The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, the largest Earth and Space Science meeting in the world, will be held this year in San Francisco from December 11-15, 2023.

The schedule below shows the date, time, location, ARC-CREST participant(s), and topic for the presentations, as well as a link to abstracts published on the AGU website.

The schedule below shows the date, time, location, BAERI participant(s), and topic for the presentations, as well as a link to abstracts published on the AGU website.

When BAERI’s Courtney Batterson was a child growing up in Minnesota, she was fascinated by storms — not only the tornados for which the Midwest is known — but also the very sudden and aggressive thunderstorms that felt like they came out of nowhere. “I would wonder where they came from and where they were going,” she says. Batterson always knew she wanted to study storms but never expected they would be on a different planet altogether: Mars.

Courtney Batterson, assistant research scientist at the Mars Climate Modeling Center. Image: NASA.

Batterson is an assistant research scientist at the Mars Climate Modeling Center (MCMC), a research group housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where scientists investigate the current and past climate of Mars. They do this using the Mars Global Climate Model, a weather forecast model that synthesizes data gathered from Mars missions and satellite observations in order to help scientists better understand the Red Planet’s weather patterns. The research is wide ranging and varies from studying the mass of the planet’s atmosphere to the water ice of its North Pole and even the history of climate change on Mars.

Batterson has been researching dust storms, particularly a seasonal dust storm in the planet’s southern hemisphere that we know relatively little about, called the “B” regional dust storm. She was intrigued by the gap in the literature about the “B” storm, which led to some interesting questions, such as: “Why isn’t there a northern hemisphere response? How is there dust that high? What’s pushing it up? How does it even become a storm?”

We’re sitting in The SpaceBar, a quiet pub in the shadow of the colossal steel structure of Hangar One at Moffett Field, where scientists can get a quick burrito or a cheap beer. The decor is somewhat retro: a neglected Street Fighter II game loiters in the corner.

Moffett Field, in the Bay Area, is a long way from Minnesota and Omaha, Nebraska, where Batterson studied meteorology. She first came to California for an internship at the MCMC and six years later is still the youngest member of the team. She seems a little nervous about a big presentation she has to give to some higher-ups at Ames tomorrow, but when speaking about her research, her voice is quick and self-assured.

Batterson and other MCMC research scientists at NASA Ames. Image: Courtney Batterson/NASA Ames.

“The dust on Mars is so interesting because it’s the first thing heated when the sun hits it,” Batterson says. This dust then heats carbon dioxide, which makes up most of the atmosphere on Mars, so this causes the planet to get warmer. “The dust is really what’s heating the atmosphere, rather than direct sunlight warming the gaseous CO2,” says Batterson.

The research being done by the MCMC has played an important role in entry, descent, and landing support for Mars rover missions, and the researchers hope that the rover will give them more observational data to inform their model. In addition to the rover data, Batterson would like to see a network of satellites making observations over the planet’s entire surface, especially of the poles, which we still know very little about. But while those data would certainly be enlightening, it all comes with a price tag. Mars missions are some of the most expensive of all NASA’s initiatives. The most recent, the Perseverance rover, will cost an anticipated $2.7 billion.

“For people who aren’t planetary scientists, what’s the benefit?” I ask. Batterson responds: “I would say the biggest thing is that Mars is one example of how our planet could end up, and it’s a way we don’t want to end up.” She explains that the leading theory is that Mars used to be a planet that was “warm and wet.” There’s evidence it had vast rivers, if not oceans, and possibly ancient life forms. But for Mars to have been warm and wet, it would have needed more atmosphere, some ozone, and a magnetic field. In that case, it would have looked a lot like Earth.

“But something happened,” says Batterson. “And whatever triggered the chain of reactions that caused the runaway greenhouse effect on Mars, caused it to become cold, dry, barren, and dead. And that’s one possibility for Earth’s future.…So if we can understand how [Mars] got there, maybe we can prevent it from happening to us.”

Would she ever consider traveling to Mars one day? Knowing what she knows now, Batterson says there’s “no way.…It would be great if I could just snap my fingers and go for a second. But for me, it’s not worth the trip.”

She’s more excited about the possibility of rock samples from Mars being brought to Earth. So far, Perseverance has deposited geotagged samples on Mars’s surface, ready to be picked up by a future mission.

Studying the geology of these rocks will “inform the models like crazy,” because scientists will know more about the size and density of the dust grains on Mars, which could change our understanding of “how water and CO2 condense on those dust particles to form ice that either stays aloft as clouds or falls out of the sky like snow.”

But, as it will likely be the early to mid-2030s before these samples can be brought to Earth, Batterson and her colleagues will have to keep trying to improve their models with the data they have now.

The MCMC team in the 40 x 80 ft. wind tunnel (National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex) at NASA Ames Research Center. Image: NASA/BAERI.

Listen here or on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Robert Bergstrom and Sharon Sittloh, BAERI’s co-founders and husband-and-wife team. Image: Jay Daniel / Black Cat Studio

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Erin Bregman: This is For the Love of Science, a podcast from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute.

Danielle Levin: Very official, Erin.

Erin: Thank you, Danielle. We’re also called BAERI, that’s the less official name. And even less official than that is BAER.

Danielle: I’m Danielle Levin.

Erin: And I’m Erin Bregman. And in this show, we get to talk to institute scientists, engineers, and mission specialists about whatever research they’re doing right now…

Danielle: …in the things that we specialize in, which are the Earth, environmental and space sciences, and we learn about what their work can teach us about the planet and our universe. We are the communications team of BAERI, and we’re delighted to bring this podcast to you. In this particular episode, we’re starting out our new series called 30 Years, 30 Stories.

Erin: I’m really excited about it. It’s a collection of written and audio pieces that talk about some of the work that’s happened at BAERI over the last 30 years. Some of them are going to be really big stories. Some of them are going to be really small stories. Some of them will be on this podcast, and some of them will just be written, and they’ll show up on our website and our Medium publication. The first one that’s going to come out is actually about the Quantum Chemistry Lab, written by Rachel Sender, which is just a fascinating project. I hope you go check it out and give it a read.

Danielle: So for this particular one, Erin is going to talk with our co-founders, Robert, who tends to go by Bob, Bergstrom, and Sharon Sittloh. They happen to be married also, and they’re going to talk about the path that eventually led to the founding of BAERI 30 years ago.

Erin: And, spoiler alert, it was definitely not on purpose that they started an institute that has become as big as it is today.

Danielle: And cats feature prominently.

Erin: In the post script. Stay tuned beyond the end credits for a fun story that’s either the most romantic or the most unromantic story of how two people ended up married.

Danielle: I vote for romantic.

Erin: Oh, the last thing I’ll add before we start is I wasn’t able to talk to Bob and Sharon together because they were in the middle of moving. So I caught Bob on Zoom during a busy work day, and I met Sharon in the parking lot outside of a Starbucks in Mill Valley in California.

Danielle: Good old Starbucks. Good for more than just bathrooms.

Erin: Here’s Sharon. She’s the co founder of BAERI:

Sharon Sittloh: But I did theater for many, many, many years.

Erin: That’s my background.

Sharon: Really? Stage?

Erin: Yeah, I’m a playwright. Yeah.

Sharon: Wow. Well, I did it for 50 years.

Erin: Really! I had no idea.

Erin: And Bob Bergstrom:

Bob Bergstrom: I’m the founder, or one of the founders, and the president of the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute.

Erin: Do you usually call it BAER or BAERI or BAER Institute? What’s your go to?

Bob: That’s a long story.

Erin: About 50 years ago, a little bit more than 50 years ago, Bob and Sharon are students at Purdue University.

Danielle: And what were they studying?

Erin: Two very different things. Sharon was studying art history and fine arts painting, and Bob was working on a PhD in mechanical engineering.

Danielle: Mechanical engineering? But BAERI does Earth and space science. How did he make that leap?

Erin: Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is his engineering PhD was connected to atmospheric chemistry, and so he was looking at something connected to how small black carbon particles are impacting the temperature on Earth, like the global temperature, not just weather, because it really wasn’t understood at the time. And it turns out that that’s also an engineering problem as much as it is anything else.

Danielle: It’s quite a… It feels a little prescient for where we are today.

Erin: Yeah. In fact, he mentioned one time, not in this interview, but in a previous interview conversation with me, that his idea for his PhD thesis came from his advisor on the first Earth Day in 1970. His advisor was like, ‘Hey, you’re interested in the environment. This paper just came out where they’re saying that, you know, these carbon particles are having this impact on Earth’s climate.’ And Bob looked at it and was like, ‘Hmm, I think we can do better than that.’ And he went off to do a model and that kind of started his research career.

Bob: Engineering people would look at me kind of crosswise and say, you know, ‘why did you do that for a PhD?’ And I just thought it was something I was interested in.

Danielle: So, he got his PhD. Then what happened?

Erin: And then like most PhDs, he applied for a postdoc, and he got a postdoc in Germany. So they went off to Mainz, Germany for a year.

Danielle: He and Sharon together.

Sharon: Very interesting because I’d never been out of the country. He hadn’t either, I don’t think, actually. But I’d never hardly been out of Indiana.

Erin: Is that where you grew up?

Sharon: Yeah. We could have stayed. We could have actually gone to Russia. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back because at the time women weren’t treated… Germany and Europe were even a little more repressive for women than it even was in the United States, you know, 50 years ago.

Erin: And then they came back to the US and ended up in California at NASA Ames, which is in Silicon Valley. Moffett Field. It’s where BAERI is now, Building 18. That’s where you can find us.

Danielle: That’s where you can find us.

Sharon: Then the research kind of dried up in the sense that it was the Reagan era when all of the civil servants were… You couldn’t get a civil servant job. So he decided to go with a place in San Rafael, which was still science oriented. But then when he’d been there a few years, he thought, well, he’d go back to law school because nothing was happening in the science field fast enough. So he thought, well, maybe I could do better in law to make changes in society. So he went to Stanford Law School. I got my master’s degree in theater at San Francisco State. He practiced, he was in a big law firm in San Francisco for about a year, a year and a half. But of course, they tried to kill him. The law is a profession… When you get to that level with a big law firm, I mean, they work you to death. So that was not a long-term solution. And so then he went with the EPA thinking, okay, policy enforcement law, maybe I could make a change there. Well, it wasn’t, it wasn’t so easy either. So he thought, well, what if I went back into science? And he did.

Bob: I would really spend my time looking around to see what, you know, what opportunities there were to see if I could find something that I wanted to do. There were some number of other things that I suggested and they said, ‘No, we don’t do that at Ames.’ And I said, ‘Well, how about the stuff that I used to do?’ You know, which is optical properties of a little black carbon particles. ‘Has it done anything since I left?’ He said, ‘Well, no. Since you left, it’s actually gotten worse. Nobody’s done anything.’ And I thought, all right, let’s, let’s try that.

Danielle: So Bob says it was getting worse. What does he mean by that?

Erin: He means that since he left the field of research, no one else had picked the question back up again, and it had just sort of sat there not being looked at.

Danielle: Ready for him to pick it right back up again.

Erin: Exactly.

Danielle: So he’s back at Ames?

Erin: Yes.

Danielle: How does BAERI start to figure into it?

Erin: Okay, that’s a good question, and this gets kind of complicated. So the best way I can explain it is you and I come from the theater world, right?

Danielle: Mmhmm.

Erin: And you know how when you’re an individual artist and you get a grant, unless it’s a really easy to work with granting organization, a lot of times you cannot just take that grant money and stick it in your bank account, right?

Danielle: That’s right. Yeah. Tax implications and all of that stuff.

Erin: Right, right. So it’s the same thing for a research scientist. If they get a grant to do their research, they can’t just take that money and stick it in their bank account. They often have to send it through a university or a nonprofit.

Danielle: And Sharon figured in at this point in what way?

Erin: The whole thing was her idea.

Sharon: And I said, ‘Well, why not form a nonprofit?’ I mean, he was a lawyer. He could figure that out.

Bob: Well, I knew how to do corporations because I had worked with a guy who published a book with Nolo Press on how to do your own corporation.

Sharon: So we did. We formed a nonprofit. We didn’t know what to call it. We thought well, we’re in the Bay Area. We’re pretty sure we’re going to stay here. Environmental stuff. That’s what his law was in and that is what his PhD was in, basically. And so, environmental research. Yeah. What would you call it? What else was it? So we looked at all the other things that were out there and said, well, let’s just hope it can be an institute. You know, idealistically it would grow and we would be an institute. But we had no idea. I mean, we were really naive.

Bob: We said, ‘okay, we have to have a board meeting.’ They said, ‘Well, okay, what do we do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

Sharon: We had our first board meeting at Mama’s in San Francisco over omelets. It was right across from Grace Cathedral. Well, it was very informal, obviously.

Bob: Since I was initially the, you know, the only employee, Sharon did a lot of the other work, and she got a friend of hers, Marion Williams, to help her with the accounting.

Sharon: I mean, it was simple. It was very simple, but I really didn’t know anything. And I took a night class at Golden Gate in accounting. And then Marion Williams, who eventually became the CEO of BAER, taught me the basics. And so, you know, I struggled through it. But then more people started coming because Bob started talking about how he was putting his money from NASA through, you know, the grant, through this, our little nonprofit.

Bob: And then the same guy who funded me, he had about five graduate students. And so he said, ‘well, you know, we did it for you. Why don’t you go take these guys?’ And I go, ’hmm, why do I want to do this?’ It turned out back then that a company of one person, or you had a small group, it was very difficult to get health insurance. And so we had five or six, and it was just enough to push us into a category where we could get a group health care plan.

Sharon: And more and more people started coming and, you know, and then it started getting really complicated and I thought, nah, I can’t do this. I’m not going to be good at this and we need to get somebody else.

Erin: So Sharon stepped down from what her role had been at BAERI.

Danielle: The founder steps down! And then who took over her responsibilities?

Erin: You remember Marion Williams, who had helped her in the beginning learn how to do the accounting? She handed it over to her. And Marion Williams actually became the CEO of BAERI.

Bob: At some point, the administration of the company in terms of, not really persona, but just the policies and dealing with Ames and stuff like that, became important. I couldn’t do all of that and be a scientist also. So at some point I started doing less science and more administrative stuff.

Sharon: Government is a bureaucracy. There’s just no getting around that. And it’s not always easy to work in a bureaucracy and people fall through the cracks. They’re not always in your best… looking in the employees best interest. I think BAER, mainly Bob, said, ‘you know, we’re going to treat people right.’ And so he did. And I think he still maintains that to this day. He tries to. It gets harder the bigger you get.

Bob: When you have a whole lot of employees, particularly when you don’t know them, you can get people who, for a variety of reasons, are difficult to deal with. And so you need to implement some kinds of checks. You have to set up more structure. It’s hard to figure out how to do that without, you know, sort of stifling, making people think that we’re becoming bureaucratic. And I mean, it’s not like… It’s not like “the good old days,” and blah, blah, blah. But it was a lot, a lot simpler back then. And now it’s not quite so simple.

Sharon: We had no illusions that it would ever really be as big as it is today. I’m as surprised as anybody, honestly, I don’t think Bob was… No, he didn’t know either. It was just like…a fluke.

Erin: Do you have a typical day now or what kinds of things make up your typical work day?

Bob: The typical day is talking or communicating with people to make sure they have what they need to get stuff done, and things are moving along. You know, it’s like, again, with 150 people, you can’t check in with everybody. [cell phone chirps in background] Okaaay! I’ve got to take this one, too. All right. All right. [Bob answers phone] Hey, my phone was right, it said Florian! Hey. Okay. Yeah. All right. What’s up?

Erin: Thank you to Bob Bergstrom and Sharon Sittloh.

Danielle: Our music is by Danny Clay.

Erin: If you want to read and listen to more episodes and stories from this series, Danielle, where should people go?

Danielle: You can go to a number of places. The first place to go is our Medium page, which you can find under our organization name: Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. Where else, Erin?

Erin: You can go to baeri.org and sign up for our newsletter—all of the stories will go straight to your inbox that way, or you can follow us on LinkedIn.

Danielle: Okay. And these stories will be coming out over the course of the next year. So you won’t find all of them right away, but they’ll be peppering the page as we go along. We’ll leave you with one more story.

Erin: As promised, it starts with a cat.

Sharon: So we had this cat. And the cat needed a home. And so it was hard to find places to live. So we thought, well, if we got married, we could live in student housing. It’d be cheaper, and the cat could live with us. So that’s what we did, that’s why we got married. It was like, okay, we’ll give this cat a home.

Bob: We didn’t tell our parents, which was I think they were mortified by. But a friend of ours bought champagne. And then we had seven or eight of us and we had champagne after the ceremony, went went home and watched creature features, and fell asleep on the floor.

Sharon: Well, you know, we were kind of the outliers in the sense that we…the thing of getting married and till death do you part and all that stuff, we rolled our eyes and said, okay, we don’t want to do that way. You know, you got to leave yourself an opening in your life, because you don’t know how it’s going to go.

The Quantum Chemistry Laboratory at the NASA Ames Research Center is not a typical chemistry lab — there are no glass vials brimming with colorful chemicals, bubbling together in thrilling experimentation. Rather, this lab is a cluster of computers that can process incomprehensible amounts of information in a relatively short amount of time. They use quantum computational modeling techniques to understand the complex relationship between molecules and their environment and work to answer big questions about the origin, preservation, and fate of life in the universe.

The Lab was founded by the late Dr. Timothy Lee, a pillar in the field of astrochemistry. During Lee’s 33-year career, he was responsible for developing theories and methods that are used broadly by quantum chemists worldwide. Lee began working for NASA Ames in 1989 and focused his work on important atmospheric and astrochemistry questions that became central to the mission of the Quantum Chem Lab: what greenhouse gas characteristics cause them to trap heat? What conditions spark life? And, where else in the universe could life exist?

The people who make up the lab are a collective of researchers who spent years collaborating with Lee, including BAERI’s Partha Bera, SETI Institute’s Xinchuan Huang, and a fluctuating group of postdocs and graduate students.

From left to right: Partha Bera, Xinchuan Huang, and the late Timothy Lee of the Quantum Chem Lab. Images: NASA.

The researchers use the science of quantum mechanics, rules that govern super tiny objects like atoms, to model how a molecule made from a variety of atoms will behave, and even look, in variable environments. Bera was kind enough to have a lengthy conversation with me about the Quantum Chem Lab: its composition and research goals. Bera gave off an air of thoughtfulness and patience as he explained: “Our lab is our computers. We can find out using quantum computation the properties of [potential] molecules, meaning: will the molecule look green or blue? What will the molecule smell like? If the temperature is high, is there going to be a significant change in their property? What will a molecule millions of light-years away look like when viewed by a telescope?”

Quantum Chemistry of Greenhouse Gases

In the mid-2000s, the researchers at the Quantum Chem Lab, in collaboration with Purdue University, set out to use their expertise in quantum chemistry to understand what makes a greenhouse gas dangerous to the environment and how to create safer alternatives.

“There are thousands and thousands of molecules in the atmosphere, but only a few are culprits. Those are, of course, carbon dioxide, [and] there are others that are man-made with no natural sources. We [humans] put them in the atmosphere,” Bera said.

Greenhouse gases and global warming are not new concepts. The man-made greenhouse gases called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were recognized as dangerous in the 1980s, and in 1987, an international treaty called The Montreal Protocol was passed, placing an international ban on the use of CFCs. The Protocol was successful in cutting down CFC emissions and slowing down their negative effects on the atmosphere. Other harmful greenhouse gases, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs) were still being used, however, and safer alternatives couldn’t be designed because no one understood the underlying mechanisms that caused the gases to trap heat.

Image of the ozone hole’s expansion from 1979–2006, and evidence of some recovery from 2006–2011. Image:Earth Observatory, NASA.

Using computational modeling techniques, the researchers at the Quantum Chem Lab were able to discover the common factor of these harmful man-made gases: the high polarity of their bonds, especially carbon-fluorine bonds. These bonds can absorb larger amounts of heat than other natural compounds found in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide, by expanding their ability to absorb infrared radiation. While many bonds leave windows in the infrared spectrum that allow heat to escape from the atmosphere, highly polarized bonds like carbon-fluorine take up more of the infrared spectrum, effectively blocking those windows and trapping in heat.

After identifying in 2009 that the highly polarized nature of carbon-fluorine bonds is what contributed to their dangerous greenhouse-gas effect, Bera and Lee published a paper in 2010 laying out design strategies for minimizing their potency. In a 2009 interview for New Scientist, Lee said, “It’s not just the number of carbon-fluorine bonds that is important, but where and how they are distributed within the molecule.” Bera and Lee showed that these chemicals could be made less dangerous by changing the location and frequency of carbon-fluorine bonds within compounds, as well as by limiting the length of carbon chains in the molecules.

While these findings were published nearly a decade ago, industry is only just now starting to work with Bera and his colleagues on implementing practices for creating safer compounds. This work is integral to the preservation of life on Earth; we know from past mass extinctions related to global warming how sensitive life is to climatic changes and atmospheric conditions.

Quantum Chemistry in Space

Reaching past our own atmosphere, Bera and the Quantum Chem Lab are also able to use modeling to understand how new life could form in space and which planets fit the criteria necessary for that to occur.

Fundamental rules, otherwise known as first principles, govern the universe. When we understand these rules, whether on the scale of tiny atoms or larger objects, hypothetical scenarios can be developed to predict potential outcomes — these are models. With the help of technology, millions of scenarios can be created and played out to determine which represents the best model for understanding the questions or processes being tested. “This is how we find out what a molecule may look like, even for molecules that have never been seen or detected before,” Bera said.

I couldn’t help but relate this kind of modeling to my own work. As a paleontologist, I use modeling techniques to infer dietary adaptations of extinct human species from information about teeth and biomechanics. In paleontology, we have only fragments of information, often muddled by millions of years of degradation, so we need to be creative to find methods that allow us to glean as much knowledge as possible from the little we have access to. Similarly, in terms of studying space, only glimpses of information make it to Earth from unimaginable distances over long expanses of time, leaving large gaps in knowledge and data. This is why theory is so important for all walks of science.

A graphic showing a model (predicting the potential energy surface of the C excited state of nitrogen dioxide) computed using state-of-the-art quantum chemistry methods. Image: Partha Bera.

“[Using models,] we try to figure out what would happen to certain molecules when they react with each other and what new molecules could be produced. Part of our work is to find out how chemistry evolves in conditions that are alien to Earth,” Bera said.

Historically, it was thought that the formation of complex organic molecules couldn’t be supported in the harsh environments of space, but this has since been proven wrong. It is now known that these types of molecules are common in space because of the abundance of materials and time — in the context of the roughly 10-million-year cycle of star formation. Stars form in molecular dense clouds, jam-packed with diverse elements ready to be combined into new and exciting compounds. As a star ages and dies, raw material is released into space. While most of the raw material doesn’t survive to travel to new clouds or planets, just enough makes it out to cause a stir and introduce new elements and compounds to faraway solar systems. We have evidence of this from meteorites that landed on Earth.

Pillars of a molecular cloud. Image: NASA.

Intriguingly, included in the material found in molecular dense clouds are what we consider the “building blocks of life” (i.e., amino acids, nucleobases (units of DNA), and sugars), and should these compounds happen to find their way to a potentially habitable planet, the possibility exists for new life to form. Now for the kicker: the diversity of these compounds found on meteors is much more expansive than those found in known living organisms on Earth. Proteins as we know them on Earth are made up of 20 amino acids, but over 70 amino acids have been identified on meteorites.

Combining fundamental principles that govern physics and chemistry, data about the many diverse molecular building blocks found in space, and variable atmospheric conditions, the lab’s computers are able to run nearly endless scenarios predicting the many potential outcomes of such alien chemical interactions. “We can predict new molecules, so this really takes the science forward,” Bera said. The Quantum Chem Lab has shown that many of the common compounds available in space from molecular clouds are likely to form an abundance of organic materials. To the delight of this sci-fi nerd, the conclusion of the paper linked above (Sanford et al., 2020) reads, “life may be relatively common where local conditions [in space] are favorable,” a statement I felt was too bold to paraphrase.

So, what does the research at the Quantum Chem Lab contribute to the understanding of alien life? Well, both the question of what can exist and also where to look for it. Using computational modeling, researchers like Bera can see the potential outcomes of molecules when they react with each other in variable environments and determine the atmospheric conditions that will best promote these interactions going biogenic, i.e., able to form life.

Again, I find it helpful to look at the Quantum Chem Lab’s research through the lens of paleontology: while researchers who study life in space make predictions of what life could exist, in paleontology we predict what did exist, and both fields use clues to deduce where to best look for such life. A great example of this type of application of theory and modeling in paleontology comes from one of my favorite books, Your Inner Fish. Paleontologist Dr. Neil Shubin knew that some sort of fish with wrist bones must have existed — a transitional creature that connected vertebral life in the ocean and vertebral life on land.

An artist’s rendition of Tiktaalik. Image: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation.

Shubin needed to predict where to dig for such a fossil. Astrochemists need to predict where in the universe to look for life. Both gather clues that will help them choose the best possible locations to search. Researchers at the Quantum Chem Lab are able to narrow down potentially habitable planets based on spectral data (information from light) that helps map out the composition of alien planet atmospheres, since not all atmospheres prepare a planet to host life. Shubin was able to use geologic data to narrow down his search, combing through maps and surveys for exposed rock formations of the right age. While Shubin found his wristy fish Tiktaalik in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, the search for alien life is still ongoing.

As we look backward at life’s 3.5-billion-year journey on Earth and forward to the search for life in space, it is both humbling and relieving to realize we’re not so special. Boiled down, we can all be viewed as resulting from the perfect storm of just the right amino acids ending up in just the right conditions for life to form on a giant, ancient, spherical rock, spinning around an even more ancient star. That star is just one of billions in an ever-expanding universe, one that’s booming with organic building blocks hurtling towards countless potentially habitable planets. The Quantum Chem Lab’s research teaches us that life, in one form or another, will persist.

Listen here or on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

BAERI researcher Dr. Victoria Hartwick. Image: Victoria Hartwick

Quick Glossary

Exoplanet — Any planet outside of our solar system (i.e., a planet revolving around a star that is not our Sun)

Climate model — Computer programs that simulate weather patterns over time

Kelvin — The temperature scale used in exoplanetary science

Ablation — The breaking up of a meteor when it travels through Earth’s atmosphere

Noctilucent clouds — Pearlescent extremely high-altitude clouds visible at dawn and dusk. They are formed on meteoric smoke.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Danielle Levin: This is for the Love of Science, a podcast from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. I’m Danielle Levin. In this show, we hear directly from the institute’s scientists, engineers and mission specialists about the groundbreaking research they’re doing right now in Earth, environmental, and space sciences, and learn what their work can teach us about Earth and our universe.

In this episode, my colleague and our host, Erin Bregman, speaks with planetary scientist Victoria Hartwick, who works with the Mars Climate Modeling Center at NASA Ames. The conversation begins with a discussion about Dr. Hartwick’s paper that explores whether wind turbines on Mars could be a viable source of energy for future humans on that planet. The interview begins there, but explores topics large and small, from how clouds form in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, to how climate models work and how planetary climates, including our own here on Earth, are affected by the space environment around them.

For listeners less familiar with the scientific terms, we’re starting something new with this episode and including a glossary of terms as part of our show notes on the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute page on Medium.com. On that page, you’ll find our podcast and also articles covering all facets of BAERI: the research, the team, and more. And now on to Erin’s interview with Dr. Victoria Hartwick.

Victoria Hartwick: I’m Dr. Victoria Hartwick. I am an employee at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, working with the Mars Climate Modeling Center at NASA Ames Research Center. I guess that the through line of my research has been applying lessons from Earth, or lessons from Mars, to other planetary systems, and using these really advanced tools, global climate models, to ask really fundamental questions about what’s driving climate. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity to explore, to ask fun scientific questions, to just stretch our understanding of how planetary climate works and what it means to be, you know, an evolving climate, or a habitable climate, in the solar system and in our galaxy.

Erin Bregman: I like that that’s kind of how you started, you get to ask interesting science questions. Because one of my questions for you was going to be: how do you get to your science questions? What’s the process for arriving at a question that you want to investigate more?

Victoria: That is a really great question. Science is, I guess I would call it a collaborative process. And the way you get ideas, in some ways it’s really a creative endeavor. You pull in information from all of these researchers, and the state of the art of what they’re working on, and it’s almost an insight moment where you can see how different pieces connect together. And there’s often just that one thing that is missing and you say, “well, what about what about this aspect?” And that’s just the seed of your research project.

This project on wind turbines on Mars came out of that type of process. I did my Ph.D. at University of Colorado, Boulder, in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department, so I was the lone planetary scientist in a sea of Earth scientists, some of whom were doing global climate simulations using these global climate models, and others who had more practical applications to very specific questions about the Earth meteorology.

One of my colleagues was an expert on wind turbines for Earth, and her dissertation focused on utilizing global climate model data to predict the available wind power in specific locations across the planet. As she was explaining it, I realized: I have a global climate model of Mars that produces exactly the same data types as she’s discussing. And I wondered, could I just simulate the wind energy and the possible wind power and evaluate it in the same fashion? And so in collaboration with her and a couple other wind energy experts at the University of Colorado, I was able to adapt Earth methodologies for investigating wind power to Mars.

This image was taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in December 2018. The ripples in the Martian sand tell us which way the wind was moving and how it was diverted around these rock formations; Image: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech/University of Arizona

Erin: And why hadn’t that really been done before?

Victoria: I think the major reason that not a lot of time had been spent investigating the potential wind power on Mars is because the atmosphere is incredibly thin. The atmosphere on Mars is about 1% the atmospheric density on Earth. So if you had a strong wind on Earth, say, like a 50 mile per hour wind, which would really–you’d be working against it to move, the equivalent force that you’d feel against you on Mars for a 50 mile per hour wind, it’s kind of like a gentle spring breeze. And how wind turbines work is actually the wind moving over the blade starts it spinning. So you need force behind your winds to get your turbines rotating and therefore generate energy. And because Mars’s atmosphere is so thin, even with really strong winds, it was kind of the general consensus that maybe there wasn’t enough power available.

But a lot of those first assumptions were based on wind speed measurements at very particular locations on Mars. We actually have only directly observed the Mars winds at a couple locations across the surface. And many of those locations were actually chosen because we believed that the winds would be low.

Our first landed missions, we don’t really want gusty winds coming through as you try to land your spacecraft. Similarly, we have some measured winds from the Insight Lander, which is a recent mission to Mars, and they needed it to be really quiet so it wouldn’t interrupt the instruments. So they wanted really low winds. So we just assumed that, you know, the winds across the surface, maybe those measurements were representative of the global wind budget.

We found using our global climate model that there are places that are quite windy and can in fact sustain wind energy pretty reliably. In the past, you were relying on these really simple models of Mars or just, like I said, direct observations, and now we have these really sophisticated models that allow you to probe, you know, the entire planet and look at very discrete different properties. And so we had this tool and it allowed us to look at a question that had been put to the side for a bit, I would say.

This figure shows proposed regions of interest for wind energy deployment (in boxes) based on the percentage of the year during which wind, or wind in combination with solar, can generate the energy requirements for a human mission on Mars. Gray regions show locations where solar and wind power would produce more than 65% of the energy requirements throughout the entire Mars year; Image: Victoria Hartwick

Erin: Yeah, that’s another great segue, because I’m so interested in these global climate models. Can you talk a little bit about what it is and how it’s made and how you use it?

Victoria: Of course. So global climate models, I like to kind of think of it as like a planet in a box. So it’s a tool, a computer model, or a computer simulation, of the entire planetary system. And these can be of varying complexity. But the most state-of-the-art nowadays can capture really the entire, all the processes that are determining the climate and meteorology on a planet. These often derive from Earth models, and those models are utilized to do things like weather prediction and also to look at, like, long term trends in climate. Starting, I would say, in the maybe ’70s, we started adapting those Earth models to evaluate the climate and weather on different planets.

One of the cool things about planetary science is the physics that drives the climate and weather on earth is the same physics that drives the climate and weather on other planets. So we can utilize what we know about Earth and apply it to other planets.

So we took these really complicated models and started adapting them to other planets. Some things that would be included for Mars would be dust lifted off the surface and moved through the atmosphere, the motion of the winds. And that’s very important for this wind energy paper. But it can get even more complex. You can start looking at cloud formation. You can look at evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. The possibilities are really endless.

Erin: And I imagine there are a whole lot of variables that go into a model like that. Like how many are there?

Victoria: There are so many. Because when you think about anything that you can imagine that would impact the weather in your backyard, there are so many factors that could impact it. And when you’re looking at a planetary scale, you can make this as complicated as you want. Particularly important for Mars and particularly important for the winds on Mars would be things like the local topography. So really accurately matching the topographic maps that we have, looking at if there’s snow anywhere on the surface or changes in the surface thermal properties. So something that would make the surface warmer or cooler. Also, things that are important are how much dust is in the atmosphere because dust is actually absorbing incoming solar radiation and outgoing heat. And that can change how hot the atmosphere is at different levels and that changes the circulation and therefore the wind. So a lot of times what we can do is directly take the topographic map and put it into the model. Or in the case of this study, we used observations of the evolving dust and just, we didn’t simulate it, we just utilized a map and that helps constrain some of the outputs.

This map of Mars is based on data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, an instrument on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The image used for the base of this map represents more than 600 million measurements gathered between 1999 and 2001, adjusted for consistency, and converted to planetary radii; Image: U.S. Geological Survey

Erin: And how did you get started down this path?

Victoria: So I started exoplanetary studies…. I saw a hole in some of our current evaluations of exoplanets. We are really concentrated, logically, on trying to find or identify an Earth twin. So something that’s like Earth that could possibly be habitable. That’s very exciting. My work with Mars, present day Mars, made me, I guess I’d say nervous, that it might not be as easy to tell an Earth-like planet from a Mars-like planet that happens to be quite cloudy.

So my work is to take the Mars climate model for present day Mars and move that planet into different orbital configurations and different stellar types and see how the system adapts and changes. So to look at how the dust changes, to look at how the dust and the clouds cooperate together and modify the observed spectrum that we might get.

My first study of this, we just took Mars and shoved it to Earth orbit around the sun and said, “Well, what is this going to look like? What if we had Mars smack in the middle of the habitable zone?” And we were really surprised to see that it got very dusty. But also temperatures raised above 273 kelvin, which is the temperature that we think about when we want liquid water on the surface. So this little rocky planet with a tenuous atmosphere could actually be habitable by that classic constraint. So this was not an expected result. And sort of hints at that there… That we have more to know or more to learn when we think about exoplanet habitability.

Erin: It sounds really fun to be surprised by what a model does.

Victoria: I think that some of my favorite things about being a scientist is, you know, you run your model and you have some idea of what you expect, visualizing the data and pulling through it and you’re like, “What is going on? What does this mean?” It takes a lot to try to parse through it and figure it out and wrap your mind around what this complex planetary system is doing.

Erin: I was looking at another one of your papers, too. I think it was an earlier one about clouds and Mars. Can you talk a little bit about that work too?

Victoria: Yeah, of course. So this was some work I did as a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, and I was really interested in these observations we’ve seen of clouds on Mars that are very high up in the atmosphere, above 50 to 70 km. There was a question about how these clouds could form. The basis of that is that clouds don’t like to form just out of nowhere, water likes to condense onto something. And on Mars, that’s mostly dust. But dust is really difficult to mix up to that level in the atmosphere. So we wondered what could be up at that level of the atmosphere, which would act as a site for water to condense on and form clouds.

And this is another example where we look to Earth scientists and some of the work they’ve done to give us insight into what might be happening on Mars. So there’s a type of cloud on Earth called noctilucent clouds, which are these incredibly high altitude clouds. And they actually form on meteoric smoke, which is basically, after tiny, tiny meteors come into the atmosphere, they burn up and that burnt up remnants coagulate and form little particles and clouds form on that material. So I always think that’s just a cool concept that we have clouds forming on meteors, basically, in our atmosphere.

Erin: How often does that happen?

Victoria: They’re really pretty common on Earth. They’re in a very specific area. You’ll see them kind of in the polar regions, very high in the atmosphere where it’s quite cold. And they have this sort of pearlescent color. So sometimes you can see them at dawn and dusk. They’re very pretty, and pretty cool when you know the origin of them.

Noctilucent clouds in the sky above Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, on July 2, 2011; Image: NASA/Dave Hughes

Fortuitously, a spacecraft had just arrived at Mars called the MAVEN spacecraft, and it was actually measuring metallic iron layers in the Mars atmosphere, which are the byproducts of meteoric ablation or the burn up of these meteors as they entered the atmosphere. So we had an observational constraint that suggested that this type of process to form clouds could be happening on Mars as well as on Earth. So we utilized the observations from MAVEN and put that into our model and were able to simulate the formation of clouds on this meteoritic smoke material. And we were able to reproduce some of the observations of these really high altitude clouds which were difficult to produce without that source of material at the top of the atmosphere. So that was a cool little thought experiment to see if some of the processes we see on Earth are actually happening on Mars as well.

Erin: Yeah, that’s very cool. And I think it was in a piece about the paper, I’m not sure if it was in the paper itself, you were quoted as saying that we think of these bodies as self-contained planets, but climate isn’t independent of the surrounding solar system. And that, to my mind, a little bit like, Oh, right, of course we think about our planet as contained, but it’s actually part of this bigger thing that’s actually impacting it.

Victoria: Yeah, it’s really easy to think of, you know, our planet as fully impacted by processes that are happening just internal to the planetary system. But really, we’re in an environment, a space environment, so we’re impacted by the Sun, and that one’s a little easier to understand. We’re going through debris fields from the formation of our solar system or from impacts long ago. We’re also being impacted by other planets in our solar system. And for Mars, these meteoric, smoke particles, the formation of clouds can actually have kind of planetary scale climate impacts, which is really interesting in that it’s not just a localized change. It can have a large impact. And this could change earlier on in our solar system history when there’s a lot more just junk hanging out in our solar system still. The impact could have been even bigger.

Erin: I feel like we hear about the Armageddon-style meteor impacts, not the day to day stuff.

Victoria: Yeah, these are much more nice and less threatening, but it’s a lot of material. You know, tons of material per day. My advisor at the time, he told me that you can actually try to collect this. So if you go up to the top of your roof and, you know, get some water down, I think they’re magnetic often, and you can collect some of those like meteoric debris from very, very small… I’ve never tried it, so I don’t know how easy it is, but tons of tons of meteoric material is coming into Earth every day and it just burns up in the atmosphere because it’s very small.

Erin: And you said that planets in the solar system are affecting each other too?

Victoria: Yeah. So one of the most obvious ones is Jupiter. And I like to think of Jupiter as our protective big brother because he sits out in the orbit and his large atmospheric, or gravity reroutes asteroids and material into different directions. And there’s some scientists who believe that Jupiter was really important for the stability of life on Earth because we would have been impacted by a lot more asteroids if Jupiter wasn’t constantly kicking them out of the way. So the whole solar system is in this kind of concert together to change the evolutionary history of our solar system.

Erin: Huh. And where my mind goes is like, okay, if that’s a unit, then like, what’s affecting the solar system and what’s…

Victoria: Yeah, because the solar system is in our galactic neighborhood. It’s moving around through space. It’s amazing to think of. And that’s the rabbit hole as a scientist you start going under, thinking what could impact this? How deep does it go?

Erin: Right. And if you’re looking at something like a climate model that, like at some point you just have to cut off what you’re measuring. How do you decide what you’re going to stop looking at?

Graphic of the most immediate environment around our Sun, our cosmic neighborhood. Image; NASA/Goddard/Adler/University of Chicago/Wesleyan University

Victoria: I think a lot of times it depends on the question you’re asking. So, for example, if I’m looking at the winds on Mars, the meteoric smoke and the clouds probably won’t have that big of an impact on that system. So maybe that’s not the level of complexity that I add to the model at that point in time. Or, you know, the really long term evolution of the planet. Mars tilts back and forth on its orbit. But when you’re looking at a day to day climate or a day to day wind, we don’t really have to worry about the evolution of the planet on millions of years. So you just make choices based on the specific aspect that you’re looking at. And you try to make informed choices, but we might not always be right. So it’s helpful to keep thinking about it and checking your assumptions.

Erin: Have you encountered instances where you’ve found your assumptions to have been wrong?

Victoria: So often! I think that’s part of the fun of being a scientist. In our most recent paper, for example, on Mars-like exoplanets. We are pretty confident that these systems would get dustier because basically as you move closer in your orbit, the sun is giving more energy just by virtue of you being closer to it. So it’s injecting more energy into your planetary system. So we thought the dynamics would be strengthened and the winds would be stronger and we’d get more dust lifted into the atmosphere.

What we didn’t expect is that dust would accumulate to incredibly high levels and that would have a huge feedback on the dynamics of the system. But also we created a dust greenhouse effect and that was not something I was looking for. It was not something I expected. It wasn’t something I thought to investigate. Because when we think of greenhouse gases or the greenhouse effect on Earth, we’re really conditioned to think about gases, CO2, methane, maybe like sulfurs from volcanoes. But you don’t really think of like a mineral dust lifted from a desert as forming a greenhouse. But on this exo-Mars, there was enough dust in the atmosphere that was actually raising the surface temperatures by tens of kelvins, and in this case, raising it above the freezing point of water. So that was really the determining point of making this potentially habitable is having a dust greenhouse effect.

The fundamental question, I guess, in terms of exoplanets and in terms of what we call arid or Mars like exoplanets, which are just planets that have a limited amount of water, so we’re not talking about oceans, is at the top levels: could these planets be habitable, and what do they look like when we stare at them with a telescope? Can we identify them in the first place? Can we pinpoint signatures of habitability, and can we discriminate them from other types of planets? But at the basis it’s, you know, when we think of planets, what are the constraints of habitability and how far out of our understanding of Earth can we get and still be habitable.

One of the things I think is most interesting, and I mentioned this earlier and I think people don’t always understand, is that planetary science, the processes that happen are driven by the same physics everywhere. So the reason why winds blow on Earth are the same reasons that winds blow on Mars. So just because you’re thinking about a different planet doesn’t mean, you know, you’re in a completely different environment or something completely foreign. We can apply lessons that we’ve learned from different planets sort of back and forth. I also think one of the things that is really exciting about planetary science, and in particular exoplanetary science, is the opportunity to think out of the box. In some ways, these fields are really creative fields that you think about fundamental science questions in creative ways.

Erin: What does science mean to you?

Victoria: Science to me is about attempting to understand the world around us to the best of our meager capabilities as humans, and to sort of remove the curtain from the wonder of the universe. You’ve got me waxing poetic right now, but you can just look outside. And there’s so many questions about: Why is this happening? What makes things work the way they do? And science is our attempt to start answering some of those questions and use all the tools that we’ve developed as human beings over time to try to answer some of these really fundamental questions about the universe.

I don’t know that I can answer that. I can probe, you know, answer the tiny question, and each scientist we just add, we can contribute that little bit. And as a group, we can maybe start figuring things out.

Danielle: Thank you to Victoria Hartwick. Our music is by Danny Clay. You can learn more about Victoria and her work at victoriahartwick.wixsite.com/research. To find that link, this episode’s glossary, and more about the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, visit our page on medium.com. From all of us at BAERI, thank you for listening and see you next time.

The paper’s findings have been widely featured, including by Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, the Los Angeles Times, and NASA. You can read the full Nature article here, and visit our Medium publication to listen to an interview with Bell that we conducted last year about his work.

The project has been featured by multiple news outlets, including The Washington Post and Vice. You can read the full Nature Astronomy paper here.