KAREN BREWSTER: I was going to take us back a little bit. About your growing up and how is it that you ended up getting interested in sea ice.

I don’t know where in Germany you grew up. HAJO EICKEN: Mm. KAREN BREWSTER: And what your family background might be.

HAJO EICKEN: I grew up on the North Sea. You know, in an estuary. And so we -- so my grandparents on my mother’s side had a little weekend cabin that was literally right behind the dike on the North Sea.

So we would go out into the Wadden Sea. You know, these tidal flats. And I -- I just liked the ocean. I mean I really -- I really liked the sea.

And -- but that was an area -- you know, I mean you would get ice on occasion, but I really wasn’t interested in sea ice, to be honest, while growing up.

Although it’s kind of interesting that -- you know, if you have a -- and you probably heard this yourself, you know. If you’re out on -- in coastal Alaska in June out on the shorefast ice, you know --

You’re out on the shorefast ice, you have wading birds and geese and ducks that fly by. You know, you hear their calls.

And at the same time you hear, if it’s warm, you know, you hear the little trickle and the way the meltwater that’s generated at the surface of the ice kind of drains into little holes. So it’s this little chik-chik-chik-chik.

And being out on the Wadden Sea is in terms of the sounds exactly the same. You know, during low tide the water kinda drains down into these little mudholes. You’ve got the same types of birds that are flying around that you hear.

So that was -- that was always amazing to me. Like I really felt a real connection.

Yeah. I really have to say I love being out on shorefast ice in June. You know, May and June. It’s just a beautiful time of the year.

KAREN BREWSTER: It is. It is. And what did your parents do? HAJO EICKEN: My father was a -- had a roofing business. So I -- when I grew up, you know -- both as a kid at school and then I think for the first year when I was at university, I worked summers in the roofing business.

You know, so it was mostly just, you know, loading up, like, insulating materials and roof tile -- roof tiles, and all kinds of stuff on trucks driving that out there.

And then, you know, sort of in terms of my research career, then when I went to university -- so I studied mineralogy. I actually looked at sort of what’s known as technical petrology, where you look at how can you improve building materials. I worked with cement and concrete.

So for several years I -- I -- at university I worked summers in, like, the research industry in asbestos cement or fiber-reinforced cement, and technical ceramics. You know, that type of stuff.

Because I thought, yeah, that’s a neat way to sort of combine construction, roofing, you know, sort of the physics of building with -- with the material itself.

But then just by chance I -- you know, I swim. And back then I was a member of a swim club in my hometown. So when I visited over summers, I swam out there.

And I ran into this other guy who was a geophysicist who worked at the German Polar Research Institute for Polar Marine Research.

And he said, "Hey, you know, so what you do?" And I said, well, here’s what I’m working on. And he goes, "Well, we’re studying ice and we’ve got these problems. You know, we need to set up a microscope lab, and are you interested in working with us over the summers as a research student?" You know, while I was in university.

And I said, "Oh, sure, you know, that’s interesting. Sounds cool."

And then, you know -- and even then I said -- well, this is all interesting, but it’s cold. You know, you’re looking at ice. It’s a cool material, but it didn’t quite -- I didn’t quite get it just yet.

But then they -- you know, in 1986 there was the first winter cruise into Antarctic waters. And it was a -- it was a two-part cruise on the German polar research vessel.

And it was sort of an interesting -- maybe I’m going off on a tangent here, but it’s a really interesting story because of the way things come back, you know.

Because -- so on that cruise there were two legs. One was in the winter, and that was where all the big sea ice glaciologists, geophysicists, oceanographers wanted to be.

So the winter leg, my then-advisor Manfred Lange was one of the lead scientists. And they had other researchers on there, including Steve Ackley, who's a well-known US sea ice glaciologist; Peter Wadhams, a really famous polar oceanographer; a bunch of people from the US, including a couple of people from Fairbanks.

And then, they had another leg that was in the late-winter/early spring that was all biologists, because they wanted to look at okay, how does the -- you know, the sea ice zone in the Antarctic go from winter to spring.

So there was no interest whatsoever from the physical -- you know, from the geophysicists to be on that cruise, but the biologists said, "Well, but we’re going to look at sea ice, too. We need somebody who can drill cores for us and kind of look at the ice. Do that kind of stuff."

And so Manfred said, "Hey, you know, are you interested in going down there?" And I said, "Sure, you know, this is great."

And that cruise really sort of changed my career, because it was -- you know, I still actually -- the way it worked was the cruise ended in the southern hemisphere and I started my master's fieldwork afterwards in Brazil.

So I was still set on sort of doing, you know, more classic mineralogy-type work, which I did for my masters.

But during the cruise, the great thing was it was a bunch of biologists, but top-notch biologists. You know, people who really were sort of leading polar marine research at that time.

But serendipitously there was one other sort of glaciologist/geophysicist type and that was Tom Grenfell from the University of Washington, who had worked a lot in Alaska, worked in Barrow, had been the advisor of a graduate student who did his thesis in Barrow, knew all about Alaska and the Arctic, as well.

And he -- you know, I -- back then I was twenty-one, you know. He sort of took me under his wing.

He was doing microwave remote-sensing research, so he was mostly based on the ship, but then taught me a bunch of stuff about sea ice. You know, about what to observe on the ground.

And then I was out there with basically a bunch of biologists providing them sea ice samples, analyzing cores, and what have you.

And that was -- you know, there were a number of people there who were really influential in my career.

But the cool thing was that, you know, this was in ’86. When I came to Alaska, one of the motivations was that in ‘98 was this big US research program, SHEBA: Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean.

And that was an ice camp out in the Chukchi Sea. I went out there for three months just a couple of months after I moved here.

And Tom actually was on the ship with me the whole time. That was really cool, actually, to sort of see that come full circle.

KAREN BREWSTER: Cool. Yeah, well it’s interesting to hear how people get into the subjects that they get into. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah, yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: And what inspired them. And some people, they have family that were scientists or, you know, as you say, they grow up in an environment.

And you kind of came to it by accident a little bit. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: Although I would think some of the structural things of cement and sea ice, they might have some similarities. HAJO EICKEN: Very similar. Yes, yes.

KAREN BREWSTER: You know, I’m thinking about when I talked to Lew Shapiro. You know, back then they were doing a lot with structure of ice in the -- and, you know, the ivu, the pressure ridges. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. KAREN BREWSTER: And how it broke up in terms of ice drilling rigs and things like that.

And, you know, that now you’ve come into studying it from different perspectives, because maybe they kind of figured all that out. I don’t know. HAJO EICKEN: Well, no, and that’s the interesting thing.

That’s what got me interested in sea ice is -- I mean, sea ice is a material that’s simple enough so you can do fundamental basic research that you can’t do on more complicated materials.

You know, because sea ice is pure ice, saline brine, you know, the liquid that gets retained in there. Some gases and then a few salt precipitates. You know, that’s sort of the simplest form of sea ice.

And the microstructure, the way those different components of this composite material are arranged, is such that it’s -- it is somewhat complicated, but that was part of my PhD actually was develop image processing techniques and other techniques to quantify that.

When you do that, you find that actually, yeah, the structure is somewhat simple, you know.

So it’s simple, but at the same time complicated enough that it allows you to do a bunch of studies that relate to the behavior of any type of material: rocks, industrial ceramics, metals at high -- what’s called high homologous temperatures, very close to the melting point of the material.

And -- or other way around, close to the freezing point or the temperature of solidification.

And what’s interesting was that part of my work of coming here was to look at, okay, can we, by understanding the microstructure, develop better models of, say, permeability or the way heat is transferred through sea ice.

And really, the furthest we’ve gotten, you know -- and then I -- I left that line of research, but I had a postdoc Daniel Pringle, who sort of pushed that furthest, I would say, where a team of us including a masters student, Daniel, myself, and then Ken Golden from the University of Utah, a mathematician, we were looking at developing models of ice permeability and ice microstructural evolution.

And what’s unique about sea ice -- you can’t do that with any other material, really, in the same way at these high temperatures, is that we would grow these what are known as single crystals, where you basically take -- you know, we would take ice out of the gravel pit here, cut the crystals, which are gigantic. You know, they’re like this size.

Cut them into sort of plates where we knew what the orientation was, and then put those plates on top of seawater and would grow sea ice.

You know, so you’d transition from the freshwater ice single crystal to a sea ice single crystal.

So then you had a single crystal where you could reproduce everything about that crystal. I mean, this was like a standard type of crystal.

And then we -- you know, I’d developed some approaches to extract three-dimensional information about the pore network in these crystals using x-ray tomography.

So we -- what we would do is we would grow a bunch of these crystals and we would subject them to different temperature cycles.

And we would then at various stages of that extract samples, do the x-ray tomography, and learn more about -- you know, what’s the distribution of pores in there.

And in the furthest -- sort of the most sophisticated experiments, we would actually run the whole experiment in the x-ray tomographer.

And based on that, then Daniel published what I still consider is really a landmark paper that summarizes our work, where we developed a model that shows how pore network connectivity evolves as you approach this very high homologous temperature where the ice is just about to melt away.

And that paper gets cited by people in metallurgy, in rock science, because for them it’s almost impossible to do this type of work.

They’re getting there now, but for a number of reasons that’s very, very difficult.

So this work, I would argue that that really is unique about sea ice. But it’s a kind of a cool sort of re -- you know, it kind of comes back full circle to this question of, okay, what do we know about how rocks or metals or industrial materials behave.

KAREN BREWSTER: And I was also thinking about, you know, your work with local observers and local experts that you seem to have been -- you were open to collaboration. You were interested in hearing what they had to say.

And I don’t know if that was very common at the time you were doing that. Now it’s perhaps more common. But when you were getting into that and -- and how did you kind of think to do that?

HAJO EICKEN: Well, I mean, in part -- well, I think there’s -- there was sort of several reasons.

One was -- you know, I was just -- I mean, to me, you know -- I spent -- before moving to Alaska, I had spent quite a bit of time in Antarctica and in the Arctic, you know. But mostly on ships.

And so you never really come into contact with people who live with the ice. You know, you’re always out somewhere out in the boondocks.

KAREN BREWSTER: But plenty of scientists would’ve been fine with that. HAJO EICKEN: True, but I -- yeah, for some reason I -- to me it was always interesting, like how do people live with the ice for --

I don’t even know why actually, but that was one aspect. I mean, that definitely was attractive about coming to Alaska that you have people who’ve been living with sea ice for millennia. KAREN BREWSTER: Right.

HAJO EICKEN: But the other thing was then that -- you know, just more from a utilitarian point of view, the type of work I was interested in doing up in Barrow back then really required somebody -- like, I --

You know, I mean usually the locals know best. You know, you just have to talk to them and kinda figure out, okay, what do they know; how do they know it -- and communicate with them.

But there that was important because otherwise we would’ve risked equipment. We would’ve made a lot of mistakes.

Whereas I could come in, you know, and thanks to Lew (Shapiro) in large part, who put me in touch with the right people, you know, within a year we were doing stuff that wasn’t completely stupid in terms of where to put equipment and so forth.

KAREN BREWSTER: Right. But I was gonna say, not all researchers would think to ask the local people. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. KAREN BREWSTER: Maybe by the ‘90s they were. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. I -- yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: And a little bit I’m wondering if -- you know, also in Barrow there is the legacy of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. HAJO EICKEN: Yes. KAREN BREWSTER: And you think that was an influence? HAJO EICHEN: Yes. Yes. For sure.

Because, I mean, Kenneth Toovak, you know, he had worked with -- with a bunch of academic scientists for a large number of years.

Richard Glenn was great. I mean, he got his masters at UAF. I mean, these are people --

KAREN BREWSTER: So if you had -- if you had started doing that in a different community, do you think it -- the -- HAJO EICKEN: Could’ve gone very different. KAREN BREWSTER: -- progress might have gone different?

HAJO EICKEN: And much slower. No, again it was all serendipity. I mean, I was -- I was extremely lucky in terms of meeting or having people who kind of guide me in the right direction.

Then Dave Norton organizing the Barrow Sea Ice Symposium. ‘Cause, you know, Henry Huntington was there. I learned a lot from him about -- you know, like, more sort of the formal interview techniques or what to do/what not to do. I wouldn’t have gotten any of that.

You know, and then Igor Krupnik in more recent years, I mean. And there, too, Igor was great, because he was -- you know, the PhD committee, thesis committee for Matt Druckenmiller, was a great thesis committee.

Because it had -- you know, it had sort of a classical glaciology/geophysicist on there, Matthew Sturm; Igor Krupnik as a human geographer. It had Mark Johnson as a hard-core physical oceanographer, but then also Herbert Anungazuk. KAREN BREWSTER: From Wales.

HAJO EICKEN: From Wales. Iñupiat cultural anthropologist with the National Park Service.

That was a great committee. I learned a lot from groups like that too, you know.

But getting back to your point, I mean, yeah, I guess you have to be -- I’m interested in sort of looking at those areas where different aspects of a problem or different spheres intersect.

You know, that’s what’s interesting about sea ice. And what got me interested in the first place is that -- you know, maybe if my first field expedition would’ve been with a bunch of geophysicists, it might not have even been as interesting as it was in my case where it was a bunch of biologists who were looking at -- okay, what type of micro-organisms grow in the ice. You know, how do penguins use the ice cover.

And again, I mean, that group was amazing. Like, one of my other close collaborators there, or mentors, was Bernard Stonehouse, who is like the world authority on penguins. I mean, literally, the world authority.

There were -- you know, Victor Smetacek was a really close colleague who ultimately, I think, was the person who convinced me, "Hey, you know, this is what you have to do."

But a world-leading biologist in terms of marine food webs and phytoplankton, biological oceanography.

So those -- but what those people kind of made clear to me was that there’s a lot of interesting work that you can do at the intersection of these different disciplines.

And to some extent, I -- I think that’s also what I’m interested in in terms of social science and sea ice research, in terms of Iñupiat or indigenous knowledge. Yupik knowledge of sea ice and geophysics.

KAREN BREWSTER: Any other projects you’re working on? You said you kind of have moved into climate change work that’s not really where you thought you were going.

HAJO EICKEN: Yeah, and I’m not sure. I mean I don’t really consider myself a --you know, I don’t think I contribute in any significant fashion to climate change research, to be honest.

And I don’t -- I mean that’s not what I see myself doing. It’s more -- I think what we’re trying to do is to see how --

I think we’re working at the intersection between how do large-scale changes in the climate system manifest itself in sea ice processes at the local scale. Understanding the geophysics of that.

How does that impact various users of the ice, not just people but also marine mammals. You know, parts of the food web. You know, microorganisms.

And then, what is the information that we can provide that makes it easier for people to adapt to those changing conditions.

You know, what do you have to observe. I mean that’s -- I’d say, you know, a key aspect of my work now is more looking at designing, helping implement, bring together researchers that want to put in place observing systems, in particular autonomous observations that are -- ideally, you know --

I mean we’re now working on a project. We’re working with Katie Spellman here at IARC who does a lot of work in science education, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, but also co-production of knowledge and a number of local communities to empower people at the local level to determine here’s what we want to observe, where we want to observe it, and here are the tools in terms of the observing technology that we need that we can deploy. That’s the type of thing.

KAREN BREWSTER: Well, it’s funny you just talked about what to observe, because in all the interviewing I’ve done on sea ice, I always ask the hunters what is it that you’re looking for when you’re out there that’s telling you whether it’s safe or whether the ice is going to be moving in.

Sometimes it’s difficult for them to articulate because, as you say, they’re looking at so much. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: So, for science you’re doing the same thing. Is you’re trying to figure out what to observe. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And that’s for us, you know, in the sort of the geophysical science or in general in the natural sciences, that’s also a process of prioritization, you know, which can be painful if you’re working with a bunch of researchers who all think, hey, what I’m observing or what I think is important is the most important thing of everything. Right?

But if you look at the changing Arctic, you will have to track a lot of different variables. But you can’t track a hundred variables or make dedicated observations of a hundred variables just in one narrow field, you know.

You have to bring this together as a whole.

And so again, that’s where I see the work that I’ve been doing in collaboration with Amy Lovecraft, Olivia Lee, and others. We’ve had these scenario workshops over the past three, four years, where we’re using this participatory process of scenarios in the north - North Slope Borough, Northwest Arctic Borough - to help us identify what are those observables that we need to track.

KAREN BREWSTER: Especially, as you say, you know, how do you know what you need to track for the next down-the-road how many years? And how you prioritize them. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: Not use the hundred, but pick five. How do you know? HAJO EICKEN: Exactly.

KAREN BREWSTER: How do you know what you’re gonna need to know? HAJO EICKEN: Yeah, yeah. KAREN BREWSTER: So it sounds challenging.

Which brings me to question. You know, we've been talking about all these projects you’ve worked on and great successes you’ve had through your career, what kind of challenges have you faced? Difficulties?

HAJO EICKEN: Well, I mean, I -- you know, hey. I mean, success? I don’t know. I mean I still feel I --

You know, sort of, I still struggle with relevance. You know, what -- what is really relevant?

I mean, as you said earlier -- and I don’t really consider myself contributing significantly to, say, climate change research as such, because that’s not where the original research lies.

But then, at times I’m wondering -- you know, with some of the work are we too focused on a specific location or are we too focused on a problem that isn’t as widely relevant? That’s a constant battle, if you will, or struggle.

And, yeah, and just prioritizing how to focus on things that are really worthwhile and relevant. You know, that’s the big challenge.

KAREN BREWSTER: And as Director of IARC, are you able to still find time to go do research and fieldwork? HAJO EICKEN: Well, yes and no.

KAREN BREWSTER: I don’t know what your responsibilities are as director. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. No, I mean I -- I mean, that’s a big challenge and I’m still learning.

I -- you know, particularly right now I feel I’m not doing enough on the -- that I can’t quite keep up with sort of the administration part or the part that’s more about leading an institute.

But what I -- I think I’ve at least understood, you know, I’m not sure whether I can implement it, is that now really all the written -- I mean I still do research in part because, you know, that’s what I like.

You know, if I weren’t able to connect what I’m doing as IARC director to research, it would just be a desk job. I wouldn’t -- I wouldn’t enjoy it. I wouldn’t be credible. And I probably wouldn’t be good at it either.

But I can’t -- now I have to find that sort of this intersection between research that I can advance but that benefits IARC as a whole. That opens -- potentially opens new opportunities or builds partnerships that allows others at IARC to do what they need to do, you know.

So it’s less about me doing original research or writing papers. It’s more about me helping other people.

And frankly, you know, looking at it, I mean, now if I look at the people working here at IARC, I mean, they’re all better at what they do than where I’m at now.

I mean, so it’s really more about finding ways that I can help them position themselves in a setting that allows them to be productive, you know. And not just productive. But right now a lot of it, of course, is how do you financially support the research in this fiscal climate? KAREN BREWSTER: Right.

HAJO EICKEN: And -- but it’s interesting that now I’m at a point in my career where the types of things I’m interested in relate to things that are more sort of science policy or science diplomacy, you know.

Or putting in place larger network collaborations at an international level, where there still are ways that you can connect some of the original science with these other things.

KAREN BREWSTER: And when did you become director? HAJO EICKEN: Uh, two and a half years ago. Well, yeah, almost -- I was interim for a year and then -- and then --

KAREN BREWSTER: So, 2016? '15? HAJO EICKEN: Yeah, I was interim in 2015 and then middle of 2016 became actual director.

KAREN BREWSTER: So, you’re still young so maybe this question is something you haven’t thought about yet, but your legacy. Have you thought about what -- HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. I don’t -- I mean what’s legacy? I mean, define legacy.

KAREN BREWSTER: However you want to think about what -- You know, what you may have -- You know, a mark you may have left.

HAJO EICKEN: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean that’s where I tend to be -- I mean as a researcher you have to be self-critical, right?

And I -- I’m not sure where -- if I’ve made a difference. I mean if, you know, we’ve talked about some of these things. I think, Yeah, there’s that.

Always reminds me of -- you know, when I was at -- I went to high school in Canada, and so we did Hamlet. And there’s this scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Where I think the quote is like, you know, so what’s your thing? “Well, no doubt help swell the progress of a scene or two.”

You know, that’s basically where -- and in many ways that’s what research is, right? I mean you’re -- you’re -- it’s not about -- or -- well, I mean there’s people who dominate a field or really make big jumps, you know. I’m not one of them.

I really see increasingly, and in particular in the Arctic as important, these collaborative networks and sort of facilitating an advance of the field as a whole. That’s where I would see my role in some respect.

KAREN BREWSTER: Well, and I see science as it’s -- I just had this metaphor for how ice forms. That it’s this layering -- HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. Yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: -- of one researcher after another. You mentioned Lew. You mentioned Wille Weeks, you know, what they've done, and then you build on that, and Andy's (Mahoney) built on what you’ve done, and it just kind of keeps going.

HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And so -- yeah, so you’re part of a tradition and you -- you know, I think --

Yeah, having a better understanding of the way sea ice works as a material or as a big -- you know, as just a fantastic, really interesting part of the Earth’s system, that’s an important aspect of the work.

But then increasingly, also, you know, what do we do about a changing Arctic? You know, how do we respond?

I mean that, I would argue, is an increasingly -- certainly a question that we can’t escape here in Alaska. So we have to do something about it.

KAREN BREWSTER: And the question, will there be sea ice for anybody to study in a few years? HAJO EICKEN: Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, you know, right now the -- sort of the whole discourse is about, okay, sea ice model projections are -- the perennial sea ice that’s year -- present year round is gonna go away. Or most of it is gonna go away sometime mid-century or so.

That’s what everybody is focused on. But, of course, then everybody comes back and says, "Well, yeah, but then, of course, the sea ice is going to form again in the winter because, you know, we have polar nights so there’s a lot of energy lost in the polar regions."

But that’s really one of the key questions I think we need to be prepared for, is how do we -- it’s entirely plausible that, you know, with -- if we continue on the trajectory we’re on now that we may lose significant parts of the winter ice cover, as well.

How do we know that’s about to happen? I’m not sure models are gonna help you all that much in that regard.

I mean, there're still some surprises, I would argue, left there in the way with the polar -- in particular the Arctic part of the globe works.

And that’s an important aspect I think also of these observing systems that we’re putting in place is to actually be able to track some of these major, major transformations.

KAREN BREWSTER: Well, as you say, like this year it’s been super warm in the Arctic. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. Yeah yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: And that makes the ice come later and thinner, and maybe it’ll happen that it doesn’t freeze at all some? HAJO EICKEN: Yeah. KAREN BREWSTER: In the future. So, it is a big question. HAJO EICKEN: Yeah.

KAREN BREWSTER: Well, any other projects you wanted to talk about? Or anything else.

HAJO EICKEN: No, I think I’m good, actually. KAREN BREWSTER: You’re good? Okay. HAJO EICKEN: That’s a lot of talking. KAREN BREWSTER: Thank you very much for your time. HAJO EICKEN: Hey, no, thank you, Karen. I mean it’s --

Yeah, it’s sort of interesting to just reflect on stuff like that. You know, you don’t -- you don’t do that. KAREN BREWSTER: Yeah. HAJO EICKEN: So -- Good.