Bit by bit, Christian Elliott is conquering both space and the Earth.
The 25-year-old Blue Grass native (a graduate of Augustana College with a master’s from Northwestern University’s journalism school) will travel half-way around the world this Wednesday, Dec. 6.
Elliott will be attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). The annual conferences — held in the framework of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — serve as the formal meeting of the UNFCCC parties (Conference of the Parties, COP) to negotiate and agree action on how to tackle climate change, limit emissions and halt global warming.
Elliott is taking part as a 2022 Fellow of the Pulitzer Center (through its climate science reporting fellowship), Dec. 6 through Dec. 12.
“There’s an ocean pavilion, that they’re gonna have some talks at, and there’s the children and youth pavilion, which is where I’m gonna be involved,” he said recently. Elliott will be part of a panel discussion with a few other journalists for youth from across the world attending the Dubai conference.
“It’s about how to tell the climate change story from your community, through the example of the Pulitzer Center model,” he said, “which is trying to connect with schools and colleges and basically fund people that have ideas and provide training on how to actually go and report a story and get it into a publication.”
The UN Climate Change Conferences are the world’s highest decision-making body on climate issues and one of the largest international meetings in the world.
The Pulitzer Center will be a major presence at COP28, showcasing a new framework of journalism and engagement in six distinct events, encompassing five themed pavilions.
“Beyond conventional reporting, the transformative new model seeks to engage, inform, and promote agency on critical issues,” the center says. “The events hosted by the Pulitzer Center will inject a fresh perspective into high-level discussions about the future of climate change, concentrating on the interconnected challenges facing oceans, rainforests, and the intricate relationship between climate and labor.”
The Pulitzer Center’s participation at COP28 will include panel discussions, film screenings, and workshops that highlight the often underreported stories of rainforests, oceans, and the intersection of climate and labor.
Elliott (a 2020 Augie grad with a master’s in science journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School — was a recipient of the Pulitzer Center‘s 2022 Climate Science reporting fellowship and currently works full-time as a fellow for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
He primarily works for NASA’s “Curious Universe” podcast, which he did starting in an internship during fall 2022 and spring 2023. In the three-year-old podcast (one of many NASA produces, including “Houston, We Have a Podcast”), you can join NASA astronauts, scientists, and engineers on a new adventure each week — all you need is your curiosity.
Pulitzer Center will have a total of nine staff and fellows at the climate conference. Elliott was surprised to be chosen.
“There’s so many fellows and I definitely don’t feel like I have the same level of experience as a lot of other journalists,” he said. “I think they picked me because of that. So I’m kind of more like the people who are gonna be attending this talk that have ideas, but don’t have the experience and funding. But yeah, I definitely said yes right away.”
“It’s a great opportunity and I am really excited,” Elliott added. He’s especially honored to go to such a high-profile event, among people concerned with climate change.
“I mean, it’s really exciting. I think going to a COP meeting like that – it’s kind of the biggest thing you can do as an environmental journalist or climate journalist. That is like THE event for climate decisions globally.”
Working remotely for NASA
As a freelancer, Elliott has written science feature stories for National Geographic, Scientific American, Undark, Hakai, Discover, Sierra, Smithsonian and MIT Technology Review. Elliott’s reporting has been republished in The Atlantic, Slate, Mother Jones and Popular Science.
Now, Elliott is a year-long fellow for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, through August 2024.
He works remotely from Springfield, Ill. (where his girlfriend is in medical school at a Southern Illinois University branch), and goes about once a month to the center in Greenbelt, Md.
Elliott has produced podcast new episodes this fall, including a favorite one called “Hum of the Sun,” on what space sounds like.
“It’s a question that has fascinated composers and scientists alike throughout history. Through a process called data sonification, heliophysicists are using NASA satellites like audio recorders to listen to the electromagnetic symphony our Sun plays on the strings of Earth’s magnetic field, and making new,” according to the podcast summary.
The latest for “Curious Universe,” is on the mission that returned an asteroid sample to the Utah desert in September.
“That one was cool because they sent me out to Utah for the actual event to see the capsule land,” he said.
Launched on Sept. 8, 2016, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft traveled to a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and collected a sample of rocks and dust from the surface.
The spacecraft delivered the sample to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023. It released the capsule holding pieces of Bennu over Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule parachuted to the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, where the OSIRIS-REx team was waiting to retrieve it.
This mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth, according to NASA.
There is a connection between Elliott’s work on space and Earth, since NASA’s Earth Science division will be at this week’s UN climate conference, he said.
NASA collects comprehensive climate data, including temperature and ocean data, which he called “the best data there is on climate science.”
“They try to not be not make political statements or call for any kind of specific action, but just try to inform people as much as they can,” Elliott said.
He also did a six-month internship last year at WBEZ, the NPR station in Chicago, where he was a producer on the daily two-hour news show, “Reset.”
Part of his research for the Pulitzer Center was spending a week in fall 2022 at the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration in Oregon, a collaborative program that explores Antarctica for the oldest possible polar ice samples, analyzing them to understand the evolution and future of Earth’s climate system. Elliott produced three stories out of that project.
So is his main vision focused on the stars or our home planet?
“I think my biggest priority as a journalist is the climate change story and, I mean, just as a youngish person, I feel like that’s the biggest crisis that we’re facing,” he said. “So it’s an important story to tell.”
For more information, visit Elliott’s website HERE.
