Twila Moon: climate change is the ultimate shared experience, and I mean, we might say death is another one of these ultimate shared experiences, but we don't get to talk about it with each other once we're on the other side, whereas climate change, we're all in it every single day together. And so what does this mean for you as an individual where you live?

Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanagh, and my guest today is glaciologist Twila Moon. If you've never heard of a glaciologist, you're probably not alone. Twila studies Earth's ice, the glaciers and ice sheets that have built up over millennia, but that are now disappearing much more rapidly. Today, Twila and I talk about what first drew her to ice, the visceral sensory experience of standing next to a living glacier, and what it's like to watch something that once felt permanent, something that has animated her heart and mind for decades, vanish within her lifetime. We also discuss the parallels between learning to sit with climate change and learning to sit with grief, and Twila shares why taking action in the face of overwhelming ecological disaster can actually generate hope

[00:01:25] Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, welcome to Peaceful Exit. It's so good to see you again.

[00:01:29] Twila Moon: Yeah. Thank you, Sarah.

[00:01:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: I was thinking about this conversation and my husband and I lived in Alaska for five years, quite near the Portage Glacier. And we saw it recede from a frozen lake where you could see the face of the glacier really from the sidewalk to, you know, a lake where they had to raise money for a boat to reach the face of the glacier. So you're a glaciologist. Can you explain what that means and what you do?

[00:02:01] Twila Moon: As a glaciologist, I study Earth's ice. Its land ice, so all of those glaciers and ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica that have formed on top of our landscape from year after year after year of snow falling upon snow. And I study this ice to understand how it's behaving right now and how its changes are going to influence people all around the world. You've discovered one of those ways that a changing glacier can influence a person simply by having a personal experience of seeing its change, and having a landscape which I think when you first meet a glacier, they can feel really solid, really in place, quite permanent in many ways. And so being able to see over just a short time of years or sometimes even months, really big changes, I think can be a very visceral experience in understanding this change in our air and our heat in a very visual change in the ice on our landscape.

[00:03:09] Sarah Cavanaugh: How did you get interested in this area of science, particularly climate science, and what drew you to study ice in particular?

[00:03:17] Twila Moon: I was always a person who liked science and the natural world. I was the little kid who always wanted a pair of binoculars with me and could happily stare at the moon or at the dirt for a very long time. And in college, I had the opportunity to do a study abroad in Nepal, and that's where I met my first big glacier from a big Himalayan peak. And it was summer, so you're hearing water move, you're hearing rock fall. It felt incredibly alive to me, incredibly interesting, in motion, changing and behaving now, but still really connected to our geologic world, which fascinated me.

And honestly, I fell instantly in love with this ice. It felt like a living thing to me. I went back to undergrad and said, "I'm gonna be a glaciologist." I'm sure a couple eyes were widened. At that time, glaciology was not a word that, you know, is out there. It was not even necessarily well connected with concepts of climate change at that time.

but I had fallen in love with ice, and I was determined to study it. It was arriving at graduate school at the University of Washington, where there are many people studying ice and snow, and becoming involved with their program on climate change, which is thinking about these system connections across our Earth system, taking those classes, that's when I really started understanding more about climate change.

And also, I was beginning my own research about the Greenland ice sheet and discovering how quickly that ice sheet could change. So all of these experiences together gave me a really close connection with ice, actually before really associating it deeply with climate, and then participating in the discovery of how climate is radically changing the ice around our globe.

It just sounds like you had this moment of awe when you saw the glacier, and I remember seeing glaciers in Alaska where you hear cracking and you hear water. There's so much to hear and see and feel really, that kind of energy that moves rock. Absolutely. Ice is something that can really engage with so many of our senses. The sounds of thunder when big ice breaks, you know, those cold breezes that you get, even picking it up, holding it in your hands, um, listening to the little pops of glacier bubbles, you can stick some ice in your mouth and hold thousands of years old water. So it does have an ability to engage with our senses that I think makes ice a little bit unique compared to some of the other parts of our kind of rock and water world.

[00:06:08] Sarah Cavanaugh: Can you say a bit about the Greenland ice sheet?

[00:06:11] Twila Moon: The Greenland ice sheet is one of two big ice sheets in the world. The Antarctic ice sheet, of course, covers a whole continent at our South Pole, and the Greenland ice sheet covers the world's largest island. When you look at it from space, it covers an area about the size of four Californias, and it reaches more than two miles thick in the interior. So there's a reason that it's such an important player in where water and fresh water, because it's all formed from snow originally, is being held in the Earth, and there's a reason it's an important player as a global air conditioner and also helping to hold water that otherwise be in our oceans.

[00:06:59] Sarah Cavanaugh: How do now retreating glaciers, instead of those moving toward the sea, how do the retreating glaciers impact the environment all over the world?

[00:07:09] Twila Moon: So what we have is this pile-up of snow year upon year, and you can almost imagine it like pouring really slow pancake batter on a landscape, and it's constantly gonna move downhill. That motion of ice is a really important part of it being a glacier. If that ice isn't in motion, it's not a glacier. Now, what happens is that we continue to have a glacier that actually in motion is moving downhill, but the warming from our air or the warming from the ocean is really overpowering that forward motion of the glacier. And so the front of it, is retreating back. And so that means that we're losing glacier ice all around the world.

There's so many places that we have ice on our landscape, and virtually all of them are experiencing ice loss overall. The implications for losing ice are actually much broader than I think many people realize and can really cause a lot of impact. So, uh, you can think first of that ice melting going into streams, helping to keep stream temperatures cool for the fish and other creatures that live there. Many communities might use that glacial melt as drinking water or for agricultural water. In other places, that glacier melt is gonna feed hydropower stations. Of course, once it's entering our oceans or our ecosystems, it's adding fresh water. It's helping move nutrients around our coastal ocean systems. And as we're adding more melt from land into the ocean, it's remaking our coastlines and adding to sea level rise, which doesn't happen equally all around the world. So there's all of these physical impacts, but of course for many people, glaciers are also a place that are important culturally, for tourist businesses, for feeling connected to the landscape and the place around you. So there are so many different roles that glaciers play that are really important, to people and communities.

So I'm in Seattle. You went to the UW. We have kind of the orca as our poster animal creature for the Northwest.

[00:09:29] Sarah Cavanaugh: Talk a little bit about, communication and science communication in particular, why is it so important how climate science and research is communicated to the average person, and does it require a creature that we all care about?

[00:09:43] Twila Moon: It's really useful to think about, you know, how do we talk with other people about climate change and about climate science, in part because talking about it is so important. Most people are actually concerned about it. Most people want to do something and think about it, and most people think most other people aren't. So we're ripe for conversation about it, probably just in the way you see a lot of openings and value in speaking about death, and the reason to bring Peaceful Exit to people to open that conversation. For me, it's taking the things perhaps that are most connected with what I see, changes in ice, and bringing it back to what is the change for you in the place that you live and the people that you value? Because climate change is the ultimate shared experience, and I mean, we might say death is another one of these ultimate shared experiences, but we don't get to talk about it with each other once we're on the other side, whereas climate change, we're all in it every single day together. And so what does this mean for you as an individual where you live? A lot of climate science communication is about helping people understand how to be proactive, also prepare, think about adapting, because we already have a lot of changes afoot, right?Giving ourselves space to talk about it, think about how our skills and interests can overlap in building more resilient communities.

What is your biggest challenge you face when it comes to communication?

One of the biggest challenges I see is a sense that we can't do something. I see people feeling overwhelmed by this change. I see people perhaps having a sense that the future is already written or that they don't have control or agency as an individual. And I think that's one of our biggest challenges, is helping people realize that you do have agency as an individual, that your ability to connect with and influence and be influenced by other people is how we build and change systems, and that we can realize our best possible futures. Now, our best possible futures does not mean returning to a climate of the 1980s or the 1990s or even a climate of the last 10 years. But it does mean that we have a range of possibilities still open to us, and we can interact with creating the best possible ones of those and also discovering ways that we can create community, infrastructure, culture, political and business systems that help us thrive even as we face more extreme weather events or more challenges in the kind of physical world that we exist in.

[00:12:52] Sarah Cavanaugh: So I see our work somehow similar in that we're taking what could be an existential crisis, climate is sort of out there happening, you know, and our mortality is kind of pushed away. But what you're doing with your excellent communication,

the way you use language and the way that you meet people where they are, and talk about it like, "Okay, it's here. What can we do to mitigate some of the impact of climate change?" It's a beautiful thing.

[00:13:23] Twila Moon: I also see so many parallels in the places that we're working and discussing. I've really enjoyed listening to conversations on Peaceful Exit, and so many of the same things that we apply to talking and realizing openly that death is a reality, just as we need to talk about and think openly that climate change is a reality. But there are also things about taking time to discover awe that help us to stay in touch with the goodness of both people and the Earth that we live in, and also spending time being quiet and still. You know, one of the things where I live that I try to do regularly is put my hands in naturally flowing water. This I find incredibly grounding. It really makes me be able to take a deep breath and just have faith that I'm doing what I can to help the Earth that I depend on in the ways that I know how. Also honoring, what we've lost, honoring people, in my case, honoring ice. I spoke with a woman recently who had actually attended the Ok Glacier funeral that was held in 2014 in Iceland where they held a funeral for one of the glaciers they lost. She said it was incredibly emotional, a lot of tears, but also a sense that you're honoring the thing and using that honor and using that grief to fuel how you look towards the future and how you act in the current day. I also see so many parallels between the tools that make us most able, to engage with death and also most able to engage with climate change.

[00:15:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: Okay, so they had a funeral for a glacier. Say more.

[00:15:25] Twila Moon: There's actually now a global glacier casualty list. I love it. They've said that it exists to remember their names and tell their stories, right? This is the same thing we do to honor people who we feel connected with, and I think that this is a really important thing for us to do, not just for glaciers, but for the landscapes that are important to us, perhaps those plants or those animals that might be entirely lost or simply lost from your place. Building that connection I think just helps to really nourish us so that we can be prepared to continue the forward motion, which is the only direction that we get to move.

[00:16:10] Sarah Cavanaugh: Mount Rainier here in Seattle is, is such an iconic mountain because she stands alone, it's cloudy often here, but when she's out, she's out, and I climbed the mountain 11 years ago, and it was such a warm day that we were taking our parkas off on the top of the mountain. Even 11 years ago, I was so aware that the freezing level was actually above the mountain, which is very, very unusual, but not so much anymore. Like, we didn't have enough snow this year, and it's very clear that the mountain is not getting as much snow as it used to. So yeah, it makes me a little, " Ugh."

[00:16:49] Twila Moon: Well, I'm glad you're asking the question of what does it mean for us when this landscape, this ice and water resource changes?

I often prefer the phrase global weirding for what's happening because I think it really ... our experience of what's happening is that it's weird. but I think that just using the phrase, like, "I wanna talk about global weirding," that sounds crazy and interesting, but it also opens up the possibility that we might think kind of weirdly about how we're gonna behave and how we're gonna move into the future. It might encourage us to do things different, talk to new people, talk about building different systems, becausescience can give you foundations to understand what change is gonna be afoot but it's so much of our community, and culture, and kind of political, and economic systems, and food systems that are, are really part of adapting to these changes while at the same time trying to reduce the speed at which they're coming at us.

[00:17:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: What do you see as the primary intersection between climate change and grief?

[00:18:01] Twila Moon: I think there's a lot of loss in shared experience, and grief in the changes around us. I cannot share my experience of the Athabasca Glacier with my friends today. It's an entirely different place. I cannot, you know, go to my backyard on an August day and anticipate that it's gonna feel the same, sound the same, have the same critters speaking, as it had in the past, and have faith that I'm gonna pass on to my nephews and nieces something that feels familiar and sacred and close to my heart.

[00:18:40] Sarah Cavanaugh: In 2017 piece for Science Magazine called Saying Goodbye to Glaciers, you write about the retreat of the very thing you've devoted your entire career to study. How do you personally reconcile this sort of anticipatory grief and avoid burnout when glaciers are shrinking faster every year?

[00:19:00] Twila Moon: So they asked me to write a perspective on how glaciers are changing worldwide. In my original response to them, I included very specific language in saying that the word that came to my mind was loss. So I really appreciate this question on what do I do as a person in responding to the science that I participate and look at every day, which is telling me about ice loss all around our world? And the things that I do are I try to allow space for a wide range of emotions. There's no question that there's a lot of negative emotions created by seeing this loss, experiencing it, so I find that I have to really actively build positive emotions. For me, actively dancing, actively going outside, reading novels. I've done a lot of learning over time about appreciating that I can't necessarily expect to realize all of the best possibilities or see the fruition of my work in my lifetime. This is something that I think people working in civil rights, for example, they have already taken in this message, that we do work for a future good that we may not ourselves realize. Those are some of the things that, I do to look at difficult information every day and turn it into motivation and connection and a pathway forward.

[00:20:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: I agree with you about the dancing

[00:20:45] Twila Moon: Gee, I love dancing

[00:20:46] Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you have any advice for generating those positive emotions in the face of... it often feels like with all the algorithms that it's a, rushing spigot of negative information? And this will resonate for anyone dealing with a medical crisis or the decline of a loved one or, or any sort of grief that feels overwhelming.

What I recommend people do is actually get more involved. Science actually also shows that those people who are taking positive action for the climate are more positive about the future than the people who aren't. And I know it sounds counterintuitive to dig more in in order to feel better about a difficult topic, but that's absolutely been my experience. When I am sharing solid scientific information, real information about what's possible in the future, people come out of that time together feeling better even though we were talking about difficult things. I also think it might have something to do with your engaging personality and your ability to communicate in such a positive way about something that's really hard.

[00:21:58] Twila Moon: Oh, thanks Sarah.

[00:21:59] Sarah Cavanaugh: So do you have a favorite glacier?

[00:22:02] Twila Moon: You're not the first person to ask if I have a favorite glacier, and truth be told, I don't. So one of the reasons I got started studying the Greenland ice sheet was because I love thinking about big ice. And there's no way I could choose a single glacier to be my favorite. I'm truly in love with the substance itself and the ways that it shapes and moves and behaves on our Earth.

[00:22:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you ever look at it in a microscope?

[00:22:32] Twila Moon: Absolutely. In fact, ice is actually a mineral. It has a crystal structure. As ice moves, it actually changes the, um, ice crystals within it to help align their crystal axes together. So there's a reason that ice can produce incredible blue colors and those microscopic features in ice are part of what make a glacier the thing that we see. And of course, on the microscopic scale too, it's also capturing air. So there's really valuable information for us in the ice of a glacier, and also in all of the air that gets caught up in a glacier.

[00:23:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: You've traveled to so many beautiful peaceful areas on Earth, parts of the world that most of us will never get to see. They're often calm on the surface despite the fierce and rapid changes occurring beneath. How do you most love sharing those experiences with others?

[00:23:37] Twila Moon: I love telling stories of these places, of icy places. I love talking with people. I love bringing images of these spaces to life. So one of the things that people might experience if you're looking at a picture of a, a glacier is a total misunderstanding or inability to grasp scale. The scale of ice on our Earth is just incredibly astounding, and I love telling stories that help bring those landscapes and those scales and sort of the movement and motion of change and change of ice into people's awareness so that ice can also feel like a really active part of our Earth system to them, but also connect all of those dots back to where they're living, even somewhere very far away from a glacier.

[00:24:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: We talk a lot about metabolizing grief in peaceful exit and um, I was talking to somebody the other day who said, "What would it be like if the end of the world was not theoretical?" And I don't feel that from you at all. I feel like if we're in action around mitigating the worst that could happen, that is going to bring us some peace.

[00:25:00] Twila Moon: So I'm an earth scientist. The Earth is more than four and a half billion, with a B, years old. And I view having this sort of geologic timescale as sort of a really interesting curse and gift of being an earth scientist, which is to say it has helped me really understand the impermanence, not just of you and me, but the impermanence of people, the impermanence of life and different forms of life, that transition in and out over millions and billions of years. And so that has allowed me to kind of gain a peace with the ending of things, not, uh, just on an individual level, but on a really collective level that I think is a really nice grounding to then from there really engage with building the best possible future. Not one that is kind of based on hope that the human species lives forever, but what I instead refer to as grounded hope, which is hope that I and the people all around me are going to create something that can be beautiful, something that can be responsive and responding to and shaping the landscape around us, and our best foot forward.

[00:26:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: You make me wanna be an earth scientist.

[00:26:32] Twila Moon: Oh, come on over.

[00:26:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: So I want to ask you a question I ask all my guests. What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:26:42] Twila Moon: I so appreciate this question. And first, I wanna say that to me, the losses of glaciers and ice around the world is anything but a peaceful exit. It feels frankly really violent, really sudden, very kind of gripping and like a sort of stabbing in my gut. And so for me, the way that I make peace out of this violent exit is by being eyes open, by seeing this change and honoring it, and by being involved in reducing these losses into the future. The peace in this kind of exit is in my response and my forward actions, not in feeling that the loss of a glacier itself is a peaceful act.

[00:27:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: Is there anything that would make your exit more peaceful on a personal level?

[00:27:47] Twila Moon: I imagine the peace in that coming from feeling that I have participated in doing good, feeling that I have participated as best I can in doing good even within harmful systems. I think this is a particularly big challenge, and in having that extra time to give people really, really, really good hugs, and squeeze their hands, and wish them luck in doing good in difficult systems too.