December 13th, 2007 andrea
Ang Garner has taken balloon soundings all over the world, including aboard Naval vessels. Tia and I filmed one of the two daily launches. Ang was kind enough to walk us through the whole process and we had a lot of fun.
Updated sounding data for McMurdo is posted on the web here:
http://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/~amrc/LIST89664.TXT
Posted in news | Comments Off on Ang Garner launching the Weather Balloon
December 12th, 2007 andrea
Polar View:
http://www.seaice.dk/polarview/google.s.html
Posted in news | Comments Off on Antarctic monitoring in GoogleEarth
December 11th, 2007 andrea
I’ve had some time today to read and think while preparing for a flight (hopefully) to Westhaven tomorrow night (–update–it was cancelled) and found two statements about art/life/science that are helping me to untangle the jumble of thoughts and emotions I’ve been experiencing since arriving here. They raise more questions than answers to me, but that’s somehow beneficial right now. Both are from Nature, March 17, 2005.
The first is from Simon Mawer:
“Because, just as an artistic creation lives in the mind of its creator, so too does a scientific idea. We labor under the illusion that discoveries and ideas lie somewhere out there in nature-but in truth the science is in the discoverer’s head…There is little difference between this and artistic vision. Yes, you’ve got to do the experiments but that is not the essence of it. The essence is the idea and the enquiry. ‘What if?’ is the question posed in both literature [art] and science.”
And from Alan Lightman:
“Somehow, we human beings have a wondrous capacity for being both rational and irrational, detached and passionate, deliberate and spontaneous, craving of certainty and uncertainty, seeking questions with answers and questions without.”
Posted in news | Comments Off on Questions Without Answers
December 11th, 2007 andrea
Everything about this binaural recording is wrong: there’s wind noise, sounds of clothing rustling, radically fluctuating audio levels, but somehow when I listen to it (through headphones), I feel like I am right back on that hill:
Posted in news, sounds | Comments Off on Observation Hill Hike
December 10th, 2007 andrea
I had the great good fortune to catch Dr. Rick Aster before he left McMurdo. In this interview, Dr. Aster explains the science behind the Iceberg B15A recording in the previous post and several other iceberg recordings he and his colleagues have created. He also talks about the complex movement of waves in earth and the benefits of listening:
Here is a link to more sound files, seismic tremors on Mt. Erebus:
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geop/mevo/seismic/tremor.html
Posted in interviews, news, sounds | Comments Off on Dr. Rick Aster, Geophysics Professor, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology