Cosmic dust reveals a hidden history of past sea-ice – does it predict a crash of Arctic Ocean life? Stimulating new science with Dr. Frank Pavia, University of Washington. Then “The normalization of (almost) everything” with computational cognitive scientist Rachit Dubey.

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COSMIC DUST, SEA ICE & FUTURE ARCTIC

FRANK PAVIA

Would you believe cosmic dust reveals a hidden history of past sea-ice? That it predicts a crash of Arctic Ocean life? That warming air, not warmer seas, drives sea ice loss?

We explore stories of cosmic dust with Lead Author of a new paper, Dr. Frank Pavia from University of Washington. Frank is an isotope geochemist with new tools to explore past and present climate. With colleagues, Pavia just published “Cosmic dust reveals dynamic shifts in central Arctic sea-ice coverage over the past 30,000 years”.

We picture Earth floating along through black empty space. In fact, space is dirty. Tons of star dust, if you will, lands here every day. We never see it.

Pavia and colleagues found previously sampled cores drilled in the Arctic Sea Bed in the 1990’s. They were looking for trace amounts of two substances: Helium-3 and Thorium-230. The Helium isotope is produced only in space. The only Helium-3 found on Earth came from space. We can call it part of cosmic dust.

Thorium-230 on the other hand originates on Earth. It is a product of decaying uranium. Uranium is found in pretty well all sea water, around the world. The decay state of Thorium can be used as a clock to measure periods of time.

Where Thorium is found, that reveals a relative “when” that layer of ocean bed sediment was formed. Where Helium-3 is found in that layer, that tells us there was no sea ice above. In times with sea ice coverage, there is no Helium-3 in those layers.

The combination of this very fine isotope measurement tells scientists when there was sea ice cover, and when not. In this way they mapped out Arctic sea ice for the last 30,000 years. That period includes a couple of interglacial warming events. Maybe we can use that to understand how the Arctic reacts to warming.

One of the periods (they can’t be specific about exact years) without summer sea ice was around 13,000 years ago. This is important because: until about 11,000 years ago, a land-bridge blocked off the Pacific in what is now the Bering Strait. There was no connection between the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. According to the authors, disappearance of sea ice before that connection to the Pacific indicates a warmer atmosphere, not warmer seas, drove change to seasonal sea ice in Polar waters. Previously, some scientists assumed warmer water was the main factor.

Of course these are different times. Not only is the gate to the Pacific gate open, but the North Pacific had a record long marine heat wave during 2024 and part of 2025. Some of these warmer waters may have flowed into the Arctic.

On the other side, waters running up by Svalbard in the Arctic above the Atlantic were very warm. And all through the past three years, running right up to today, air temperatures above the Arctic have been off-the-charts hot.

How will all this affect Arctic sea ice formation? By October 2025, sea ice there was not at a record low, but in the top ten lowest. The October 2025 extent was about 12% below the 1991–2020 average.

CRASH IN ARCTIC LIFE?

Several papers suggest continued warming will lead to nutrient starvation in the Arctic Ocean. The Pavia et al paper adds further confirmation. Previously Pavia co-authored several papers on the dust of micro-nutrients that feed plankton. But in the interview, he seemed more uncertain about whether a crash in Arctic plankton may happen.

The Abstract for the new paper says:

“Sea-ice changes closely correlate with biological nutrient consumption, supporting projections of a nutrient-starved central Arctic Ocean with continued sea-ice loss.”

If you want to dig deeper, here is an earlier paper on nutrient starvation in the Arctic.

As sea ice retreats, sunlight penetrates more deeply and for longer periods, causing phytoplankton blooms to consume available nutrients (especially nitrate and phosphate) rapidly in the upper ocean layers.

When the rate of biological nutrient consumption outpaces the physical resupply from deeper waters, surface waters become depleted, leading to nutrient-starvation, especially during summer and autumn. Worse, two factors indicate the ocean will become more stratified, so fewer nutrients make it up into the layers with enough light for photosynthesis. That organic recharge normally comes from deeper waters, but not when the ocean is stratified. The two driving factors in stratification are extra freshwater from melting ice and thawing land, as well as the factor of warmer waters reducing mixing.

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NORMALIZATION OF ANYTHING

RACHIT DUBEY

“Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal”

“The normalization of (almost) everything“. That article is from Rachit Dubey, Assistant Professor at UCLA. Rachit is a “computational cognitive scientist” analyzing how minds work. He published a series of papers about public apathy toward climate action – despite harrowing extreme weather. He just won a 2025 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award for his novel groundbreaking work.

“My work explores when exactly adaptability, a core strength of human cognition, becomes a liability.”

– Rachit Dubey 2025

This new Article from Dubey begins:

“For a long time, many climate scientists and advocates held onto an optimistic belief that once the impacts of climate change became undeniable, people and governments would act. But whereas the predictions of climate models have increasingly borne out, the assumptions about human behavior have not. Even as disasters mount, climate change remains low on voters’ priority lists, and policy responses remain tepid. To me, this gap reflects a deeper failure – not just in policy or communication, but in how we understand human adaptability.”

and continues:

“Although such failures are often attributed to political or structural forces, I believe that they also reflect a deeper cognitive misalignment in how our minds perceive change over time. The human tendency to normalize is a far-reaching phenomenon that undercuts our response to many large-scale problems, from public health, to gun violence, to climate change.”

CHANGING BASELINES

Scientists recognize normalization. They call it “shifting baseline syndrome” but could not explain why it happens. Even though we know about shifting baseline syndrome, that has not enabled a recovery from that condition. It is still operative, hiding the size of real threats and reducing pressure to act in self defense. So we have two problems: shifting baseline syndrome and blindness to shifting baseline syndrome even as it repeatedly appears…

YOU HAVE TO HAVE LIVE IT…

A new Letter from Fabian Dablander in Amsterdam, out October 7th, is titled “Climate hazard experience linked to increased climate risk perception worldwide”. Checking surveys from 142 countries, he found that “people who have experienced a climate-related hazard are more likely to consider climate change a very serious threat than people who have not experienced any hazard within the same country.” This applied to everything from wildfires to floods. These experiences are “binary data” in people’s lives.

SEE ALSO: This July 2025 paper with Rachit Dubey as co-author: “Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change”.

This is an important insight for climate communicators, government agencies and so on. Presenting graphs of slow changes over a century doesn’t motivate people. They/we respond to “binary data” about any issue. For example, rather than a chart of years when a certain lake froze over, show a photo of the frozen lake in the past, and a photo of open water now. This shows two states – a binary situation. That makes more impression on the brain, apparently and helps break the adaptation/normalization cycle.

Pictures of a forest before and after a wildfire, a living reef then a dead reef – you get the picture when it is binary. Maybe that is why the collapse of the Gulf Stream/AMOC is more real to people. Anyone trying to communicate an issue has to take these studies into account.

ALEX RAMBLES ON THIS THEME

We want to “see” or experience a shift large enough to stimulate attention and curiosity. That may explain the longing of so many YouTube videos and posts for a huge crash – of everything from recreational vehicle sales to national power grids or civilization itself. Fundamentalist Christians hope not for a gradually better world, but a very big miracle like The Rapture. Too many modern movies depend on gunfire and explosions just to get our attention.

Now that extreme has become normal from sports to politics, stressful extremes become our new mental normal. We are addicts to artificial events always needing a stronger hit.  Perhaps today’s strongest hurricanes will be normal in 25 years and not much in the news. People living in Earth Quake zones don’t bother with 3.0 shakers. We can get used to living right beside a train track or flight path. Only the most shocking news, taboos and laws broken, the most sacred statues toppled – can open doorways to our attention.

This is partly due to new technology and media. Before the year 1800, most experiences could not be more extreme than reality. There are exceptions in literature and popular tales. Maybe 90% of that earlier person’s day would involve natural things, roads and buildings, animals encounters.  Walking with cell-phones and earbuds people may only re-enter their physical reality to check for danger. At work and at home extremes are easy on our screens. Even furniture advertisements feature explosions. So it takes a much bigger stimulant from the real world to get our attention.

This is a different but related argument to Dubey et al’s work. Here, the addition of cyber-reality with more extreme stimulation also lessens slowly increasing signals, like hotter summers every year. It is different from the boiling frog effect, because in the cyber-barrier, the importance of artificial stimuli has been changed away from slower signals coming out of the natural “real” world.

YEAH, FUNDING CRASHES, THANKS GOOGLE…

I find more articles and social media posts about independent media experiencing a funding drop because Google has replaced search results and links – with their own summary of the site. Fewer readers like you ever make it here. One well known alt-media site said donations dropped by 70% since AI results replaced web results. Some will closed down.

Listeners/reader donations to keep Radio Ecoshock going have dropped about 50%. At the same time, costs to produce and distribute the show went up, not crazy up, but up. If you are one of the few, please become a monthly supporter or make a donation? Help needed.

Thanks for being here.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock