Climate scientist Kim Cobb is exploring a cave in Borneo when rocks begin to fall.
Kim Cobb is a researcher who uses corals and cave stalagmites to probe the mechanisms of past, present, and future climate change. Kim has sailed on multiple oceanographic cruises to the deep tropics and led caving expeditions to the rainforests of Borneo in support of her research. Kim has received numerous awards for her research, most notably a NSF CAREER Award in 2007, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008. She is an Editor for Geophysical Research Letters, sits on the international CLIVAR Pacific Panel, and serves on the Advisory Council for the AAAS Leshner Institute for Public Engagement. As a mother to four, Kim is a strong advocate for women in science, and champions diversity and inclusion in all that she does. She is also devoted to the clear and frequent communication of climate change to the public through speaking engagements and social media.
This story originally aired on Apr. 13, 2018, in an episode titled Fight or Flight.
Story Transcript
It started as a low and distant rumble and my mind raced to find what was going on, the origin of the noise. Was it an airplane? No, we were far, far, far too deep in the jungle for that. Was it a truck? No, that was coming, coming from inside the mountain.
I was a baby postdoc at the time. I just started my new job in the last couple of months focused on reconstructing climate from cave stalagmites deep in the jungles of Borneo. Scientifically, I was totally psyched. I was thrilled at the opportunity to fill a really important data gap in the history of climate on our planet Earth from the remarkably data-poor region.
And personally, I couldn’t be more excited at the opportunity to throw myself into the tropical jungle and duke it out with the rainforest. I’d honed some pretty serious field skills as a graduate student in the deep tropics already so I was ready.
But, as it happens, Mother Nature doesn’t let go of her best-kept secrets very easily. And so it happened that I found myself on a 72-hour plane to the middle of the jungle where I took an even smaller plane and smaller plane and smaller plane, smaller plane, four planes later and landing on a grass field on a small plane with 10 seats on it. We’re met by a caravan of eight SUVs that took us eight hours over logging roads in the interior of Borneo and dropped our team and our gear off. Base camp was nothing more than a couple rusty tin sheets held up by rotting beams of trees.
So there I was. I would spend the next three weeks literally in the middle of the jungle with twenty other men. Nineteen of those people were perfect strangers; one of them was my boss. We’d hired six American cavers to help us through this adventure. These are guys who had done this many, many, many times. They knew every crack and crevice of those caves. They’re the only people in the world to put certain leads in those caves back into the depths.
And so they were nimble and agile and excited and fast and I was terrified and slow and clueless and useless. Yeah, we got off to a great start.
So every day, we’d trek out in the morning in our clean-ish clothes and we would hike through the jungle about a couple hours to traverse something that was no more than 400 meters or so. We’d have to hack our way through the jungle, our Malaysian guides wielding the machetes in front of us while the rest of us tried to pick our way through, scanning each other’s legs and arms for leeches. It was definitely something.
And the cave entrances were not easy to find. The jungle had reclaimed all of the old trails that they had used just a couple years before. And their entrances themselves were tiny holes stuck into the cliffs behind the wall of vegetation, completely invisible until it hit you in the face, basically.
So most the cave entrances we found right away, within a matter of half a day, a day of sweat and labor, but one cave eluded us. Its name was Mojo Cave. It eluded us for days, actually. It was backbreaking work, cutting our way through the jungle to get to a wall of cliff over and over again, and it was heartbreaking for our team.
And as they got ground down, there were open rumblings from them. “Maybe we just don’t need this particular cave, Kim.” “Maybe we can just call this one a day, Kim.” And I became more and more resolved. I was going to get to Mojo if it killed me.
And the guys actually ponied-up, really went above and beyond the call of duty. One of them even risked their life one day, falling down the cliff only to reach up and grab a root, save himself and come back white-knuckled and shaking and ready to go back and do it again.
I said, “That’s it for the day, folks,” and so we limped back to camp and had some scotch and muttered, “Oh, bad Mojo. Yeah. Ha-ha, bad Mojo.”
So we went and back and back and back to cuss another couple days, but we found that entrance. I was so excited I was bouncing through the cave like I was on the moon, it’s like no gravity. We were doing our science which meant walking six feet, stopping for half an hour and collecting waters and mud and rocks. And everybody else sat around staring at me like, “When is this possibly going to end?”
So we science for the day and then we ended our cave in record time and we got back out to the entrance and took off our helmets and we got ready to traverse back through the jungle on just what was to be, of course, a very, very lovely day in my scientific life having conquered that mountain.
The last thing I remembered before it happened was my friend posing with his Mojo energy bar and a wide smile on his face. You see, I was just as happy. See, my joy was not being in the cave. My joy was getting out of the cave at the end of the day. I lived another day. For me, the darkness was the danger and the light was the safety. It was all about to turn the tables in about an instant.
So it began as this low, low, low rumble. In two or three seconds it was a lot louder. In two or three more seconds the ground was shaking beneath our feet. Our eyes were passing back and forth in confusion to each other. Nobody had an answer.
I was in full fight-or-flight mode as my brain raced through the thousand-ish scenarios that could be occurring, extraterrestrial and terrestrial alike. At that point, I was basically just paralyzed. We were all paralyzed.
Suddenly, my Malaysian cave guy yelled, “Rock fall!” And he started running towards us with his arms outstretched frantically as if to sweep us up in his arms as he pushed us to safety. And we turned and we scrambled back across the entrance boulders as fast as we could, just scrambling over each other, over rocks, desperate as the first baby rocks pinged across the entrance. Ping. Poing.
We were scrambling back and forth and we turned just in time to see a thick wall of debris obscure the entire entrance to the cave. It was deafeningly loud. These huge boulders the size of houses were pinging across the entrance, crashing into the cave as dust enveloped right over our heads.
For me, fight-or-flight went to fear, definitely, but resignation and awe. It was like a front row to Geology on speed, right? I just was mesmerized at the situation. Of course, in the back of my mind, I knew that anything could happen. The cave entrance could be closed. The cave itself could squish us like a pancake. These became kind of abstract thoughts as I was in this situation.
I remember the only coherent thought I could muster was that if I did die, I hoped my family knew that I died doing what I loved in just outright awe of Mother Nature and grateful for all the experiences that accumulated and that I would never have it any other way. Of course, eventually, after a minute or two, it ended just as it started, a couple little rocks pinging across the entrance.
We sat there in stunned silence until somebody shouted an expletive. But there is no time for post-processing at that point. It was decision time. What do we do? Do we stay in the cave, kind of balancing our odds of a recurring rock fall? Or do we go and risk another rock fall outside the cave in the debris field we would have to traverse?
So we couple of geologists, we sat down for a couple minutes and weighed these things based on pure anecdotal experience and no data at all. We came to a complete stalemate. Shocker. And we turned to the guy who had saved our lives and we said, “What should we do?”
And he said, “You go.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “Because if you stay any longer, you may never leave.”
I said, “Yes.” So wordlessly, we put back on our helmets and we started leaving the cave through the thickest cloud of dust, the noxious barrier to daylight and safety.
But there was more danger on the other side. When we got out there, the landscape was unrecognizable. The mountainside had been wiped clean like a slate. All the trees had been cut down. We’re looking at a debris field about 300 meters across, the dust still hanging over it, tree roots jutting into the air all over and our route to safety was right across that debris field. We had no choice.
Wordlessly, we picked our way across the loose debris field and I silently marked the place that was the point of no return. If a rock fall came at that point, we were toast.
We didn’t talk on the way back to camp that day, but when we got there, there was an outpouring of emotional retellings. “Oh, my God, what did you think” and, “I thought we were gonna die,” and, “I was sure we were gonna be okay. Some guy said it was gonna be fine.”
Our Malaysian guides sat there smiling silently. And there may have been some extra scotch consumed that evening. There may or may not have been an unsolicited phone call to my husband over the satellite phone that my advisor asked me about later. And the next day, we took the day off and we took the time to discuss whether it was safe to go on, whether we had our wherewithal physically and emotionally to go back into the jungle, into the caves again.
The next day, we just wordlessly geared up and go back out to the jungle without even discussing it. The pull of the jungle, the pull of the caves, the pull of its secrets proved too much even after all of that.
And the expedition would the first of ten for me. I’ve been back many times. And the rocks we collected on that expedition formed the basis for 500,000-plus years of climate history from one of the most data-poor regions on our planet. Over twelve publications later, and many, many grants and PhDs and postdocs, etcetera, it has been the joy of my life.
But the gift of Mojo is much, much, much more than those grants and publications and all of those data points that I’ve analyzed. You see, I earned some serious science Mojo that day. So what I learned that day is that when I forget how important humility is in our survival, nature will remind me. I learned that when I am clueless and afraid, my friends will save me with their wisdom and their life experience. I learned that when I must act in the face of uncertainty and profound danger, I can and I will muster the courage.
So to all of those that would attack climate scientists and the data sets that underlie our science, to all those who think that we don’t have the chops for the political blood sport surrounding the future of our planet, I say, “Bring it!”