Rob McKay

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Interview of Robert McKay by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 July 9, online. [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is 9th July of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I am with Robert McKay in a virtual interview. Thank you very much. Can you first say your name, your affiliation and position?

Robert McKay (RMK): I’m Robert McKay – used to be called Rob. I’m Professor of geology and the Antarctic Research Center, but I’m also the director at the Antarctic Research Center at my university, Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. We’re an institute that’s over 50 years old, and that has done a lot of Antarctic drilling, but also overlapped with the ocean drilling programs.

BMR: What are your research lines, your main field of research?

RMK: My main area of research is stratigraphy. Sedimentology and stratigraphy, mostly looking at past Arctic changes. So, we drill on the continental shelves of Antarctica as well as offshore, and we try to see that physical footprint of ice sheets advancing and also retreating and collapsing in the geological past. If you were to ask what are the main hypotheses we are testing, that’s trying to identify the climatic thresholds for ice sheet loss in the geological past and how that may inform future loss of the ice sheets.

BMR: What’s the aspect that you find most attractive, most interesting, of what you study?

RMK: I think the aspect is, there’s very few frontiers left on the planet. Antarctica still is. We only get two months a year to go down there, particularly on a ship. If you’re on a ship, you really only have a two month window with sea ice, but even drilling on land. Some of the drilling we do on land – which is actually not on land, it’s on floating ice shelves and drilling the seafloor below the ice shelf; so, it’s still ocean drilling, just a different context than the traditional IODP approach. We are really doing things that no one else has done.

This year we’re down there with the SWAIS2C project, that’s trying to drill through 600m of ice sheet  , and then drilling 200m of sediment beneath ice that’s is sitting on the Earth’s surface. No one’s done that before. A lot of technical challenges with that project. We’re trying new innovations, it’s high risk, it might not work, but those are the risks you have to take. There’s a lot of pressure that comes with that, but also a lot of reward that it pays off.

BMR: I would like to talk more about the challenges of drilling in Antarctica but maybe we can do it later. Now let me first ask you about your background: Where are you from? Where did you grow up and how was your childhood like? How did you get interested in Earth sciences?

RMK: I grew up very close to where I currently live, actually. Almost in the same city – literally a 30 minute drive away. It was a very different time, in the late-80s, early-90s in New Zealand, and that international travel wasn’t as prevalent. I’d never been on an airplane until I went to Antarctica. I was always intrigued by going into the outdoors, hiking around the mountains of New Zealand, because I didn’t have those opportunities to sort of explore other parts of the world. My wanderlust was spent going around the mountains of New Zealand, tramping. That got me into geology.

I went to university to do architecture because I was always very good at art, as well. I wanted to combine some interest in science and art, but I got hooked on geology pretty quickly when I realized I could go tramping as a job (laughs). That led to all those projects mapping glaciers up in the mountains of the South Island of New Zealand, ancient glaciers. Then, when I was going to finish, I was going to go work in industry, and I got a knock on the door to ask me to go to Antarctica for a Master’s project. I wasn’t going to turn that down, so I spent several weeks camping up in the mountains of Antarctica doing a very similar thing there. At that same time my supervisor, Professor Peter Barrett, was also drilling a major project offshore of Antarctica, the Cape Roberts Drilling Project. This is an almost three, near kilometer deep holes offshore through sea ice, very close to where I was camping up in the mountains so, I was connected a little bit into that project, aware of the scale of it.

Then, I’m going away for six years. I actually worked out of science for six years, and got a random phone call from Peter Barrett to come back and work on the ANDRILL Project, which was the first time we’ve ever drilled beneath an ice shelf in Antarctica and recovered 1.4 kilometers of sediment. That was a world first and really put us on the map in terms of this question of how ice sheets change in the geological past and how’s that relevant for the future? Another team went back a year later and drilled a similar scale hole.

From there, we couldn’t get another season of ANDRILL. It was just logistically too expensive and too challenging to do more complex ones than we’ve already done. We had a project planned, but it just fell apart from the international consortium side of things. But I also put an application on to go work on the Wilkes Land project for the IODP. That was my introduction to ocean drilling and, from there, to make those connections to the ANDRILL so we can see the offshore connections between that ice change on land from ANDRILL, and offshore ocean water mass changes, as well as the drivers of that ice sheet retreat from the past oceanic changes. So, I got really interested in those ocean-ice connections. That led to the IODP expedition that I co-lead with Laura DeSantis from OGS in Trieste, to look at the Ross Sea in expedition 374.

BMR: Can you tell me more about who were your mentors or some influential figures in you early career?

RMK: The main influence is Peter Barrett. Peter was someone that was doing these incredibly complex projects decades before other people were thinking about working at that scale down in Antarctica, particularly in Earth sciences. Internally, he was just doing things that were really off the charts for the geological groups. He was working in the 70s on the first Glomar Challenger expedition to the Ross Sea, actually, but also went into the Dry Valleys in a drilling project and then had this idea to track these mineral rigs that they were using for that project out on the sea ice. That took a couple of decades – a decade at least – to get successful, to work on the technology of how to do that. You put a lot of weight on only a couple of meters of sea ice, so there’s break up events, there’s core recovery issues you have – we’re drilling in that type of platform. But we ended up getting quite a novel system – well, he did – where, unlike on a ship based platform, we’ll get a 100% drill recovery. It actually ended up being these very, very unique records that they complemented the offshore records. He was someone that always made those connections. Also, a very strong lobbyist for climate change action back in a time when there was a lot of skepticism about that still, and the impacts of it. So, there was always sort of social relevance aspects that he taught me.

And so, that’s when I got the phone call, when I was living in London, to come back to New Zealand to drill beneath the ice sheet. I was having a relatively successful career there in other areas, but that allure of doing something so innovative and so out there is just too much to turn down. I came back and Tim Naish, who was then my other PhD supervisor related to the ANDRILL project – he’s someone that really sees the big picture of how does this make societal relevance. So, again, obviously there’s always an academic curiosity and intellectual sort of aspect to it, but actually, why is this important? Why would the taxpayer want to spend tens of millions of dollars to do this? And ANDRILL really did pave the way for that, because it was the first evidence that those ice sheets had retreated in 2 to 3 degrees warmer climates. And they are guiding the ice sheet models that now projects future sea-level rises.

So, I’m still inspired by them. I’m now their boss (laughs), which is always a little bit confusing, that you have this role reversal. But they’re still there and they’re still inspiring me. So, yeah, creating innovative ways to really demonstrate impact of this relevant research area.

BMR: You mentioned you went to Antarctica for the first time during your Masters course. Do you keep any particular memory of that experience? I’d say it’s something that, you know, most of the people don’t get to go to Antarctica being a Master student. So, something that impressed you, something that you remember about that experience.

RMK: As I said, I’d never been on an airplane before, neither had I been overseas. So, I flew down to Antarctica and I ended up two days later flying for 17 hours around the Dry Valleys in helicopters, seeing penguins at the sea ice edge. So, it was really too much to take in and the relevance of that at that age. But I would say that was probably the biggest turning point in my life. We hear that from a lot of our alumni that come back. People want to provide a donation so that can provide those same life changing opportunities for students.

I think the turning point is not so much, yes, this fragile environment and the importance to preserve it; but I think the confidence it gives you, that actually you’re out there in the most hostile part of the world as a 20 years old. I was there with three of us to camp for seven weeks up in the mountains. All, never had been to Antarctic before. All in the early to mid-20s, and empowered to just go out and do our own research. You don’t get those opportunities nowadays. I think it’s a little bit more… There’s a lot more risk aversion to that, which is probably good reason for that as well. I don’t think it was entirely safe. But it was, I think, something that gave me a lot of confidence. I wasn’t always the most confident – a “I’ll put myself out there” sort of person. It also gave me the confidence that I can achieve things that perhaps didn’t think I could.

BMR: That’s great. And then, for you, it came ANDRILL – in your PhD time. What’s ANDRILL? I’ve been doing a lot of scientific ocean drilling, but I have no idea of what’s ANDRILL and how it compares to ODP or IODP.

RMK: ANDRILL was a successor to other projects, Cape Robert’s Project and the CIROS project in particular, which were supported by various national Antarctic programs. In terms of logistics, if you want to think about it in terms of the IODP realm – JAMSTEC is supporting the Chikyu, but then the Europeans might come in and pay money to help do a project based around that infrastructure. So, in that case, ANDRILL was actually supported out of Antarctica New Zealand, but with support from the US Antarctic Program. The German  along and Italian came in as well, again, through national funding. So, it was a four party project.

The best way to think of ANDRILL is it’s a mission specific project. I’ve been arguing that this could be the way that the new IODP program can work. We find a geological problem, and then we actually build our own drill rigs to solve it. So, that’s a bespoke question. In terms of ANDRILL, yes, you can throw that on a ship; you can drill those same targets, sort of. ANDRILL was testing that the ice sheet had disappeared in the past so, we had to go underneath the continental shelf. You’re drilling the same types of sediments, but you get 100% recovery. The downside to it compared to a ship-based platform is you can’t move so easily. You are stuck in one spot, so you get one hole, but that’s a high quality hole, and that’s what we’re doing with this new project, the SWAIS2C project. We’re going far away from any base. We actually have to drive across the difference of France to get to the drill site. We have to have a light-weight drill rig. The scale, the cost of these projects, are about the same as an IODP project. ANDRILL was about $US18 million.

SWAIS2C is about half of that, actually,. But again, bringing together our consortia is very similar to what we’ll be going forward in the future. I like to think of it that we’ve been doing mission specific platform drilling for 50 years.

BMR: Is this something that it’s split into expeditions? Like, can we say that ANDRILL is the umbrella of different expeditions?

RMC: That was the original intention, but the money had to come together on a project by project basis, so that’s where it fell apart. Unlike IODP, we get funded for five years or ten years, and you’ll get an X number of expeditions each year when they have an annual budget. And we’ll fund an expedition each year. ANDRILL was building specific project to get the funding and then we’ll do it. SWAIS2C it is the same. We couldn’t bring it together when we tried ANDRILL three. We had two ANDRILL seasons, two ANDRILL holes, and when we tried to get ANDRILL three, it was a much more complicated project. It was on a much faster moving ice so, we had to do multiple access holes, have a Remote Operated Vehicle come down, pull the drill pipe into one area, spud into the seafloor… It was actually on an angle. And as the ice sheet moves, it straightens up and then you get more time to pull the pipe out, or pull a core out of a pipe that’s bending. That raised the cost; the cost of steel went up; the cost of Antarctic logistics, fuel, that sort of stuff.

When you’re doing that on a project by project basis, there is a lot of volatility around prices. And then, there are also other competing groups coming in with a lot of infrastructure. You get competition, which is always really healthy for science. I’m actually a big advocate for it. The downside is those competing infrastructure needs restricts everything we think that is needed to be done, which is something we’re seeing obviously with the ocean drilling program today as well.

BMR: This makes me think on the geopolitics of Antarctica. How is this managed? Are you able to go wherever you want in Antarctica? How is this organized internationally?

RMK: Yeah, in theory, you can. There are environmental permits you need to get. These are managed through each country’s obligations to the Antarctic Treaty. There are very strong environmental controls. Obviously, you can’t go there and drill and extract minerals, for example, or oil. Even for an IODP expedition, you have to do a risk asessments, an assessment of risk of petroleum for a safety risk, largely blowout. But for Antarctica, it’s also the implications of funding that are not just for environmental damage or safety for a blowout, but it’s also that geopolitical fallout that could happen with a lot of resources found. We do a lot of work to make sure we never had oil (laughs). I mean, that’s a well-known thing that there are shows of organic matter that that could be petroleum-related, the sedimentary basins are very similar to the sedimentary basins in New Zealand that have petroleum. So, there’s no question it’s there. The positive is that we don’t think any of that as economic; we’re pretty sure it’s not. But those are the things we just need to be really cautious with.

So, yes, the geopolitics are very real. Getting a lot more real, as well, which provides opportunities for all of the large countries interested in Antarctica. They’re interested in showing scientific leadership, so that can actually help protect that treaty system. The Antarctic treaties have worked exceptionally well for decades, but is under increasing pressure as other resources open up in the Antarctic. The loss of sea ice is potentially opening upfisheries, so that’s bringing in a lot more countries with large oceanographic vessels.

I think we need to work together as a collective to ensure that we are protecting the environment rather than degrading it. Countries like China have built new icebreakers and new bases in the Ross Sea. America obviously got very big presence. The superpowers are there, and the smaller countries –NZ, Italy, Korea have a long presence in the Ross Sea, Korea. And, around the continent, there’s obviously dozens of countries.

BMR: That’s very interesting. So, what’s the connection again, about the research you were doing in ANDRILL and scientific ocean drilling? Maybe my question is, how did you move from one project to the other?

RMK: After I finished my PhD, I applied for a postdoc to work on the IODP expedition to Wilkes Land. My science case is built mostly around the fact that my PHD was quite specialized. People had already done a project around deep time records of Antarctic change on continental shelf drilled cores – well, not for many decades. I was even at an early stage of my career doing quite a novel and niche area that was in demand, I guess, as the JR came back to Antarctica. So, I was mostly interested in getting continental shelf records. But the issue was the sea ice was terrible that year. They had a massive storm and it broke up a glacier time and with that glacier time, it broke up all this fossilized sea ice that had been built up behind it. That actually damaged our ability to get onto the continental shelf safely. So, it was a write-off getting more continental shelf cores.

Then, we drilled offshore and got these incredible records, continuous records, of the last 13 million years. The ship didn’t have great recovery in some of those cores – 9% drill core recovery, I think. It’s one of the highest impact cruises IODP has had. It had numerous Nature and Science papers, if that’s a measure of impact. I’m still working on that. It’s one of my primary research programs. Still got ten papers worth of data that I could publish on that expedition. But those offshore sediments were a measure of sediment being shipped off the continent, including icebergs, so we could see ice sheet dynamics in those cores. But also, things like the algae that were present in there, we could see what sort of water masses that they live on it. Was there sea ice when we had collapse of those ice sheets? Where the oceans 2 to 3 degrees warmer, that might have triggered that ice sheet collapse? So, we’re looking at drivers of ice sheet collapse through oceanographic change, even the bigger of the ocean currents around Antarctica. And then, vice versa: we’re also looking at if those ice sheet melt, what’s the impact of putting all that meltwater onto the surface of the ocean? How is that affecting the biological productivity or the carbon uptake of the Southern Ocean? That was Wilkes.

I think ANDRILL probably had less papers, but a couple of very high impact ones that provided a lot of stimulus for the whole community. With IODP, you get 5 or 6 holes so you actually get a lot more   core to work on, still high impact, but perhaps not as high as impact as that one drill hole from ANDRILL. I think ANDRILL provided a lot of context for those offshore cores. That’s where I came into the Ross Sea Drilling project.

Once I’ve done Wilkes land as an early career scientist, I took over a project, a proposal, to drill on the Ross Sea that had been floating around for about 30 or 40 years, and a lot of it was trying to find a point of difference with ANDRILL. I came in going, well, actually, I can see  how ANDRILL makes this old proposal relevant, that we actually have a lot of hypotheses we can test from ANDRILL by going offshore and looking at exactly what we were doing at Wilkes land and those transects from the oceans into the ice sheets, to see how does the ocean melt an ice sheet, and what’s the impact of that meltwater on the on the oceans.

BMR: Some people have told me that the experience of being on a scientific drillship only can only be compared to being on Antarctica, camping there and doing expeditions, in the sense of remoteness and being isolated with a team of people. How do you see this? How does the experience onboard compares to experience on land in Antarctica?

RMK: It’s very different. ANDRILL not so much, because we are all based at a large station. The scientists are all based in a remote station, which has a thousand people over summer. So, it’s almost a little mini town. So, there’s a little bit more sort of ability to move around and space ability to get your own space. For SWAIS-2C, they’re all sitting in tents so they will have their own tent just to sleep in. But there’s only one communal tent, so it’s a lot more compact. I actually find the, I enjoyed the ship more. I enjoyed the environment on the ship, you have the scientific discussions, but there are more places just to go and hang out in the deck, and have your own quiet time (laughs). Which sounds weird, right? You think Antarctica wouldn’t be like that, but… But, yeah, they’re very different experiences, to be honest. I think the camaraderie – you build out camaraderie in both of these environments, and I think that’s the most important thing. That’s what makes these scientific projects have such a long legacy, that you actually build up a huge network of international scientists from all over the world.

Maybe that’s why I like the IODP experience because of my interest in other cultures and other ways of thinking. A lot of my collaborators are from Asia or from Europe or from America, – and Australia, of course.

BMR: But then, if I understood it, in the on land stations in Antarctica, are you with people from other countries or is it mostly…?

RMK: Well, it’s less… I would say it would be more the Western leaning countries. I mean, it’s a little bit different in SWAIS2C. Now, I’m not actually involved in the SWAIS2C field work, but I’m involved in it bureaucratically. We do have two Asian countries on there, Japan, Korea… So, with ANDRILL, it was much more the Western sort of [?] countries, if you want to call them that. You’re sort of thinking in different ways it has traditionally worked with, and I guess ANDRILL also had probably more of a senior scientist dominance to it, whereas on the JR it was much more an early career split, which both have their benefits, I think SWAIS2C is going more towards the IODP side of that. But there’s a much more equal weighting of level of experience. I think it’s just a different time. So, yeah, I think that’s the beauty of IODP. It’s just truly an international project and always has been, and anyone from any country that’s part of it can come in and be included. And I really value that.

In fact, the other big thing there is, the SWAIS2C project, which has those nine countries, has largely built out of networks built up through IODP, because of our reputation for ANDRILL and Cape Roberts and our ability to succeed there, when IODP has slowed somewhat. I think a lot of people looked what’s next and saw us as a real viable option. So, it was that network building internationally from IODP that was a real asset to enhancing Antarctic science more broadly.

BMR: I see. And then, your next expedition was the one in the Ross Sea, where you were co-chief scientist, as you mentioned. How does it change being a member of the science party to being the co-chief?

RMK: It’s a very different experience. It’s super rewarding. I mean, each co-chief takes on the role in a different way; I’ve never treated it as my project. Obviously, we developed a bunch of hypotheses, but what’s so rewarding is that you see the first papers that come out are not the ones you expected to come out, right? Some young student just comes up with a great data set and a great idea, and you just go, “Wow, the first paper is not the one I thought we’d have”. That just really set us off on a good start. Going like that, I think we still have a very strong collective. For me, it’s always about the people. You get good people, you empower them, they’ll do great science, and you just try to give them the tools.

So, yeah, I found it a really rewarding opportunity. At that point, I was still a standard academic at my institute, but it really gave me the confidence to step up and lead my institute, after that. The directorship of the Antarctic Research Center came up shortly after I got back on that expedition. And the leadership set that I developed on that expedition really set me in a good place to be confident to take on the role.

BMR: And, for you, what were the most surprising result of the Ross Sea expedition? In terms of science.

RMK: Surprising… The first half of the expedition – I think it was even the first day that we were drilling. We had our primary objective, because you never quite know. We don’t quite know what we’re drilling into – it’s pretty much a frontier. So, we drilled about 80m down and started finding all these big, thick diatoms sediments from a warm climate 16 million years ago in a mass. Our primary objective was already meet. It was a super exciting day.

We did have one site right at the end of the expedition we wanted to get to. And, if we’re going back to the leadership question, I think what was most important was managing failure, well, disappointment. So, we got halfway through that expedition and there was a technical issue with the ship. The ship’s propeller seal shrunk inside and was actually leaking seawater into the propellers. So, we got told, “You’re going home”. Got woken up at 1:00 in the morning, “you’re going home”, and we were just partway through the second to last site, but the last site was the one everyone wanted. We were moving north into this beautiful sediment drift, and… So, we only had half an expedition for that. But I still think, you know, when we got back and we published several high-impact papers straight out of the expedition, the fact that we could do that with half an expedition, I would say it’s an incredibly successful thing. But also, it’s just managing people’s disappointment. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but that’s the Antarctic. It doesn’t give it up easily. So, that was valuable life sort of experience, managing failure. I think every leader needs to have done that.

The most rewarding, most unexpected finds, we’re still going through them. I mean, these giant landslides that we found, that wasn’t in our expedition objectives. They were found on the site survey season leading up to the main expedition. When we drilled through some of the sediments, we could find what actually triggered these things or caused them – that was cool, as well. I quite like working on those papers that were the ones I wasn’t expecting to be a primary outcome. And then, the primary outcome ones, we’re still working on. So, they will come.

BMR: And what will be the next big question? What will be the next big research topic to answer in Antarctica?

RMK: Well, I think it’s what we’re trying to do with this SWAIS2C project – that’s what SWAIS2C stands for: Sensitivity of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet to 2 degrees Celsius of warming. What we’re doing there is trying to find that the ice sheet actually collapsed during the last glacial period, when there was only 1.5 degrees warmer than present – that West Antarctica collapsed under that threshold. That means, the Paris Climate Agreement’s preferred target of 1.5 is the one we really need to meet urgently. I think the biggest question is what is the threshold for loss of large ice shelves in Antarctica, which will then trigger a full scale collapse of the ice sheets? And that will dramatically rise sea-level projections above the current estimates, even on the most extreme estimates from the IPCC.

There are these dotted lines on the side of the sea-level projections in the IPCC, which are the low confidence ones. That’s low confidence in terms of our understanding of processes and thresholds that trigger that loss of that ice sheet, not the fact that it’s low confidence that it could happen. It’s just low confidence of when is that triggered. Paleorecords can help answer that.

I think the other big questions I have are the impacts of changing meltwater and changing sea ice habitats, particularly the overnight change we’ve seen since 2018 – and we’ve seen while in the Ross Sea. What they are doing to primary productivity and marine biological systems? The other aspect to the Ross Sea area is it’s the world’s largest marine protected area. And we have seen a baseline shift of sea ice in the last couple of seasons that’s been orders of magnitude larger loss. And it’s off the charts, right? So, what’s that doing to carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean? What’s it doing to the natural carbon cycle and marine productivity in that area?

BMR: And of course, related to answering these questions is, what are the biggest challenges to conduct research in Antarctica? I mean, I’m mostly thinking on scientific ocean drilling, but you can also mention about on land.

RMK: The biggest challenges are money and infrastructure, and geopolitical conflicts, to be blunt. I mean, the US has obviously gone through major cuts throughout most of their science funding through NSF, that’s affected offshore operations. There’s no longer icebreaker support in upcoming seasons from the US program, who had been the biggest benefactor and supporter of Antarctic science, I would argue, internationally, and they’ve really set a leadership role – and still are, we are still working very strongly with them. And it’s not just the US side. New Zealand is also under funding cuts. Europe’s has funding cuts. We have obviously increased geopolitical distrust with the superpowers and the China-US relationships. The connections there are challenging to work with. There is still cooperation. I think science has an important part to play in promoting that peaceful cooperation. Some of the smaller countries, there may be other ways that we can do that, because there is that sort of NATO versus China and Russia challenges. Russia have also had a long presence in Antarctica. Obviously, cannot work with them at the moment. So those geopolitical challenges are real, but they are there for a reason, as well. I think science in Antarctica has always led the way of using the Antarctic Treaty as a means for peaceful scientific cooperation in Antarctica. And that’s where I’d like to see us go back to.

I think ocean drilling is perhaps one of the best placed reasons we can do this. China just built a large drilling vessel. There’s still strong will from the US, from Europe, from Japan and from Australia and New Zealand, and all the traditional IODP partners that work together. So, I do think IODP could be a way to continue upholding the Antarctic treaties’ spirit of peaceful cooperation. That’s what I would like to see. I think the Antarctic Treaty is actually one of the most successful examples of that in any international treaty system. It’s well recognized but it’s under threat, but I think other international coordinated programs are the way forward for that.

BMR: At some point, you mentioned that New Zealand is undergoing cuts on science and research. How does the support of the New Zealand government has evolved or changed through the time you’ve been involved in Antarctic research?

RMK: The Antarctic mission support is good, and we have a very good relationship with the government on supporting infrastructure out of the Scott Base. They have created capability for us to traverse across the Ross Ice Shelf and do this drilling so, it’s not a criticism there. And I guess in terms of cuts, it’s… the government would argue we haven’t made cuts, but what has happened is, there has been no increase in funding so that in real terms is a cut in terms of what we can do. So yeah, it’s under increasing pressure. The cost has escalated greatly, over decades. And so, we’re increasingly having to do this with this resource.

But I’m saying that, I think… New Zealand is always a nice example of doing things efficiently. Because we are cost constrained, we do try to think outside of the box and actually not just throw giant drilling vessels, and everything at it. We have to think in a different way and find our niche. And that different way of thinking, then, can be enhanced by international collaboration. So, without increased ability to spend large amounts of money, we have to come up with creative novel ideas and then international cooperation. The way forward is for all countries, including the US, as they go through these cuts – is cooperation. That’s probably the best way to manage that, and then with the people with good scientific ideas, those countries will get the credit for it.

BMR: Continuing with the idea of the research that it’s still to do in Antarctica. What do you think is one of the biggest misunderstandings o by the wider population about Antarctica?

RMK: I think the biggest misunderstanding—and I come at this from being at the interface of policy relevance—was sea-level rise. The biggest misunderstanding is that the sea-level projections in the IPCC do not account for the largest uncertainties we have and what might trigger an absolute collapse — that is the marine ice sheets collapsing. So, there are caveats in the IPCC that the projections could be far above the worst-case scenarios. Like, they presented the uncertainty range for the SSP8.5 scenario, in which emissions are not business-as-usual, but an unconstrained emissions scenario, which is probably unrealistic, right? So, there is a lot of skepticism – well, that’s an unrealistic emission scenario, because you can never burn that amount of carbon. That’s one of the arguments, and while itis a valid argument there are caveats to it. But we would say, actually, that sea-level projections could still exceed that if we lose our ice shelves, because those are the things protecting the flow of these marine ice sheets into the ocean, leading to orders-of-magnitude higher rates of sea-level rise.

Those are there the dotted lines off to the side of the main IPCC projections, but largely ignored in our future projections to manage coastal resilience. And we’re saying, as ice sheet are melting from underneath, we cannot see this environment easily; we need to learn more about this area to know if those dotted line are possible. I think this paleo-data is one aspect from drilling, but we also need to have modern observations. Observational networks alongside that are critical.

BMR: Just out of curiosity, how long would it take for the ice sheet to melt?

RMK: So, from paleo-data, when we had the last great ice sheet melting of 18,000 years ago, sea levels rose 130 meters over 13,000 years. That’s a meter per century. You can say very clearly from that – and most of that is from ice-sheet melt, not from thermal expansion, which is a much smaller number in the paleo-data – that’s a meter per century on average. Most of that’s from the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the greater ice sheets, with maybe 10 to 20 meters from Antarctica.

Now, there were pulses on that; there were four meters per century. Paleo-data – and this is from coral reef records and the Pacific Islands – are precise data sets. So, we know ice sheets are capable of four meters per century sea-level rise, which would be catastrophic. No one’s arguing against that being catastrophic. But that’s highly unlikely, extremely unlikely. With Antarctica, the area that’s susceptible to that kind to retreat only has three meters of ice capable of that rapid retreat.

So, I would say a meter per century is business-as-usual when an ice age starts to trigger a retreat, right? That’s one sign. Those dotted lines could be realistic scenarios if paleodata is considered. On top of that, [we have] the current thermal expansion that’s happening now, which is locked in. So, yeah, a meter per a century is possible.

Now, the question is: when could that trigger happen? That’s orders of magnitude higher than the current loss from Antarctica. In fact, in the last season, Antarctica gained due to some snowfall. But if marine ice sheets instability kicks in, that’s going to far offset any snowfall increase.

I would say we’re a few decades away from triggering the loss of our large protective ice shelves. My hope is we’re centuries away from losing our ice shelves, but we just don’t know. We see these processes kick in where ice shelves catastrophically explode – like they did with the last ice shelves in the 2000s.

BMR: Given this situation, that there’s so much uncertainty but it’s possible that a catastrophic scenario is triggered in the next decades, and in connection with the fact that money also falls short for scientific research, what would you think is the way to go, in terms of policy-making, to attract more money, to attract more attention?

RMK: In New Zealand, we’ve set up a policy-facing program to address this, which was taking those plausible scenarios. And New Zealand is a tectonically active country, so land is constantly going up and down – not just with earthquakes, but because it’s on a plate boundary. So, we’re looking at the impacts here for vertical land movement, potentially doubling the rates of sea-level rise in some areas and actually offsetting it in another areas. So, you can start thinking, Okay, well, that provides a tool for identifying the most resilient areas to build on new infrastructure. So, I would be around future-proofing infrastructure.

Now, using that example of marine ice sheet collapse at a meter per century, arguably you say’d that’s not an actionable policy outcome, right? The cost to do that outweighs the risk. So, we have to provide information that’s actually actionable by policymakers, rather than just worst-case scenarios. But still making the worst case scenarios [available] there – if you can build resilience around them then that can only be beneficial. But they are not actionable around current infrastructure. How can you build with acceptable levels of risk tolerance? We want to be able to provide agnostic advice around the risks, without being too fatalistic about it. Because if you’re fatalistic, it’s like, well, people will just start ignore it, stop insuring things, and just deal with the risks as they come.

I think the other aspect is actually working with social sciences, particular around the psychology of climate change. That’s a really important part of how do you actually address this in a policy, because it’s not just government, it’s actually communities and the like, that are making a lot of these decisions.

BMR: Now you are the director of the Antarctic Research Center in Victoria University. In relation to all this, what’s your vision, what’s the direction you’d like to steer the Center in the next years?

RMK: Well, we’re just going through a strategic refresh on that. The vision is, obviously, we have a core skill set here around understanding physical change in Antarctica. That’s our core business. A core purpose, I should say. Within a global context, we don’t want to replicate necessarily what other countries are doing. We’re trying to work together with other countries. So, we work on those novel technologies, through ice coring, sediment coring, the SWAIS2C program, connected that into the marine protected area…

So, there’s environmental stewardship aspects that we think are very important. “kaitiakitanga”, which is the Māori word for that – we’re really strong on that custodianship, actually, multi-generational custodianship. We do draw on some indigenous concepts there to really highlight that this is not just an immediate policy relevance. This is something we’re going to be handing down to future generations, and that’s our legacy. And that’s really important to me, as a person. So, we talk about values, first and foremost. Our values are also working with local communities –we can talk about carbon capping and emission cuts, but nothing is happening globally. We actually have to start thinking about adaptation to climate change. We’re looking at how do we build resilience around our coastline. So, all coastal communities, as well as iwi and  hapū – the local Māori tribes, because that’s where traditionally their food baskets were. So, we work very closely to try to build resilience. For example, the loss of a Māori marae is as a huge, catastrophic loss for that community, because they consider the generational aspects that they’re going to be losing – the burial grounds, the fishing grounds. All that.

So, I think there’s a lot more community-focused engagement and relevance. We work with the Māori, guided by their problems, not so much telling them, “This is what’s happening to you”. We’re going and listening and asking, “What do you see as the needs for you?” That’s what are we’re good for – I think if, you know, we have to be good for something. I think the days of going down there and looking at traditional geology like Gondwana breakup are less applicable – even though I’m still interested in that stuff – but we’ve got a lot to do in this applied space. I think you get more reward to actually try to have impact.

BMR: In the same kind of lines, where would you like to see scientific ocean drilling going in the next 20 years?

RMK: Well, I’ve got definite views on that. I think that, given that we don’t have a globally ranging drillship apart from the Chinese one, which we hope will be an asset, we have to go to these novel types of technologies. I’ve got several proposals in the works for the Ross Sea, in particular. One requires one of these large drillships, and that’s probably the hardest one to fund. Scientifically I’m really excited about it, I think it’s true frontier, but it requires probably a $30 million euro investment for a geotechnical vessel, which is a challenge in this current state.

But we also have other proposals that could be on the order of 3 to 4 million euro for drilling through sea ice. That’s not always been seen as an IODP sort of project, right? Where there’s always been vessels. I’m trying to make the case that we should be thinking differently around what “mission specific” means. If we’re still asking those same questions but it’s a different type of technology, still drilling sediments on the seafloor, it should come under it. I’m quite vocal on that. I get a lot of support, but I also get some hesitancy as this is not the way we’ve operated before. But the reality here is, we’re not going to be able to operate like we had before. So, there’s that aspect.

I also think we can work with the on land communities. ICDP, the International Continental Drilling Program, which is what SWAIS2C we say is actually funded through. I think we can be working with ice core communities. There’s been another ice core program to obtain amillion year record of CO2 in the atmosphere. We’ve got beautiful offshore reports of the oceanic and ice sheet change of that. Could we partner up with ice core programs and drill the sediment beneath the ice cores to get what’s underneath the actual ice sheets? I think, more and broader collaboration is needed to actually make the program continue.

BMR: I have one last question for you. What’s the most rewarding aspect, the most valuable aspect you get from your involvement in scientific ocean drilling?

RMK: It’s people. It sounds cliche, but that’s what actually keeps me in the job, to be honest. I used to publish papers and get the huge excitement to see my name up front on papers, and the adrenaline rush of that and the ego kick, I guess. But as you… I think as I went into that leadership role in the Ross Sea, drilling expedition 374, my current role is actually seeing the other early career researchers flourish and develop their own programs. I do have a student – former student, not student anymore – Molly Patterson, who’s the co-chief on SWAIS2C now. She’s off doing her own drilling projects and actually showing that global leadership. And that’s just been so rewarding, to see the next generation come through and actually take on ideas and take on responsibility, and drive something completely and utterly revolutionary.

So, yeah, I think I’ve certainly, as I’ve become director of the IAC and co-chief of 374, I get more reward from seeing others succeed and being like a facilitator for that, rather than have owned it all. That’s the most rewarding thing. I think facilitating has been the biggest reward I’ve had out of IODP, as well as all those partnerships and friendships I created.

BMR: That wonderful. Is this something else you would like to explain or to say that I have not asked you?

RMK: No, I think I think we’ve covered most things that I think would be relevant for an oral history.

But Thank you very, very much.