--:-- [Scene: Mattress Firm in Brentwood, D.C.]
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Okay, I'm Luke Vanderplug, Today Explained producer.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I'm Brian Resnick, science reporter here at Vox.com.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: We're here at Mattress Firm in Brentwood, D.C., and today we try the firm mattresses. I am so pumped. Let's do it.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Also, if you can't make it into a store right now, check out mattressfirm.com slash podcast.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You've requested my presence here for some sort of experiment.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Yeah, we're going to do a little science demonstration for you. What do we do first?
--:-- Brian Resnick: We're going to grab a glass from the cabinet.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Okay, great. I have a glass, you have a glass.
--:-- Brian Resnick: What's next?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Let's get some ice. Ice, ice, baby.
--:-- Brian Resnick: We have one of these fridges that makes ice for us.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: It looks like we have two regular-sized glasses, about filled with ice cubes, but now what are we going to do?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Fill your glass up with water.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: It just says near the top.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay, now we're heading to the studio, huh?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Let's do it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay, Brian, I've got my glass of water. I got mine. I've got a marker. Do you have yours?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Yep, purple.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay. What happens now?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: So draw a line where the water level is.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I am drawing a line on a glass that belongs to Vox Media. I hope they don't mind.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: So what's next?
--:-- Brian Resnick: We, uh, we wait.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Why don't we do an interview while we're at it?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Sure, sure. What do you want to know?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Tell me what's going on in the Arctic right now.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So the Arctic has had one of its warmest, wildest winters in recent history, perhaps in recorded human history.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Could you take me there? Tell me what it looks like.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Arctic in winter, it is a desert. It is cold, it is blank, it is white, it is frozen.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And in the winter, you know, due to the seasons and the tilt of the Earth, there's no sunlight up there.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like, the sun doesn't rise on the North Pole into the equinox.
--:-- Brian Resnick: All said and done, this winter was the warmest winter on record for the Arctic that we know of.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And this week, actually on Tuesday, Nature Communications came out with a study that's finding an association actually between those warm Arctic winters and like weirdly cold weather we're having in the United States.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So if you think the Arctic is this far away place, like the weather up there impacts weather all around the world.
--:-- Brian Resnick: When we talk about the Arctic, are we talking about Greenland? Are we talking about Canada? Are we talking about Russia? Or is it we talking about some separate body of ice?
--:-- Brian Resnick: So the Arctic is mostly an ocean. It's mostly a frozen ocean or supposedly frozen ocean.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And yes, all these countries do creep into the Arctic circle.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So in the winter, we're supposed to have a lot of ice up in the north, which makes sense. It's the North Pole. It's frozen. There's no light up there. It's very cold.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the ice is supposed to grow and grow and grow.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Last year was the lowest ever amount of ice at its maximum.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the year before that was the lowest ever amount of ice at its maximum.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And it's looking like this year is also going to set a new record low.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Every year, NOAA releases an Arctic report card where they assess the health of the Arctic.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?
--:-- Brian Resnick: I think you got that right, yeah.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay, good. So they basically conclude it's like the Arctic is not reliably frozen as it used to be.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Every indicator seems to point to like, this is not reversing at all.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Is there a chance that we'll just completely run out of ice up there?
--:-- Brian Resnick: These ice scientists are projecting a circumstance. They're calling the ice-free Arctic.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So basically in the summer, you know, when the ice shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, if it ever gets below a million square kilometers of ice, they're going to declare the Arctic virtually ice-free.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like this is when the Arctic becomes very accessible to shipping. It becomes an ocean.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And yes, there will be some ice around the North Pole, but it's not that much.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And scientists are always reassessing this timeline of when we're going to get to this ice-free Arctic.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It probably going to happen sometime this century
--:-- Brian Resnick: That timeline to that ice Arctic might be speeding up even
--:-- Brian Resnick: By the way, are we going to talk about this glass of ice water I have in front of me?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Can I drink it?
--:-- Brian Resnick: No, no, no, no, no, no. Put it down, put it down.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: You ruined the demonstration.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay. Just let it sit and let's wait and you'll see.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Fine, fine, fine.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So, ice-free Arctic, Brian? Is that real? Can that be real?
--:-- Brian Resnick: The Arctic is supposed to be boring. It's supposed to be frozen. It's supposed to be this wasteland of nothing.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah. You know, what we've been seeing, even in like the last 10 years, is really dramatic.
--:-- Brian Resnick: We're witnessing the fastest decline in sea ice in at least 1,500 years, and perhaps even longer than that.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Does melting ice mean even more climate change?
--:-- Brian Resnick: You know, is New York going to drown pretty soon?
--:-- Brian Resnick: So this whole time we've been talking about sea ice, which when sea ice melts, it actually doesn't raise the water level.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So before we had this glass of water, it was full of ice.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Has some ice melted?
--:-- Brian Resnick: A lot of the ice is melted.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Crazy thing. The water level hasn't changed a nick.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And so that's what basically is happening in the Arctic.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And this is related to Archimedes' principle, which is this ancient Greek mathematician.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Basically, the amount of water that's displaced in a container is proportional to the mass of the thing you place in the container.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So basically what happens because ice is less dense than water, when it melts, it basically just fills in the space that it displaced.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So you're basically going to end up with the same water level in any case.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: I guess we're good then?
--:-- Brian Resnick: We're good on sea level rise because the water level in my cup didn't rise at all.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Something is different here.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So the surface of that glass is no longer ice.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The ice kind of was like the crust on top of the water.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Water holds on to more heat.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Like the ice is bright and reflective. It will send a lot of radiation back up into space.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So basically what happens when you have less ice, the Arctic warms.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So it's kind of this little bit of a feedback loop.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the danger is that we have Greenland, which is covered in ice too.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And this is different.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So if that ice were to fall into the sea, it would contribute to sea level rise because it's not currently a part of that system.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You're adding more mass. You're adding more volume.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: I see. If all of the Greenland ice sheet was to melt, I think it's about, we're looking at about 25 feet of sea level rise.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So ice is already in the water. Melting does not raise sea level.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Does not raise sea level.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But new ice, i.e. Greenland, breaking off, falling into the sea, that's the stuff that's causing sea level to rise.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Absolutely.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And also, like, as we've been seeing less and less ice in the Arctic, we have seen an acceleration of melting in Greenland.
--:-- Brian Resnick: There aren't a lot of people up there in this place we're talking about, but will that maybe change?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Historically, it's been pretty hard to get a boat through the Arctic Ocean in the winter because it's been covered in ice.
--:-- Brian Resnick: This year, there was a little bit of a milestone.
--:-- Brian Resnick: A tanker, for the first time ever, made an Arctic Ocean passage off the north coast of Russia.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's weird to kind of think of the north coast of Russia.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's like where the map ends. It's supposed to be the edge of the world, but it turns out this year, because of the warming, A tanker was able to make this north passage through the Arctic Ocean.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It was the first time ever.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Where did it go?
--:-- Brian Resnick: It went from the north coast of Russia to... It sailed from South Korea to a port in northern Russia.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Wow.
--:-- Brian Resnick: That was impossible until... Until this year, yeah.
--:-- Brian Resnick: This is the first winter that a ship has done that.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Why wasn't that, like, news?
--:-- Brian Resnick: It was news. I read it in The Guardian.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Yeah, just because you didn't read it doesn't mean it wasn't news.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Happened.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The Christof de Margerie is a Russian-owned tanker.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It will go down in history as the first ship to complete a journey through the Northern Sea Route without any icebreaker escorting it.
--:-- [Scene: Back at Mattress Firm]
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Okay, Luke, here we are standing above a Serta Firm mattress here at Mattress Firm.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Are you going to just jump onto this thing or are you going to take it a little easy in case the firmness is a little too much to handle?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: You know, I think I'm going to take it easy.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Okay, good call.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Ease your way into that thing.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Oh, very gentle descent. Very nice.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: All right. All right.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: How are you feeling?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: I just feel like this one gives me a little more back support. a little more lumbar, you know what I mean?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: This is the kind of mattress that your doctor might recommend?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Exactly, yeah.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: I got some lower back pain.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: This could be good for me.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Do you think this is not the kind of mattress that you would like want to I don know sleep for eight hours on
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Or do you feel like you could adjust to this kind of firmness
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: I think I sort of into the firmness at this point
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Okay great
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Well, in case you're not completely sure, Luke, Mattress Firm offers a 120-night sleep trial to ensure perfection and a 120-night low price guarantee so you know you paid the perfect price.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Again, that's mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you're sleeping.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: It could be monumentally improved.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: I love it.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, and there is big news from the North Pole. It's literally a new ocean opening up.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Jochi Driessen, foreign editor at Vox, host of the Worldly Podcast.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So you've got Finland, Norway, Russia, China, and the U.S. are all up there.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: China might seem somewhat surprising, given that they're not a country we normally think of when we think of the Arctic.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Yeah. But they're there for the same reasons Russia is there and the U.S. is there, which is, if you want to have a new trade route, going through the Arctic, saving time and money.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So it's really valuable financially.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It also holds huge amounts of oil.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And then if you want to get all of that, you need to have some way of protecting it, which is where the military part comes in.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And there, Russia is so far out ahead of China.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And China is so far ahead of the US, the numbers are kind of startling.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Wow.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So is this kind of like the biggest deal politically as far as trade and access is concerned since like the Panama Canal or even bigger?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Is there some sort of precedent here?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Panama Canal is a good one.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The Suez Canal is another good one.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: If it works, the cost of going from Europe to Asia plummets.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It's almost as if the Panama Canal also had oil.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So that as you were moving down the Panama Canal, you could also take oil with you.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And so who's got the biggest claim to this? Who can really say, like, come on, guys, it's us.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Is it Canada or is it Russia?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It doesn't feel like it's the United States.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: No, it's definitely not the United States.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Legally, there are parameters set up to determine all of this.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: But in practice, they don't matter all that much.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: What matters much more so is the kind of facts on the ground.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Russia is reopening bases that haven't been used since the Cold War.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They're building airstrips that will have Russian soldiers living there permanently.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The buildup in the Arctic by the Russians has been quite dramatic.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The U.S. knows about this.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: We even have Republican senators like Dan Sullivan from Alaska talking about it really explicitly at Jim Mattis' confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Four new Arctic brigades, 14 operational airfields, 16 deepwater ports, 40 icebreakers with 13 more on the way.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And I can't see the Russians building up this entire fleet without the United States doing something in return, right?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Last month, you saw the commandant of the Coast Guard, the head of it, Paul Zuccomft.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: We are an Arctic nation.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Making an announcement about how the U.S. was ready and the U.S. was going to be part of this fight in the future.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Very soon, I'm talking tomorrow, we will release a request for proposal to acquire the first heavy icebreaker that will recapitalize our nation's fleet of icebreakers.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: What exactly is an icebreaker?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Is it exactly what it sounds like?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Basically what it is is a very heavy ship that has a plow at the end of it.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Okay. And it goes very, very slowly.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It tries to see ahead of itself where there's ice that's softer, and they sort of mush their way through it very, very, very slowly.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The reason why the weight matters is normal ships, if they hit ice, can topple.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Sure.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Titanic.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So if you're a normal ship trying to icebreak, you're going to flip over.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So these ships are unusually heavy.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They move unusually slowly.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And they need a huge amount of energy.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So Russia has nuclear-powered icebreakers.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They have six and are building three more.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: China is building nuclear-powered icebreakers.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The U.S. isn't.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: But the nuclear-powered ones have both the weight and the kind of just sheer, like, thrust, where these things smash against ice and the ice begins to break and crack apart.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So right now it's just this big frozen thing.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And we're trying to cut roads into it, which would make shipping from Europe to Asia much cheaper and much faster.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Isn't it melting?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Why do we need to go break it?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It's melting but not fast enough.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Fast enough for us to go?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: To go just, like, race through it.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Okay. So even as ice melts, in some ways it's more dangerous because then you're moving along kind of cheerfully in open water and then suddenly there's a big piece of ice that melted off something else.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It's almost like an obstacle course now, and those bobbing pieces of ice are the things that are now kind of the risk to ships.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The fact that the Coast Guard is now taking bids, it'll be at least a decade until the thing's operational, and that will give us two.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Russia has 40.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Oh my gosh, they have a fleet.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Six of those are nuclear-powered, and they're building three more.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: What? We'll have two a decade from now.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They'll have 40-something, and they're nuclear-powered.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Is the worth of access to this sea of access to the land of access to the oil can we say this is billions this is trillions of dollars
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It trillions for sure
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And whether you talking about like tens of trillions but it in the trillions because it thought to have some of the largest oil reserves left in the world
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So that by itself could be hundreds of billions, if not more.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: But then add in shipping, you're talking in the trillions.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Has this race to the Arctic shelf to break ice and plant flags been named yet?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It's too bad the Cold War is taken.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Yeah, Cold War V, good one.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: We were joking about calling it Sleigh Warfare.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Sleigh Warfare?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Because Russia loves to put out on its various Twitter accounts, photos of Russian troops with machine guns and like all white kind of video game outfits being pulled in slays by reindeer.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Sounds kind of Bondi.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It does, or like Inception.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Oh yeah, that scene in Inception, totally, when they get real deep.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Getting back to the real worry here, which is that we're all going to drown one day.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And is Russia and China and the United States and Norway and Finland staking claims to the Arctic a tacit acknowledgement of climate change?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Or is it a very clear acknowledgement?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: No, it's very clear.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And, you know, you'd asked about whether there's kind of a name for this.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The name that a lot of people use is the new great game, referring back to, you know, a century or so ago when people were fighting about colonial possessions and not caring about the people who lived in those colonial possessions.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Every country in the world, and frankly, including the United States military, saying climate change is real.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It is happening.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: We have to figure out how to make money off of it.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: But for these countries, there's no debate whatsoever.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: The only question is, how much do you take and how?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And then you talk about the United States.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: We have a president who, when he was campaigning, said things like, So Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and that.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: A lot of it's a hoax.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: What's really striking is just how far Trump goes to not acknowledge this as a risk.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Under President Obama, there's a document called the National Security Strategy of the United States, which explicitly said that climate change was a national security threat.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: When Trump released his in January, it stripped that out.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So under President Obama, climate change was a national security threat.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Under Trump, it is not.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It doesn't necessarily matter because the Pentagon, which is the part that actually has to do this in practice, does take climate change as a reality.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And when Pentagon officials are questioned, when Pentagon documents come out, there's no ambiguity.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They just say climate change is real.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It's a threat, and we're preparing for it.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And so the military itself in January released a report that said 50% of its bases could be hit hard by climate change.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They could be submerged.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: They could be hit by wildfire, by drought, by heat.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Basically, half the bases the U.S. now has might be unusable.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So for them, not only is it not an abstract political debate, it's not even about the Arctic.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: It's about bases on the mainland United States, in Hawaii and elsewhere, that might be underwater.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: As far as this actual issue we're talking about here, this opening of a new ocean, how does having a president who isn't on board with what the military is doing up there set us up to fail or succeed against China or Russia?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: If you're in the military, and I've had people who are generals and admirals say this to me explicitly, they just hope Trump doesn't notice.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: In theory, Congress could say, hey, DOD, we're cutting out of your budget any money you've set aside to do renewable energy, to do icebreaking, to study climate change.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: But they're trying to hope that nobody notices it and they could just keep chugging along, building what they need to build without Trump telling them not to.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Is it possible that the U.S. military saves our asses on this one?
--:-- Yochi Driessen: Yeah, so Sean, we're talking about the military saving the country when the military itself is saying half of its bases may be unusable because of climate change.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: So they could do their best, but if their bases are submerged, hit by wildfire, hit by drought, it's kind of like 10 plagues.
--:-- Yochi Driessen: And if that's ravaging the military, and the military itself is what we're counting on, we are deeply and profoundly fucked.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Holy guacamole, 17 mattresses later.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: True to their name, Mattress Form seems to have a whole lot of firm mattresses.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: What do you think? Are you a firm guy?
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: You know, there's still one more type to try.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Wow, wow, you still got an appetite for this.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Okay, mattressfirm.com slash podcast.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: Tomorrow we find out if Luke Vanderbilt, Today Explained producer, is a soft, medium, or firm mattress man.
--:-- Luke Vanderplug: That's me.
