Adrienne Block: Geologist

- [Narrator] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

(upbeat music) - A lot of people today are curious about global warming.

If you melted the ice in West Antarctica our New York would be underwater.

But if you wanna talk about raising sea level you have to talk about Antarctic ice streams.

These are the places where you go from moving the ice at maybe 10 meters a year on the continent, moving it into the ocean at rates of over a hundred meters per year.

What I study is how water gets into those ice streams and helps them to speed up and delivering literally tens of gigatons of ice into the ocean, melting it and raising sea level.

(upbeat music) My Basoon's name is Henry it's named after my first Basoon whose name was also Henry.

So this is Henry the second.

There were a lot of things I liked about the Basoon when I started playing it as a kid.

But now the things that I like about it are that it has so many different personalities.

It can play the same part as the flutes and be a high woodwind.

(upbeat music) Or it can be part of the low brass section, like a tuba.

(upbeat music) Or it can hide somewhere in the middle and and play all those sounds that no one hears but that have to be there to make the music complete.

Performing music is amazing.

I enjoy sitting there with my instrument and playing knowing my part well enough that I can close my eyes and listen for a minute and actually hear myself match up my sound with a clarinet sound, or match up my sound with the Viola sound.

And you can hear the Bassoon sort of move around the orchestra in and out of all these other parts of all the other instruments.

It's part of being that whole bigger thing of a musical performance.

Each performance of a piece of music is completely unique and it can't be replicated.

It's like a stamp on a moment in time makes me feel like I'm part of something amazing.

My Basoon solo.

(upbeat music) When I was younger, I was always into thinking about very large scale things like outer space.

And I think that was because it made me feel really small if the universe is so big and I'm only this big then my mistake is really, really tiny.

I was attracted to going to Antarctica because ice sheets are big.

That same wonderment of how big things are.

But when I got there, it was amazing to me that it's so big you can't even tell it's big.

Here in New York city, you know something's 20 blocks and it takes you about a minute to walk a block.

So you know how far that is and how long it's gonna take you to get there.

But in Antarctica there's nothing.

There's just this flat ice going on for miles and miles.

So you can see something, but you don't know if it's 10 miles away or 20 miles away.

You have no idea.

For me I was like, this is why early explorers thought the earth was flat.

Because even though I've seen all the satellite photos and I've flown around the planet you could convince me in that moment that maybe it was flat just because the perspective was so extreme.

Antarctica has so many great unknowns.

So many questions that no one has any idea about.

On my last trip to Antarctica we were studying a mountain range.

That's completely underneath the ice sheet.

We've known that they're the mountains, but we didn't know how big they were or how tall they were.

We put all of our equipment on an airplane and we send out our signals from that airplane.

So we fly over the ice, sending out this information and listening as it comes back.

We can look right through it.

We can see all the layers and then we can see the rock at the bottom.

I just love getting the data back.

It makes me just excited every day, when the plane lands and you unload the data you bring the hard drives back and get that first look at data that someone's never seen.

So our research group went and studied this mountain range in the most detail that's ever been studied and revealed what we've been calling the world last unexplored mountain range.

I still appreciate the enormity of things.

I just never got over that.

Oh wow, kind of moment.

(upbeat music) Sunglasses, the snow is so bright it can blind you over time.

You can't even go to the bathroom without your sunglasses.

Classic rock, I like classic rock.

Collared greens, couldn't believe they had collared greens.

Basoon, it's just cooler than the Oboe.

The bassoon has so many different personalities.

It can pretend to be an Oboe.

South pole.

Of all time.

Wow, my dad.

That it's a burping bedpost.

Everything.

Everything you can find.

I bring folk music Ani DiFranco (foreign language).

That's the piece I won't go anywhere without.

55 degrees below zero.

Bohemian Rhapsody.

Yeah I can't sing it.