About Our Guest

Prof. Samantha Lawler is an astronomer at the University of Regina who studies the Kuiper Belt — icy bodies beyond Neptune — to understand how the solar system formed. She lives on a farm outside Regina under dark Saskatchewan skies and has emerged as one of Canada's leading voices on satellite light pollution. She has an asteroid named after her.

What This Episode Is About

There are now more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. One company — owned by one billionaire — controls two-thirds of all satellites in space, and the number is still climbing. Proposals are on file for AI data centres and giant reflective mirrors in orbit. One request alone asks for a million satellites. In this conversation, Prof. Lawler explains what this actually means: a night sky that is measurably changing, an atmosphere being chemically altered by thousands of burning satellites each year, and a collision risk that is compressing faster than most people know.

Key Topics

• The scale: 10,000+ Starlinks in orbit, permission for 42,000. One company owns two-thirds of all satellites — a shift that happened in six years.

• The crash clock: Lawler's research calculates how long before a collision becomes likely if satellites lose the ability to manoeuvre. Nine months ago: 5.5 days. January: 3.5 days. Now: 3 days — and shrinking.

• Kessler Syndrome: A runaway chain of collisions that could make low Earth orbit unusable for generations. The movie Gravity was not that far off.

• Atmospheric pollution: Satellites burn up in the upper atmosphere, depositing metals — especially aluminum — as vapour. Alumina can contribute to ozone depletion. Space has no environmental regulations.

• The night sky: Already ~10% brighter due to satellite numbers and debris. Human cultures have looked up at these patterns for as long as we have been human.

• The rural internet dilemma: Both host and guest used Starlink during this recording. The need is real — but relying on a foreign billionaire-owned monopoly for rural connectivity is not a solution. Governments need to invest in ground-based infrastructure.

Is There Hope?

Yes — cautiously. OneWeb (800 satellites) and Amazon Kuiper (2,000) prove the service can be delivered with far fewer objects in orbit. The engineering problem is solvable. The political will is the harder part.

What You Can Do

• Contact your elected representatives at federal, provincial, and local levels — demand investment in rural broadband infrastructure.

• Support dark-sky initiatives in your region.

Links & Resources

• Prof. Samantha Lawler — University of Regina

• The Crash Clock paper

• Lawler on Mastodon: @sundogplanets

• International Astronomical Union on satellite constellations: iau.org

• Dark Sky Association: darksky.org

SMALL WINGS, OLD BONES Northern Latitudes — Episode Show Notes

There's a thread connecting this episode that isn't obvious at first. One conversation is about something very much alive — small, social, and in trouble. The other is about something long gone, found frozen in rock on a high Arctic island. But both stories ask the same kind of question: what does an animal's fate tell us about the world it inhabited, and the one we're building now?

Part One: The Science of Bees with Noria Morfin, Assistant Professor, Department of Entomology, University of Manitoba

The University of Manitoba's Honey Bee Lab has been running for over a hundred years — longer than most people have been thinking about colony collapse. Noria Morfin arrived there a year ago, and she came in the way a lot of bee researchers do: through a side door. She was a veterinary student in Mexico when a single course on bee biology changed her direction entirely. She bought her first apiary before she graduated — twenty-five colonies of highly defensive Africanized bees. It was, she says, an education.

In this conversation, we talk about what the lab actually studies (health, behaviour, disease dynamics, and the immune responses bees use to protect themselves), the varroa mite — still the dominant threat to managed colonies in North America — and what it looks like when you lose thirty to fifty percent of your livestock every year and have to rebuild every spring. We also get into the difference between managed honeybees and wild native pollinators, what integrated pest management actually means in practice, and whether there's reason for optimism.

Noria thinks there is. She points to the research effort, the awareness, and a simple human reaction she notices whenever she mentions bees in conversation: people smile.

Part Two: The Arctic Rhino with Dr. Danielle Fraser, Head of Paleobiology, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa

In 1986, a palaeontologist named Mary Dawson collected bones on Devon Island, deep in the Canadian Arctic. It took decades to understand what she'd found: a rhinoceros. Small-bodied, hornless, and 23 million years old — the farthest north any rhino fossil has ever been recovered.

Dr. Danielle Fraser helped name it. The species name comes from Inuktitut — iuk, meaning frosty. Epihippus iuk. The frost rhino.

What makes the find remarkable isn't just the location. It's what the anatomy suggests about origin. This animal looks like rhinos from Europe and Asia that are millions of years older — which means it crossed an ocean to get there. Not the Bering Land Bridge, the one we all learn about in school, but the other ones: two now-submerged connections running from northern Europe over Svalbard and Iceland to Greenland and into the high Canadian Arctic. It was long assumed these were under water by 50 million years ago. This fossil is 23 million years old.

We talk about seasonal ice as a crossing mechanism, what a 75-80% complete skeleton allows a scientist to say that teeth alone never could, how many rhino species once roamed North America (many), and why they were all gone by about 5 million years ago. We also talk about what comes next — a planned field season on Banks Island, the logistics of getting a team of ten into the western Arctic, and what it means to name a new species and make it a type specimen that science will rely on for generations.

Guests Noria Morfin — University of Manitoba, Department of Entomology Dr. Danielle Fraser — Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa

What the Ice Remembers

Preserving Climate History with Alison Criscitiello

Ice is one of the planet’s most faithful historians. Layer by layer, it records volcanic eruptions, atmospheric chemistry, temperature shifts, and traces of human activity stretching back tens of thousands of years.

In this episode of Northern Latitudes, Bill Ault speaks with Alison Criscitiello, Director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta, about what ice cores reveal.

Beyond the science, this conversation explores the human side of polar research. Alison reflects on building a career in remote, high-latitude field science as a queer woman in a discipline that has not always been welcoming, and why visibility and inclusion matter for the future of climate science.

In This Episode

• What ice cores are and how scientists extract them
• How ice preserves a detailed record of Earth’s atmosphere
• Why the Arctic and high latitudes are warming faster than the rest of the planet

Key Takeaways

• Ice cores are not projections; they are direct physical records
• Climate change is already visible in the planet’s deepest archives
• Who does science—and who is supported to lead—shapes what we learn

About the Guest

Alison Criscitiello is the Director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on ice core science, climate reconstruction, and the preservation of irreplaceable polar climate records.

Further Reading & Links

• Canadian Ice Core Lab – University of Alberta
• https://www.ualberta.ca/en/science/research-and-teaching/research/ice-core-archive/index.html