30 with the VC | Professor Craig Rodger

[00:00:00] Grant Robertson
Kia ora, I'm Grant Robertson, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Otago, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, and I'm welcoming you today to a series called 30 with the VC, where we talk about the amazing mahi that's been done at the University of Otago and the people who are doing it. It's an opportunity to understand the work that's been done here, and so another name for this series is Grant Gets Schooled. And in the first episode, I'm speaking to Craig Rodger, a professor in the Department of Physics. Welcome, Craig.

[00:00:28] Craig Rodger
G'day, Grant.

[00:00:29] Grant Robertson
Craig, part of this series is talking to our researchers and our teachers about the work they do, and we've asked them to bring along an object. I want you to explain the object that's on the table in front of us and why you've brought it.

[00:00:42] Craig Rodger
Okay, so I've cheated and brought two. One is a globe, but this particular globe we use in some of our public outreach, and it of course has the coordinates and locations of the Earth in normal geographic latitude and longitude. But because our work is fundamentally controlled by the Earth's magnetic field, it also has magnetic coordinates, because the magnetic field of the Earth is not in exactly the same alignment as the Earth's spin axis. And almost all of the research I have done, from when I did basic research all the way now to doing much more applied stuff, has been driven by the magnetic field of the Earth. And so that's my prop.

[00:01:26] Grant Robertson
Excellent.

[00:01:27] Craig Rodger
The other thing I brought along was this gift that I was given. It's a challenge coin, and it was a gift that was given to me by the chief executive of the National Emergency Management Authority to thank, okay, myself, but my wider team for the work that we've been doing with the New Zealand electricity and energy sector, and now NEMA, to recognise that contribution to try to make New Zealand a safer place. And so I'm really proud of that, because that's a sign that we've been useful, and sometimes as an academic, you're not sure if you're useful.

[00:02:05] Grant Robertson
Awesome. I'm going to come back to the impact and the usefulness of this in a minute, but let's start back at the globe, and perhaps as importantly, the Sun. How did all this journey start for you? What is it that you thought about? You're a Dunedin lad, you've been around here a long time. How did it start for you to be thinking about issues as extraordinary as the magnetic field of the Earth and its relationship to the Earth?

[00:02:34] Craig Rodger
So I grew up in the 70s and the 80s, and so I remember as a child seeing these images in the news when cool things happen in space, and particularly when the Voyager space probes visited each one of the planets, which were often separated by like a year or more, but there would be this whole series of images, and I remember thinking, wow, this is so exciting. I remember staying up late for the launch of the first space shuttle, STS-1 mission back in the day, and so I was always interested in the spacey aspects of, and eventually got into physics, but then I came to the University of Otago, and I was doing some physics, and I was doing some maths, and I was doing some computer science. I did one paper in Soviet history. Fascinating.

[00:03:23] Grant Robertson
So did I.

[00:03:23] Craig Rodger
Oh, there we go. We both did that.

[00:03:25] Grant Robertson
It was a good paper.

[00:03:31] Craig Rodger
But I remember in my first year walking around in the Physics Department and found this door labelled ‘Space Research’, and thinking, wow, we even do that in New Zealand, which I had no idea, and that really, for me, was the trigger that got me along this path. So I started off, I did my undergraduate, and that turned into an honours degree at Otago, and then I stayed and did a PhD in space physics at the University of Otago. Went overseas for a couple of years to do a postdoc in the UK, and then came back to do some more work, and thankfully, the timing was good. Managed to get myself onto the staff here as basically sort of a junior lowest level lecturer, and then over time have aged into a professor.

[00:04:19] Grant Robertson
Yeah, and that's a fantastic journey too, because you didn't start out saying, I'm going to be one of the global experts on solar tsunamis. You started out as somebody interested in space.

[00:04:32] Craig Rodger
Yep.

[00:04:33] Grant Robertson
Physics was the department that you saw that connection with, and I think that's a really important story for people to understand, that you don't become fully formed as an academic at such an early age.

[00:04:44] Craig Rodger
Absolutely, and my research career has moved around over time. I started off doing a lot of work on lightning, and how lightning interacts with the upper atmosphere and near-Earth space, and that was fascinating for a while. But, and I love the physics behind it, and it was really, really interesting, but New Zealand is a low-lightning country, and after a while, I started to realise that while what I was doing was really interesting and fun, it probably wasn't very useful for us, and that has been part of the story that I've tried to do is, over time, go away and, you know, there's so many, there's so many interesting scientific questions out there.

[00:05:24] Grant Robertson
Exactly.

[00:05:24] Craig Rodger
There's an infinite number, really. But at some point, if you're going to ask people to please give you some money to support your work, I feel like you have to be able to demonstrate that there is some return, that there is some value.

[00:05:36] Grant Robertson
It is a form of an investment.

[00:05:38] Craig Rodger
Indeed it is.

[00:05:39] Grant Robertson
And so for you, space weather becomes that thing. Talk to me, as a person who didn't get science much when I was at high school, explain to me what space weather is, and how it impacts us.

[00:05:55] Craig Rodger
Okay. So, here we can do the strong distinction between space physics, the physics that is happening in space and in the environment around the Earth. And that's nerdy good-time science, right? But space weather is where the space physics hits the practical part of our society. So, space weather is investigating how things that are happening, triggered by our Sun, in the environment, in the space around the Earth, all the way down to the surface of the Earth, how that can interfere with our technology. And it's stuff that's been happening for billions of years. We haven't been around for billions of years, but even in the time that human beings have been around, we won't have even noticed most of this because our technology levels were too low. And it's only in the last maybe 150 years or so, our technology has started to become sensitive to space weather.

[00:06:55] Craig Rodger
And the story basically is that the better our technology is, the shinier, the cooler, the faster, generally the smaller, the more susceptible it is. And so we have, as we've been, our civilisation has become more impressive, we have become more and more exposed to the risk of space weather, disrupting, damaging, destroying the infrastructure that we rely on every day. Both from an economic point, but also just life, society, things that we need.

[00:07:32] Grant Robertson
It's an extraordinary thing. And you're wearing a badge on your very colourful shirt today about solar tsunamis. And again, for the non-scientist, discovering that there were these things called solar tsunamis and the level of impact that they could have, as you say, on our daily life has been extraordinary for me. Do you want to just, again, drill down just a little bit further into what a solar tsunami is?

[00:07:56] Craig Rodger
Yep. So that is, the phrase solar tsunami is a term that I have stolen from NASA.

[00:08:04] Grant Robertson
You don't really steal it from NASA.

[00:08:05] Craig Rodger
NASA gives everything away.

[00:08:06] Grant Robertson
I don't think you should steal from NASA, Craig. It'll get us in trouble.

[00:08:08] Craig Rodger
Well, that too. But they're very, very generous. And so a solar tsunami is what the scientists would call a coronal mass ejection. So there's an explosion inside the Sun, some of the largest explosions in the solar system. They're huge, titanic explosions. And it throws out a small amount of the solar atmosphere. And that is thrown out in some direction. And that direction could be Earth-directed. It could be heading straight down towards us. They're quite big. And we call them a solar tsunami because it's a bit like a wave of material. It's triggered by an explosion, like an earthquake. And it takes time to get to us. So it travels across space and then might or might not get to us, crashes into the magnetic field of the Earth and starts triggering the processes that can cause all those negative impacts that we talked about.

[00:09:03] Craig Rodger
And so I know that some people in the emergency management space don't like the phrase solar tsunami because they feel that it could confuse people from ocean tsunamis. And so, you know, I have to be careful about saying that. But it is also the name of our research programme. And I think it has this, the similarities between an oceanic tsunami and a solar tsunami I think is helpful for people to understand. Like an oceanic tsunami with a solar tsunami, we have time to react. Of course we need to have a plan. You don't build a plan in the time it's coming, the sort of half a day to two days that we've got. You get the plan out once you realise that it's going to be an issue and you start enacting the plan.

[00:09:52] Grant Robertson
So that's a really important question. Two questions for people who've now just been introduced to the concept of a solar tsunami. How long does it take to get here and how often are we likely to be having to deal with these?

[00:10:04] Craig Rodger
Okay, so a typical coronal mass ejection or solar tsunami takes two to three days to get to Earth. Generally those slow moving ones are low risk. They will probably trigger beautiful aurora in the skies above Dunedin, but that's about all. The ones that we know are likely to be more effective are the fast ones, where we're talking about, say, 16 hours to 24 hours, that sort of time window to get from the Sun to the Earth. Those sorts of events are more likely to be, once again, we'll have beautiful aurora over Dunedin, but for the really big ones, which occurred in May 2024, there was an aurora being seen over Auckland. And so that's a really different environment. At the moment, the New Zealand electricity grid, due to a bunch of research work that we've done hand in hand with them,

[00:11:01] Craig Rodger
we think it's roughly between the 1 in 30 year and 1 in 50 year thresholds where we would actually be at the worrying level. The, we really will pay attention and watch is sort of the once every 10 to 20 years. Now that, for a lot of people, that feels like a really long time. But in New Zealand, most of the people who are running our vital national infrastructure, they are planning for events on the 1 in 500 year to 1 in 2,500 year type timescales. So to be thinking that we could be having a few events that we worry about every 100 years, that makes them way too common.

[00:11:43] Grant Robertson
So, this brings us to the impact of the work that you're doing. And I want to acknowledge too, Craig, that just in May this year, you won the International Union of Radio Science's Karl Rawer Gold Medal. You're only the second New Zealander to do that. The other person was Sir Ian Axford. So we'll look out for the knighthood sometime soon for you. But, clearly, this work that you're doing is being internationally recognised. It's been nationally recognised. You know that I was bailed up on an aeroplane by somebody who told me that the work that you're doing is impactful for the whole planet. I want you just to reflect for a minute on what's the worst case scenario from one of these in terms of its impact on someone in their daily lives who's going about using their cell phone, doing the washing. What's the impact that one of these would have if we weren't prepared for it?

[00:12:34] Craig Rodger
So, the worst case scenario is that the coronal mass ejection arrives and it causes massive damage to the power grid of New Zealand. But these events are global. It won't just be New Zealand. I mean, we will notice it. But all of our friends will basically be stuffed too. And so, for a one-in-100-year event, something like 10% of the main grid transformers in New Zealand are at risk. They would be burnt out permanently. Replacement times for that sort of equipment is normally measured in years. But we're talking about destroying transformers all over the globe. And so, who knows what the rebuild times will be. One imagines a very, very long time.

[00:13:31] Craig Rodger
So, if nothing is done, we have the risk of seriously damaging the New Zealand power grid, particularly in the Lower South Island and actually in the Auckland region, at levels that could take months to years to recover from if we're doing well. And, of course, without electricity, so much just doesn't work. Everything just doesn't happen.

[00:13:56] Grant Robertson
And I always think of it just about the freezers. And most of us don't have the ability to go out or the skills to go out and hunt food or sustain themselves. So, it's going to have an impact on everyone's daily life. So, that's the worst case scenario. What's the plan look like to prevent that?

[00:14:16] Craig Rodger
So, the plan today is to basically switch off parts of the power grid. So, to turn some parts of the power grid into islands which can run. And that probably means people will have reduced access to electricity for three to five days. And some parts of the country might have no electricity for three to five days. And basically, we just let this thing from the Sun roll through, the activity happens, and then we rebuild the power grid. When I say we, of course, I mean the electricity industry rebuilds the power grid. We will be advising them that it's all over. And then all of that hardware keeps working. It wasn't destroyed during the event.

[00:15:12] Craig Rodger
Simply by turning it off, it's protected. There is a longer-term plan to spend money and buy extra protective equipment at the locations that have been identified as being most at risk. And that probably will mean that we can actually just roll through the event. And it will cost tens of millions of dollars. But it's protecting a big asset.

[00:15:37] Grant Robertson
Oh, yes, yes.

[00:15:38] Craig Rodger
I mean, I think very roughly every day that the power grid is off is about a billion dollars to the New Zealand economy. And there is core national infrastructure, not owned by the country, but making a lot of money for the country, and things like the Glenbrook steel mill or the Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter, if they have an electricity disruption that's quite short, they are stuffed.

[00:16:01] Grant Robertson
Yeah, that's right.

[00:16:02] Craig Rodger
And so that's vast costs from a short disruption. So there is these, we have the now plan that will probably actually, and this is where New Zealand is one of the most advanced countries in the world and is being recognised for it, just for having that plan and to be ready.

[00:16:21] Grant Robertson
But people aren't sitting back.

[00:16:23] Craig Rodger
They're now trying to say, well, that plan will still disrupt customers.

[00:16:26] Grant Robertson
So, yeah, how do we get ahead of that?

[00:16:27] Craig Rodger
How do we get ahead of that? Now, NEMA would like me to point out, the National Emergency Management Authority, that there are many natural risks in New Zealand that could disrupt the power supply, at least locally, and that everyone should have a plan to be able to survive a timescale like three to five days without electricity.

[00:16:45] Grant Robertson
Ladies and gentlemen, your public service announcement for today. Have a plan, have your water, have your cans of food. And it is absolutely true that as a country that we are, we're susceptible to a lot of natural hazards and we do need to be prepared. How does it feel as a researcher to see that you're having this impact? You're having these meetings with NEMA, you're globally having these meetings as well. I just want to get you to reflect just from a minute on how it actually feels as a researcher to know that you're at the cutting edge of something like this.

[00:17:17] Craig Rodger
And this is something that has been occurring to me for the last year or two. It's very satisfying, but it's also quite odd feeling. Because I'm used to going to conferences and hanging out with my nerdy friends and my nerdy enemies and talking about science. And there are people who care about some of the science that I've done, but it's this eclectic mix of people. And then suddenly, during the May 2024 event, I had an email from the chief scientist of the National Emergency Management Authority asking for my cell phone number so he could ask me what was happening and why Transpower New Zealand was doing things to protect the grid. And at the end of our very nice chat, he said, thank you, I now need to go talk to the chief scientist of New Zealand so they can brief the Prime Minister. And that's the sort of, you know, you suddenly realise that you're doing stuff that matters to people.

[00:18:15] Grant Robertson
That's right.

[00:18:15] Craig Rodger
And that is satisfying and scary.

[00:18:18] Grant Robertson
Yeah. I'm pleased that it's both. I now just thinking, just want you to turn your mind a little bit to you're doing this extraordinary work, you're also a teacher. You're also a really well-regarded teacher at the university as well. When you're thinking about your teaching, how are you drawing on your research? What's it mean? Because, you know, for those watching this who perhaps aren't so familiar with the university, we are a research-led teaching university. How do you reflect your research in the teaching that you do?

[00:18:54] Craig Rodger
So, of course, it depends on the course.

[00:18:56] Grant Robertson
Of course.

[00:18:57] Craig Rodger
But in an hour and 15 minutes, I will be giving my next lecture in the Introduction to Astronomy course. And that course gives me a lot of opportunities to talk about stars and planets and the sky and talk about how our science knowledge can be applied and be useful. So, demonstrating to students that they're not just gathering dry facts, they're not just learning things that are, well, fundamentally useful. It's fundamentally interesting, sorry. They are useful skills. The sort of skills, of course, you know, we want our students to go away, get good jobs, be good citizens, be useful, and have good lives. And, I mean, I often reflect on that. That's the other nice thing about having been here for a really long time. You know of a bunch of students who have gone off and done all of that.

[00:19:52] Grant Robertson
Amazing things.

[00:19:53] Craig Rodger
And then you think back and say, wow, I was a very small part of this young person going away and becoming that magnificent person.

[00:20:01] Grant Robertson
And that level of inspiration that teachers provide is so clear to me. That Introduction to Astronomy course, how old are the majority of the students in that course?

[00:20:13] Craig Rodger
18, 19.

[00:20:15] Grant Robertson
There's an 18 or a 19-year-old going to a lecture in an hour and a half's time from one of the world's experts in this field. I think that's a pretty amazing thing for that student.

[00:20:29] Craig Rodger
I don't know.

[00:20:30] Grant Robertson
You're too modest, Craig.

[00:20:32] Craig Rodger
I love it when they come.

[00:20:33] Grant Robertson
Yeah.

[00:20:33] Craig Rodger
Because as long as we have a good number of students in person in the lecture theatre and you can see them react when you're talking.

[00:20:41] Grant Robertson
Yeah.

[00:20:41] Craig Rodger
And you can see them being confused when maybe you're not doing the best job. But that's helpful because then you know, okay, I need to think about how to explain this better. And you get that real-time feedback. But to see them light up when they think it's an interesting fact or they understand something significant.

[00:20:56] Grant Robertson
Yeah.

[00:20:57] Craig Rodger
It's so rewarding.

[00:20:58] Grant Robertson
It's outstanding. Who was your mentor? Who was the person who made that big difference to you?

[00:21:03] Craig Rodger
High school physics teacher called John Hannah at Onslow College in Wellington. While I am a Dunedin boy because of family history, I did high school in Wellington. And basically, at the time, I thought I was going to be a computer science person. I think computer science is a great discipline, but I was just more comfortable with silicon-based life forms than people. And then I went away and did physics courses and it was just so fascinating and eye-opening. John Hannah was a University of Otago student. He used to tell us stories about his times here.

[00:21:40] Grant Robertson
Yeah. So these feedback loops are just remarkable.

[00:21:44] Craig Rodger
It is.

[00:21:44] Grant Robertson
And that level of inspiration from a high school teacher, you hear a lot from senior academics that it starts that early. And I think that, you know, physics can be a little bit of an intimidating subject, I think, for some people. What's the secret to being able to succeed in physics?

[00:22:02] Craig Rodger
I think mostly, for many people, it's just applying yourself and working slowly and steadily through the problems. You do need to have a good maths head on you. So you need a bunch of maths skills. Maths is the language of science and physics uses it a lot. And so you need to have some confidence in basic mathematics. And then the physics will sort of drag you through some of the more complicated mathematics. Eventually, I got to the point, I think it was in third year, I remember going to courses and the applied mathematicians were teaching us stuff. And I could use it, but I didn't understand why it worked anymore. And that was at the point where I realised, you know, I have run out of capacity in this area and it's not a comment on the quality of the teaching. It was just like, nope. But I could get the right answer out, it turned out.

[00:22:58] Craig Rodger
I could apply the cookbook, I just couldn't work out why it happened. And that was, but that was useful for me because it really demonstrated to me that that was my point there.

[00:23:06] Grant Robertson
And you were off on another pathway.

[00:23:07] Craig Rodger
I was going to go beyond the physics end.

[00:23:09] Grant Robertson
Brilliant. What comes next for Craig Rodger and for this work in space weather, solar tsunamis?

[00:23:18] Craig Rodger
Okay. Well, we have been very fortunate in the current environment that we got, I managed to win us another large funded project from a programme from the New Zealand government. So at the end of September last year, we finished our first five years of funded work. It was a large amount of funded money. And that was to work with the energy industry in New Zealand, electricity and the natural gas pipelines to work out how big the hazard was and what could they do. We, just as that was ending, like a month and a half beforehand, I think, we got the good news that a proposal that I had produced for another five years was successful. And we're not leaving the electricity industry behind

[00:24:13] Craig Rodger
because they care so much and they're using the research and it would be stupid to abandon them. But we're moving more towards prediction.

[00:24:22] Grant Robertson
Right.

[00:24:23] Craig Rodger
How can we give them warnings that is useful for them in the context of New Zealand so that if they need to, for example, put the power grid into safe mode, which, yes, is like mostly turning it off, that they have the time to do that. At the moment, they need two to three hours to be able to do that. And in terms of the really high quality warning time that we'll have in an extreme event, we're probably going to have 15 to 30 minutes. So that's not actually enough. And so that's a big science and engineering issue. The other thing we're trying to do is we've been very focused on the energy sector. We believe, as is the case with most countries around the world, that that is the number one space weather risk. My friends from the UK tell me that the number two space weather risk

[00:25:19] Craig Rodger
is navigation satellites. And that the GPS or GNSS satellite system could be disrupted and damaged. Or simply that we won't be able to talk to them for a few days because the ionosphere that surrounds the Earth, the charged part of the upper atmosphere, becomes so thick that the radio waves can't go up and down. We have done almost no work on that in New Zealand. And when I say we, not me, not anybody. But now Earth Sciences New Zealand, who are actually sitting on our big archive of really useful data from them and Land Information New Zealand, they're going to start drilling into that so we can better understand how that risk, does that risk apply to our country? How bad is it? How can we link it to the predictions and responses? So, there's a bit more to it, but that's most of it.

[00:26:07] Grant Robertson
And a lot more to do. And just quickly on that, I mean, you talk about these five-year cycles of grants. I think, again, for people perhaps not familiar with universities, five years is actually a relatively short time to be, for example, developing a predictive model, testing a predictive model. Those sort of lengths of grants are really important to you, aren't they?

[00:26:30] Craig Rodger
Absolutely. I haven't had a Smart Ideas, but in New Zealand they're about two years. I have been fortunate enough to have a Marsden back when they existed. They're three years. But to create these tools to develop things, if you were doing a space mission, you plan them five to 10 to 20 years in advance before you're going to be able to get the data back. And so the longer and the more continuous the funding is, that's the ability to build infrastructure, build capability.

[00:27:07] Grant Robertson
It's huge work. Craig, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. It is impactful. Your research is world-leading, cutting-edge, and you're also in the classroom teaching the next generation. And I'm really proud of what you do and really grateful for the work that you do. So thank you so much.

[00:27:26] Craig Rodger
That's great, Grant. Thank you.

[00:27:27] Grant Robertson
Now, here's your chance. In less than two minutes, what do you want to tell the Vice-Chancellor or ask the Vice-Chancellor?

[00:27:36] Craig Rodger
Well, I think I know you're interested in making reforms and changes, and Otago has had a few bursts of that in the time of my career. What I would encourage you to do, and so I'm going to tell you something, what I'm going to encourage you to do is just to remember that we're a joined-together system. And sometimes if you make a change here, that can have influences all over the place, you know, in terms of the way the students flow around, in terms of the way the funding inside the university goes. At times I feel like we make a change in one area and we're not thinking well enough about how they flow outwards in possibly disruptive ways. But anyway.

[00:28:23] Grant Robertson
No, and look, I think that's a really good point, and it's really important for anyone not to make change for change's sake, to make it for the positive benefit of the long term of the university. And I think you and I, both Dunedin boys, who spent some time in Wellington, and I've come back really aware of the history of this place and the extraordinary mahi that goes on and the extraordinary people who do it. So I'll definitely bear that in mind, Craig. Thank you so much for that. So thank you for joining us on 30 with the VC. This is a series where we're understanding more about what happens at the university and the great people who make it happen. Please look out for more episodes and please continue to engage with the amazing work at the University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. Nō reira. Tēnā koutou. Tēnā koutou. Kia ora koutou katoa.