The Arctic Century has interviewed Alexander Osadchiev, a Russian oceanologist, a leading researcher at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, chief researcher at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He is an active traveler: he has visited all regions of Russia, has been to more than 155 countries, and is a repeated participant of scientific expeditions.
Time has become my most important resource at some point, and I manage to do a lot of things only through brutal discipline.
I lived, in general, without valuing my time, and then, when I was 25, my son was born. And so it happened that I stayed at home with him until he was three years old, until he went to kindergarten, then to school.
And just when he was born, I started writing the text of my thesis. And that's what taught me to value my time. It taught me the following practice: if you have a free hour, you sit down and work. If you spend that hour on the Internet or reading something, that hour will pass by, and you will do nothing.
This taught me to prioritise the most important tasks. I managed to do a lot in science, to write a lot of articles precisely because I chose topics in which the work goes fast enough, and the work is quite autonomous.
And, in particular, that is why I defended my doctoral thesis quite early. Efficiency is needed in science as well.
Another very big problem is to remember some tasks. Very often people fall into some sort of a, so to speak, deadline curse. When there is a huge number of small tasks that need to be done within a week, a month, even half a year, it is best to do them at once and to forget about them.
Besides, if you do the tasks in advance, then you have time to look at the work and find some mistakes, improve the material by a bit. When you try to do them under a deadline, you don't have time to take a fresh look at the outcome of the work.
I work a lot with students, and I try to teach them that. Time is precious, and good planning is a great way to save that time.
That's certainly a problem. I've always wanted to travel, and I've structured my life to be able to both work from home and work while on the road. Of course, I've been so lucky with oceanology, but in many ways I chose it, and in many ways I've stayed in it, because I can work wherever I want, have some autonomy and still get good results.
Nevertheless, I still work a lot: I always work in the evenings and on weekends. Of course, it's a bit stressful, but on the other hand, you shape your own schedule. If you have enough discipline, it provides a good effect.
During COVID, many people said they couldn't work from home: it's true, working ‘at work’ is much easier than working from home, and working on a schedule is much easier than working without a schedule. But there are some big pros to this ‘freelancing’ thing as well.
Also, you have to choose tasks that will be done and bring some good result, and not do everything. But for this you have to search, you have to be looking for ideas all the time.
I was lucky in this respect, I had a very good supervisor. By the way, it will soon be 15 years since I came to work at the Institute of Oceanology. On 26 November 2009, I signed a work contract for employment at the Institute of Oceanology.
While it is true that a lot depends on the topic, it is still necessary to take a responsible approach to its completion. This is a recommendation I give to a student: one should try to finish the tasks. And this is sometimes even more important than talent.
Talent and inability to finish a task will lead to zero. If you multiply 100 by 0, you get 0.
Of course there is. And I've met people in my life who have been very powerful stimuli for my development. And it was the same with travelling, by the way. I talked to people who had travelled a lot and told interesting stories. I thought that I want to do that too and I will do the same.
Leonardo da Vinci is a completely unknown person [for today's scientists], some kind of a black box. For example, with Keldysh, Landau, Einstein, you simply cannot guess the working conditions. What was there? How did they live? What was going on? And you can't position these conditions on yourself. That's why great people from the past are a reference point, but a conceptual one at that. Your contemporaries, who achieved some outstanding results, are really a reference point and a guide to action.
Discoveries are rare. And discoveries, so to speak, are hidden behind a lot of work. You study some area or process, you do research, you walk around, you measure, you write smaller articles.
The vast majority of papers (in physical oceanology) that get published are ‘even without doing this study, we could tell where it would end up’ style papers, because one can generally understand the results intuitively. That's what 95% of scientific results consist of. And then there are the ‘wow!’ papers.
A discovery can happen. Sometimes there really is something lying on the surface, it's just that people haven't noticed it. They looked at all the known and available data and didn't see an ‘elephant’. Suddenly I saw it and did it, and the result was great.
But why did I see it? Because I was ready to see it.
When you do a lot of work on a problem, you start to realise what's normal and what's weird for that place.
Discoveries happen when you're ready for them. You don't find a diamond, you find a pebble. If you know how to identify a pebble, whether it's a diamond or not, then at some point you will actually find a diamond by digging through a lot of stones. You find a diamond, you realise it's a diamond, you cut it and it shines.
But to do that, you have to dig through a lot of material. The discoveries that I have had, that I am really proud of, that I like, there have been only three or four of them.
Yes. I even have two new currents. They somehow ‘merged’ into one.
Two currents were discovered: both the first and the second, which I like very much, which I am proud of. The opening of the first current was both luck and, on the other hand, the readiness to accept that luck. We went to work in 2021 in the St. Anna's Trough: it's a very important place in terms of climate change.
In the 90s it was almost always covered in ice, almost all year round. Now, in the last 20 years, the ice there has receded a lot, but it's still ice-free for two or three weeks a year. We managed to come in a low-ice year and make a good survey there and take a lot of measurements. From this survey, we saw some an anomaly, analysed it and realised that it was a current.
Then we managed to prove it, to get a hold of it. When you know what to look for, it's easy to prove.
And it was really lucky. We could have not gone there this year, or we could have gone to that area and it would be closed by ice.
We found the current because we made a lot of stations, a lot of measurements, but we were also ready to see this current there.
The second current is seasonal, it is formed only in winter under the ice and carries river water from the Kara Sea to the Laptev Sea. We managed to detect it thanks to several years of purposeful work. We managed to organise measurements in the winter season from icebreakers, set up anchor stations on the seabed in the right places, and carry out ship measurements in a fairly short period before ice formation started. Summarising all these data, it was possible to show the existence of this new current.
Yeah, it's pretty cool! The satisfaction of a scientific discovery, even a small discovery, is why scientists do science in the first place. When it's something you're proud of, it's doubly satisfying.
Yes, but there are cycles and trends. Right now, the most relevant trend is climate change, which is related to anthropogenic activities. The climate has some kind of cyclicity itself: diurnal, seasonal, there are solar cycles, some tens of years, thousands of years, ice ages....
If you look at the entire history of our Earth, the Earth has been very different. There were periods when there was little oxygen, there were periods when, on the contrary, there was a lot of oxygen, there were periods when almost the whole Earth was covered with ice, except for the equatorial regions.
In general, it is a constant superposition of cycles that are connected with the movement of the Earth as a cosmic body and with long-term geological and biological processes on the Earth itself.
One must always understand the time scale. Each process can be viewed on the scale of a second, on the scale of a year, on the scale of a thousand years.
Actually, one of the most important mistakes of our time is that people say that there is no climate warming because ‘there was an ice age, then it was just as warm, nothing special is happening’. But the fact is that when we talk about ice ages and interglacial periods, on this time scale these fluctuations are normal.
However, it gets warmer at a much higher rate, on the scale of 100 years—as fast as it used to get warmer on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years.
The problem is in measurement. There are various methods that allow air temperature measurements to ‘roll back into the past’.
We started to have very good measurements of air temperature only with the advent of satellites, i.e. from the second half of the 20th century. However, people also invent different indirect ways to get information about temperature in the past. It’s possible to get temperature information from a period of 66 million years.
Information about past temperature, for example, is provided by glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, which bury air bubbles in themselves. It is possible to take a core from a glacier and at a depth of metres or hundreds of metres, as in the case of Antarctica, determine at what temperature the gas composition in the buried bubbles was formed.
Sediments on the ocean floor also allow us to do this. Under different climatic conditions sedimentary rocks on the ocean floor are formed differently.
It's the same with the annual rings of trees. Their width tells us about the temperature of the atmosphere during the life of the tree, which is tens and hundreds of years ago. In various ways these data are coordinated with each other, we look at how they combine with each other, and build an understanding of this or that accuracy of temperature in the past.
What we're talking about in terms of the Arctic and global warming is roughly considered to be the beginning of the industrial age (late 19th century). From that point on we had an increase in greenhouse gases, carbon primarily.
Since the end of the 19th century, the temperature in the Arctic has increased twice as much as the average temperature on the planet. And in the last 20 years, the temperature in the Arctic has risen even faster. It has increased about 3-4 times more than the average temperature on the planet. This is due to the reduction of sea ice.
It would seem that it has warmed by 1 degree, nothing special. What difference does it make that we've had a 1 degree warming in 100 years? And it really may not be that noticeable. What's more noticeable is the reduction in Arctic sea ice.
It has become 1 or 2 degrees warmer in the Arctic, and the ice in the summer in some water areas has moved 500 kilometres away. No one expected this, no one knew it would be like this.
The ice began to shrink sharply at the beginning of the 21st century, and it was predicted that it would all melt by the 2020s or 2030s. However, in the last 10 years the ice area has stabilised, albeit at a much lower level than at the beginning of the 21st century. And no one could have predicted that either.
People are trying to explain it. But what the future holds is unknown. A sharp decrease in ice strongly affects many processes, because ice is a kind of ‘refrigerator’. There is little ice - the Earth cools slower, heats up faster, because ice mainly reflects the sun's rays, and dark seawater mainly absorbs solar radiation. And even if it gets colder again now, it will take a long time for this ice to build up to the values of the 90s. Ice melts quickly, but it builds up much slower.
Oftentimes, these projects are some kind of a fake. It takes a lot of energy to influence any climatic processes.
People have been thinking about climate weapons for a long time: how they could subdue nature, learn to control something, stop currents, but it doesn't work that way.
Natural energies are very high, and what humans can concentrate, of course, is a drop in the ocean.
The only climate weapon that has actually been used is the dispersion of silver iodide from aeroplanes by American troops during the Vietnam War. Getting the reagent into rain clouds resulted in heavy rainfall, which washed away Vietnamese crops and communications. Now, Russia similarly can ‘disperse’ clouds before some holidays. That is, to cause or cancel precipitation is the only thing that mankind can really do in terms of effective management of climatic processes.
No one knows, unfortunately. And really, it seems to me that politically countries are divided into two categories. There are countries that think they don't benefit from warming, and there are countries that think they benefit from warming.
Russia's informal position is that we will benefit from warming. But it is absolutely impossible to assess this with a planning horizon of 10-20 years.
There are changes that are potentially good, for example, Russia will become warmer by a degree. However, will our society be able to adapt?
Let's say that in Moscow they grow potatoes, in the Voronezh region they grow wheat, and in the Stavropol region they grow grapes. It gets warmer, and we start growing wheat instead of potatoes in the Moscow region, and grapes instead of wheat in the Voronezh region. If we can really do this, we will make money, we will win.
But if the fields can still be replaced somehow, it doesn't work that way with cities: for example, the city of Sochi is flooded — in recent years, the number of floods there has increased solely because the atmosphere above the Black Sea has become a little warmer. We cannot move Sochi anywhere. That is why it is impossible to adapt sometimes.
The conclusion is that, let's say, poor countries will suffer from climate change with a 100% chance, it will be bad for them. And rich countries, they will somehow adapt and try to benefit, but it is absolutely impossible to predict what will be more, pros or cons.
In the case of permafrost, for example, it is impossible to take everything into account: you need to calculate how many infrastructure accidents there will be, how many houses will collapse, how many piles you need to drill to reinforce these houses. We do not have such data. Therefore, only time will tell.
But we need to think about it and react. It is very good that this is being monitored in Russia, and our climate agenda is working very well. The government, both at the federal level and at the regional level, has started to monitor the climate, realised that it is important, and that we need to adapt, study it, and to react somehow.
The climate agenda is often politicised: the responsibility for climate change has to be shifted to someone else. What eco-activists say, “We should do nothing at all, let nature remain as it is. It is necessary for people to give up overconsumption, and to have as little change as possible.”
And there is the following position: a person wants to live his life qualitatively, he will not give up consumption, he will not reduce it and will only increase it if he has the means to do so. And the amount of money grows more and more.
Therefore, we have to adapt to change. You can force everyone to develop wind energy on the scale of one country, but on the scale of the world it is impossible. If it is not profitable for people, it will not be developed.
Very often, of course, this is a way of manipulation. You can say that you cannot buy gas in Russia because it is bad for the environment, but you can buy it in America because it is good.
Or, say, in Europe, there was a story with a climate contribution, “So you produce gas, but we will buy it from you for cheaper prices, because you will still have a climate tax, because your gas is not produced in an environmentally friendly way and our whole planet suffers from it.”
Still, the climate agenda is secondary. All the events of the last few years have shown us that everyone was very interested in climate until more pressing issues came along.
When the more pressing issues came along, the whole climate agenda was set aside and other issues were addressed.
And there's a lot of hypocrisy in that. People say that the climate is the most important thing that we will leave to our children, we are responsible to them. And then the same people say two years later, “No, we have other, more pressing problems now”.
Thank God, no. Thank God scientists are above all that. Because it's something they're professionally versed in.
Scientists understand everything. Politicisation doesn't come from scientists, of course.
Sometimes it can come from scientists: you have to say, “What I am studying is threatening a global catastrophe, so give me money to study it”. There's a small probability of global catastrophe, but we'll make a big headline. We'll forget the small probability and highlight that it's a global catastrophe.
Everyone gets it and knows it perfectly well.
There are obstacles in the sphere of co-operation. ‘Unfriendly countries’ are forbidden to deal with us. And all those who kept even some personal contacts, some have become politicised and simply refuse to work with our organisations. Some would like to work, and personal contacts are preserved, but they have been banned from institutions and organisations.
In 22nd year someone still worked, but now almost everyone has been cut off. And it is very rare when Western scientists maintain some kind of official co-operation with us, with Russia, only in those issues that are really very profitable for them, such as fishing in the Barents Sea.
Nevertheless, scientists still reference each other, still exchange some ideas. But of course there is some contact with people who maintain a personal, ‘human’, attitude.
But we are trying to reorient ourselves towards China, India, the BRICS countries, the CIS. I think that Russia will reorient itself. And if this confrontation drags on, then, of course, in five years we will be cooperating with other people. These ties are being actively organised now.
I think not. There is science and there is interpretation. You can interpret any result in the opposite way if you are behind a tribune.
Science is pretty objective. Oceanology deals with a real object, the world ocean. And you can't invent something about it that doesn't apply to it, because more or less everything can be verified there. It is or it is not—you can just go and measure it.
It's clear that predictions about the future are exactly the grey area that can't be verified. You can predict anything. And this is just the ground for some insinuations and political statements.
Nevertheless, oceanology is objective. And because there is the Internet, everyone reads articles, writes articles in English, and if someone has done something, all other people have access to it. In that respect, science is completely universal.
Because we have little undeveloped land left. Historically, we have not managed to get far: neither to the Mediterranean Sea, nor to the Indian Ocean. We have made our way a little bit to the Black Sea, a little bit to the Caspian Sea and a little bit to the Baltic Sea. And these seas, objectively speaking, are small. Everything is explored, populated and so on. There is no active development there. But the Arctic is completely empty. And that is why it becomes a possible point of growth.
Besides, it is a possible point of growth because it is getting warmer, and it is simply easier to work there.
And there is some romance, some understanding of the unity of this space. The Arctic is really different, and that's probably why there is a desire to explore it from different angles.
I think the Arctic, Antarctica and then space! The bottom of the ocean as well.
In oceanology, probably not. We have reached a certain ceiling in it now, and it is not developing intensively.
Intensive development of science is connected to the invention of some new means of cognition. For example, the technology of gene sequencing was invented, and immediately a huge abyss for biology appeared: you can understand the connections between species using the genome, you can even understand when people came out of Africa and what were the waves of continental settlement....
Earlier they tried to understand this with the help of archaeology, but now you can objectively study the genome.
The emergence of some new mechanism of study gives an impetus to the development of science at once.
There were periods in oceanology when new mechanisms appeared. In the second half of the 20th century satellites appeared, which gave a huge progress. At the beginning of the 21st century, Argo floats appeared. They dive, swim, and take a lot of measurements in the ocean by themselves. Then all of this is sent via satellite communication, all of this is collected in a single centre. However, aside from that, since the beginning of the 21st century, there have been no major breakthroughs.
If people would only learn how to study the ocean more efficiently, to map the bottom…
There is still no human presence in the ocean: it is very episodic. The ocean is still a very foreign area to humans. High pressure at great depths, storms on the sea surface—it is hard to make measurements there. If it is possible to make measurements at a new level, of course, oceanology will move forward and there will be a lot of new discoveries.
Drones have been akin to the invention of the microscope. In a certain sense, the Argo floats have also played a similar role, as marine ‘drones’.
But, for example, they cannot float in the Arctic: signals propagate poorly in the sea. If something stands on the bottom at a depth of three kilometres, the float cannot transmit data, because on the surface it transmits data via satellite, but signals do not pass through the water column. And so far this problem has not been solved.
If this problem could be solved, it would be much easier, because all these drones that are floating in the sea, they have to surface and send their data. That's why they don't work in the Arctic, they float up, they bump into the ice, and that's it—a breakdown of equipment.
And besides, they cannot transmit coordinates, because it is impossible to determine coordinates at depth. It has to surface.
So far we have a good understanding of the circulation of currents only on the surface, as they are are registered by satellites. But what happens at depth, we do not know very well.
Artificial intelligence hasn't made that much progress yet. The science is still dominated by new methods of measurement. It's satellites, it's new methods of measurement like Argo floats, it's, in a sense, new methods of developing computer modelling.
We are waiting for something else new. Still, machine learning, artificial intelligence, has not yet made such fundamental progress. So far it just solves some problems better than other means.
Well, it's only if you like it. It can't be taught. You either have it or you don't.
Of course, you have to have some example in front of your eyes and some good practices of how to do it.
It is very important that all the other components are present: social, in the form of a team, salary, normal work conditions, premises, attitude—this is all very important, of course. If the work is not paid for, then, of course, no amount of enthusiasm will save you.
In a certain sense, yes. If you advertise something, people do follow it, and that's what we're doing now.
We had a big problem with science being poorly advertised. Now we have an increased popularisation of science at the state level. The last five years some kind of boom could have been observed.
And it is right, because schoolchildren simply do not understand that you can work in science, that it is good to work there—you can make a career and arrange your life. They just don't know about it. If you ‘pound it into their heads’ for ten years, they will learn and join the scientists’ ranks. And there will be an effect.
This kind of advertising, of course, works. Apart from creating infrastructure, paying money, creating laboratories, equipment, buildings, you really need advertising.
And one without the other does not work. You need to have everything.
In Soviet times there was really an orientation — geology was a very important state project. The Soviet Union got a lot from its resources: timber in the 30s, gold in the 40s, oil and gas in the 70s...
I am far from physics and maths now. Of course I am an oceanologist and of course I am first and foremost a geographer. Oceanology is all I do.
Credit for all photos in the article to Daria Osipova
Interviewed and translated into English by Dmitry Tarasov
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