Rebecca Priestley is a member of the Melting Ice and Rising Seas team, led by Professor Tim Naish from the Wellington Antarctic Research Centre, which has just been awarded the prestigious Prime Minister’s Science Prize worth $500,000.
She is also the author of Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, a memoir about her fascination with Antarctica, a place that she has visited three times. The book, released in September last year, has been called ‘a deft eco-memoir’ by Maggie Trapp in the NZ Listener, and described as ‘the perfect retreat when you are trying to plot your way forward in these pandemic times’ by Paula Green.
Rebecca is an associate professor at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and director of the Centre for Science in Society.
Congratulations on this massive achievement! Can you tell us what the prize is for and what you’re going to do with the money?
The Melting Ice and Rising Seas team is a multi-disciplinary team who have worked in Antarctica, and here in New Zealand, to improve projections of future sea-level rise from Antarctic ice melt. Because of this work, we now understand that sea level rise this century will be more than the IPCC forecasts. Most of the money will go to support a two-year postdoctoral research fellow to work with the NZ SeaRise Programme on Antarctic ice sheet dynamics and implications for sea level rise in New Zealand. But there was also a $100,000 prize that was shared amongst the more than 20 team members. I spent a bit of mine in advance: the day before lockdown I went out and bought a bicycle. There is about $3000 left and I’m planning on buying a glasshouse to give me a better success rate with my vegetable growing. Other members of the project team are using their money for similar things, there’s a lot of talk of bicycles, e-bikes, and gardening projects. We’re all very conscious of trying to find ways to reduce our carbon footprints and live more sustainable lifestyles. The way we live our lives now – and the amount of carbon we emit into the atmosphere – will determine whether we get 40 cm of sea-level rise by the end of this century or up to two metres. We really need to go all out to cut those emissions as much as we can, at the same time as finding ways to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. (Hint: plant a tree!)
What is your role in the team?
I do have a background in geosciences (I spent five years studying it here at Te Herenga Waka) but my role in the Melting Ice and Rising Seas team is in science communication – both doing it and doing research into it. In the NZ SeaRise programme, I lead a public engagement research stream. We’ve recently surveyed New Zealanders on what they know about sea level rise and have just submitted an article for publication. But I’ve been writing about the research the Antarctic Research Centre does, with a focus on the paleoclimatology work that has determined what the Antarctic ice sheets have done in warmer times in our planet’s past, for more than a decade. I wrote a series of articles for the Listener, back when I was writing a weekly science column, and wrote about it in Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica. On my second trip to the ice, in 2014, I stayed in a field camp in the Friis Hills, in the Transantarctic Mountains, with Tim Naish, Richard Levy, Nick Golledge, Warren Dickinson and some other geoscientists. I then followed their work back in New Zealand, looking at the core samples from the Friis Hills to try and tell the story of what happened in this part of Antarctica when the planet was warmer, some 15 million years ago. Many of the other members of the Melting Ice and Rising Seas team feature in my book: as well as Tim, Richard, Nick and Warren at various times in my Antarctic journey I encounter Nancy Bertler, Rob McKay, Darcy Mandeno, and Peter Barrett. I tell a different sort of story than the sort of thing you’ll read in the press releases and magazine articles, I guess it’s the story behind the science, the story of the humans who do the science. There’s some emotional stuff (that’s mostly me), a bit of swearing, the occasional drink.
For those who haven’t read your book and haven’t been to Antarctica – can you give us a picture of what it’s like there, and why it’s been such a big part of your life?
The best answer to a ‘what’s Antarctica like?’ question came from Stu Arnold, who was a field trainer when I was there on my first trip back in 2011. ‘Big, white, cold, awesome’ pretty much sums things up I think. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read the book ;-).
Covid-19 has had a massive impact on our lives this year. Has this dramatic global event produced any thoughts for you around how we might approach changes that need to be made to deal with climate change?
What our Covid-19 response has demonstrated is that when we’re faced with an existential crisis we can all work together, we can make radical changes. It’s harder to do that with climate change because it’s just not so much in our faces. But we need to. I was really struck by something said by Christiana Figueres, who led the UN conference that led to the Paris Agreement in 2015, in an interview with Guyon Espiner on his podcast series After the Virus (which I highly recommend). She pointed out that with the trillions of dollars now being spent globally on economic recovery packages, the time to deal with climate change is now. But we have to do it as part of trying to make the world a better place for everyone. We have to deal with the pandemic, climate change, and inequality in the next 3-18 months, she said, with policies and injections of capital that address them all at the same time, ‘because sequentially addressing them will only get us out of one frying pan and into a raging fire.’
Read a chapter of Rebecca’s memoir, Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica.