Placed my last flag right there. That’s the year, the layer for the year 1820.
We’re interested in looking at abrupt climate changes, you know, these sort of sudden shifts
that have not been well documented in the geological record so far.
They’re doing research on the glaciers to look for the different time periods and, like,
what happened in those time periods with the glaciers.
I would like to characterize the time frames over which abrupt climate changes can occur
and characterizing what the climate system looks like, coming out of the climate change
but maybe more importantly what the climate system looks like leading up to one of these
abrupt shifts. There’s great research happening here at the University of Maine and we want
to make sure that students know about it.
Follow the Researcher was one of those crazy ideas that … a bunch of us were sitting
around and our student STEM ambassador Charles, said…
Wouldn’t it be cool if the students could follow me to Peru? You know, obviously they
couldn’t really follow me to Peru, but we could take technology. There’s no reason
I couldn’t document this expedition.
“I (Charles) could live tweet, communicate with the kids while I’m on the glacier.”
And we all thought that was a great idea.
We’re going to have a question-and-answer session as part of the Follow the Researcher
program. So, whatever we’re doing at lunchtime on Wednesday each week, we’re going to put
everything down and tweet, and talk to/try and answer students’ questions.
About how long do they travel by walking, like travel?
We can store our cores packed in snow, inside of a cooler, in an ice cave, and for that
period of time they stay very well frozen, that’s, you know, they’re in no real danger
at that point.
We’ve got the cooler up here to protect some ice.
When we have to get them out, this is very planes, trains and automobiles sort of a situation.
We will try to do this process as quickly as possible. We’ll hike up to our glacier,
which is about maybe an hour’s hike above our high camp. We’ll get that cooler out,
we’ll then hike that down so that’ll be 80- or 100-pound weight on a backpack over,
you know, rolling boulders and things coming out.
How was it?
Heavy.
You can put the ice and what’s left of our gear on the horses and then into backpacks
for ourselves. From there’s it’s about a 10-kilometer hike out to the village of
Salma. From there it’s about a six- or seven-hour drive back to Cuzco. From there we will fly
from Cuzco to Lima. From there we’ll fly from Lima to JFK.
Hello Follow a Researchers, we just got through customs — they let us keep our glacier ice.
That’s good.
And it’s in the back of my truck from JFK airport or from New York region up to Orono,
where we can — where we will get it into the freezer here, and then head home.
There are students doing fieldwork throughout the university, and I don’t know if anybody
ever tells middle-schoolers and high-schoolers that that’s part of science. That you don’t
just sit in a lab and wear a white lab coat and, you know, work with chemicals — although
that’s a really cool part of some programs, but there’s an opportunity to get out and
have some adventure too.
I think it’s important to get K–12 students interested in science. You know that’s sort
of the time — middle school, early high school — is when students seem to decide
if they are going to be interested in science or not.
Well, I like it because, like, we get to learn about these different places other than where
we live, and it shows us stuff that we didn’t really know about that place.
We have somebody who’s enthusiastic about working with kids, and enthusiastic about
sharing their love of their science area.