like out of the hundreds or thousands of trades that they made, there was like one or two that actually made them profitable.
Alexander McCaig (10:10):
Yeah. You can take all these losses as long as you have a big swing that wipes everything else out.
Jason Rigby (10:14):
It's everybody now buying Bitcoin at 8 or 10,000 and then it went up to 25, 30,000.
Alexander McCaig (10:21):
So close to 40.
Jason Rigby (10:23):
Yeah. They ended up making all their gains for 2020, just off of crypto currency.
Alexander McCaig (10:27):
Well, it's a good hedging strategy.
Jason Rigby (10:29):
Yes, hedge funds. There we go.
Alexander McCaig (10:30):
Oh, my gosh. That's what I was looking for?
Jason Rigby (10:31):
That's what I was looking for, bro.
Alexander McCaig (10:33):
Oh, my goodness.
Jason Rigby (10:34):
Because the hedge fund managers, a couple of them are billionaires.
Alexander McCaig (10:38):
There's quite a few of them.
Jason Rigby (10:39):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (10:40):
They do a pretty good job.
Jason Rigby (10:41):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (10:41):
And a lot of their money's made on management fees not actually [crosstalk 00:10:45].
Jason Rigby (10:44):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of Santa Claus.
Alexander McCaig (10:47):
Yeah, "Speaking of Santa Claus delivering me a big old check," right? No, listen, groundwater isotopes extremely important. I don't want that individual Woods Hole oceanographic Institute to fall prey to the same issues we see in finance. Do not manufacturer a future that is a lie. And the reason I say that is because we don't want to manufacture something that'll say, "Oh, things are looking stable," when it's really getting worse.
Jason Rigby (11:14):
Yeah and we know that. I mean over and over, can we harp on this? We've heard we have 70 years left on this planet before it's irreversible. So we don't need bad models, not right now.
Alexander McCaig (11:28):
This is not a time for bad models-
Jason Rigby (11:29):
Right?
Alexander McCaig (11:29):
... it's a time to be accurate.
Jason Rigby (11:31):
It's a time for unity.
Alexander McCaig (11:34):
(singing)
Jason Rigby (11:34):
And that's Number four on our list.
Alexander McCaig (11:38):
Love that.
Jason Rigby (11:38):
Global peace.
Alexander McCaig (11:39):
Global peace.
Jason Rigby (11:41):
And creating unity. That's TARTLE's big seven-
Alexander McCaig (11:44):
Yep.
Jason Rigby (11:44):
... if you want to call them, in how people can give towards data. How easy is it on TARTLE to give global peace, or to give towards climate stability, or human, rights or public health?
Alexander McCaig (11:57):
Pressing your thumb on the screen maybe three or four times. It's that easy. Is there certain functions, global peace you want to share your data and your earnings towards? Oh.
Jason Rigby (12:10):
So I'm creating all this data, I'm going on these social media sites. I'm going on Medium. I'm going on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.
Alexander McCaig (12:18):
VK.
Jason Rigby (12:21):
I'm going on VK, the Russian one. Yeah, I love that. I'm going to all these different sites. Just desktop, my phone.
Alexander McCaig (12:25):
4chan.
Jason Rigby (12:26):
Yeah, I'm going on them all.
Alexander McCaig (12:28):
Silk road.
Jason Rigby (12:29):
Yeah. I'm going on all that stuff. So I can literally take what I'm doing now and go on the TARTLE marketplace-
Alexander McCaig (12:38):
Yep.
Jason Rigby (12:39):
... sell that-
Alexander McCaig (12:39):
Turn it into an asset.
Jason Rigby (12:40):
Right. Wow.
Alexander McCaig (12:41):
Share it, get paid for sharing.
Jason Rigby (12:44):
So I get money.
Alexander McCaig (12:47):
I get to increase my asset base.
Jason Rigby (12:48):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (12:49):
That's fun.
Jason Rigby (12:50):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (12:50):
I get to increase my earnings, and I get to share data towards causes I care about, Oh, and wait a minute. Do I want to donate some of my money? And then go talk to my accountant that I donated funds. Wow, that's pretty cool. I shared data-
Jason Rigby (13:03):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (13:05):
... got a little bit of a tax break-
Jason Rigby (13:06):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (13:08):
... and I'm helping solve global problems. I'm helping unify the world.
Jason Rigby (13:12):
And it's as simple as going to trtle.co?
Alexander McCaig (13:15):
Yeah, .co. And if people at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute want to get data on groundwater, well, why don't you ask all the people in the local area, what detergents they're using. How much Clorox they're flushing down their pipes, how much they're destroying the groundwater and these beautiful isotopes and not upsetting it with all this petroleum-based chemistry. Interesting.
Jason Rigby (13:37):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (13:38):
Yeah, consumption. It's amazing how people are key drivers to our climate and what its outcome is.
Jason Rigby (13:46):
Yeah. And that's number one for us, is climate stability. If we don't have a healthy globe-
Alexander McCaig (13:51):
There's no point having TARTLE politics, wars, peace.
Jason Rigby (13:55):
All this stuff you're arguing over for, I'm going to use a mean word here, your grandkids are fucked.
Alexander McCaig (14:01):
Yeah. Be on a burning planet with all the money you want.
Jason Rigby (14:04):
Yeah, exactly.
Alexander McCaig (14:05):
Go ahead, enjoy that.
Jason Rigby (14:06):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (14:07):
All those beaches in Tahiti and stuff like that-
Jason Rigby (14:09):
Yeah, gone.
Alexander McCaig (14:10):
... gone.
Jason Rigby (14:11):
Those islands, gone.
Alexander McCaig (14:11):
Washed over. You're going to have to scuba dive down to them, like off coast of Japan to those big sunken cities.
Jason Rigby (14:18):
Certain areas that are able to have crops, frozen.
Alexander McCaig (14:22):
Frozen.
Jason Rigby (14:23):
Certain areas that are 60, 70, 80 degrees are going to be a 100 and something degrees, inhabitable, Africa, parts of Africa.
Alexander McCaig (14:32):
Africa.
Jason Rigby (14:33):
It's already at 120, 125 degrees. You get to 130, 140, you can't live there.
Alexander McCaig (14:37):
Arizona's not going to exist.
Jason Rigby (14:39):
No.
Alexander McCaig (14:40):
It's all artificially pumping in water to [inaudible 00:14:42]. Bye.
Jason Rigby (14:43):
Yeah, that's all gone.
Alexander McCaig (14:43):
See you later.
Jason Rigby (14:44):
[crosstalk 00:14:44].
Alexander McCaig (14:44):
Miami, bye.
Jason Rigby (14:45):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (14:45):
Coastal California, see you later.
Jason Rigby (14:47):
Yeah. There are models out there that show this. You can see it in graphic models that show what happens.
Alexander McCaig (14:53):
All of our beautiful Micronesian islands-
Jason Rigby (14:56):
All gone.
Alexander McCaig (14:57):
... gone.
Jason Rigby (14:58):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (14:58):
If a hurricane doesn't get them first, rising tides will.
Jason Rigby (15:01):
But I like with TARTLE how we use the word climate stability because we're not political.
Alexander McCaig (15:08):
No.
Jason Rigby (15:09):
As data's not political, TARTLE's no political. We're not saying, "Hey, we're liberal," or "We want to help the climate, bro."
Alexander McCaig (15:16):
No, no, no. Here's the data.
Jason Rigby (15:17):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (15:18):
This is exactly what it's showing without any bias.
Jason Rigby (15:20):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (15:21):
We're just going to observe what it has said before we come to any sort of judgment, okay? The data's showing that the climate is heading in a poor direction for us, the outlook looks bleak.
Jason Rigby (15:33):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (15:34):
You go on your weather app for your phone and it says, "Running: air quality bad, not good day to run."
Jason Rigby (15:39):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (15:40):
Not a good chance of survival for humanity up here, okay?
Jason Rigby (15:44):
Yes, exactly.
Alexander McCaig (15:44):
So let's look at this data, not politically, no bias, no dogmas, completely agnostic, and let's stabilize what we have. We don't want to use any political charged terminology nothing like that. We can look at something that's completely equal, positive, and beneficial to everybody. Stabilization.
Jason Rigby (16:00):
Stabilization, I love that word.
Alexander McCaig (16:02):
Peace.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and the kid and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and the source data defines the path. What's your data worth?
