You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty light on my blog posts the last nine months or so. That’s because I’ve been consumed with our Web project, Ice Stories. Just about a year ago, we got funding from the National Science Foundation to do this International Polar Year education project and it’s been non-stop polar research and education since then. We did a full slate of Webcasts last winter from Antarctica and trained some young Arctic researchers in media production and story-telling this past March. We gave them cameras and asked them to post dispatches, video and pictures from their research camps in Alaska and Greenland. We also sent an Exploratorium media crew to Barrow in May and June to produce Webcasts and stories from this science outpost on the northern-most spit of land in the U.S.

Now it’s my turn for a polar expedition and we’re going to Greenland starting July 7. Summer is an intense time for science in Greenland. With 24 hours of daylight and a melting ice cap to study, researchers spread along the edges of glaciers and on camps atop the summit of the ice cap to learn all they can about the dynamic nature of ice, wildlife, climate, and geology in an era of rapid climate change at the poles. I’ll be up there with video production Lisa Strong to document all the science we can stuff into three weeks. We’ll be camping and hiking with glaciologists, biologists, and climate researchers, recording interviews, writing dispatches, and capturing moving and still image scenes of this gorgeous icy island.

Our first stop will be the town of Kangerlussuaq, nestled along a 160-km (100-mile) long fjord with the looming ice cap behind. We’ll reach Kanger, as it’s often called, via an Air National Guard military transport from Scotia, New York and we’ll be staying at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support facility, aka “KISS.” We hope to catch up with Billy D’Andrea, our Ice Stories correspondent from Brown University, who is studying lake sediments for clues of our recent climate past. We also plan to hitch a ride and hike out to Tom Neumann’s camp along the glacier edge. Tom is a glaciologist from the University of Vermont (http://www.uvm.edu/~greenlnd/) who is interested in the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in particular the last time Greenland was free from its mantle of ice. His team does this by patrolling the edge of the glacier and collecting debris spit out from the base of the ice sheet. These rocks contain clues about the last time they were directly exposed to cosmic rays from the sun (i.e. the last time they weren’t covered by ice). Near Kanger, we also hope to capture some musk oxen with our cameras and will almost certainly encounter unwelcome wildlife in the form of marauding Arctic mosquitoes (Billy says we’ll be eaten alive, which is why we’ve packed mosquito nets and plenty of deet).

From Kanger, we fly to the lovely town of Ilulissat, a major tourist and science destination on the island. Ilulissat means iceberg in Greenlandic and the town is aptly named situated as it is near the outlet of the world’s fastest-moving glacier, the Jakobshavn. Jakobshavn is Greenland’s largest glacier and it regularly calves huge icebergs in the summer season, some as large as a cubic kilometer is size. We hope to capture one of these gigantic calving events at Mark Fahnestock’s camp along the rocky shoreline of Disko Bay at the base of the glacier. Mark is a glaciologist from the University of New Hampshire, and studies the flow rate of the Jakobshavn glacier. This one glacier, a fraction of the 630,000-cubic-mile ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, produces 35 billion tons of icebergs every year, nearly all the bergs that threaten ship traffic in the Northern Atlantic and almost certainly the origin of the monster that sunk the Titanic. As a final destination of our Greenland science tour, Lisa Strong will fly with the Air National Guard up to Summit Camp to get a perspective of the ice from on top the two-mile-thick sheet.

July 7, 2007 will mark the global concert Live Earth, which features bands on all seven continents rocking out with a call to arms for combating global warming. San Francisco residents can watch the satellite feed at the Exploratorium, along with a screening of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Web audiences can tune into MSN’s Live Earth webcast here.

Among the dozens of headliners, which include The Police, Shakira, and Linkin Park, Live Earth will launch the Indie band Nunatak onto the world stage. Made up of scientists at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, Nunatak will record a concert with a live audience of only 17, the full contingent of scientists and support personnel manning the station in the dead of winter. You can check out a rehearsal video on YouTube that features some pretty decent fiddling by Tris Thorne, the communications engineer at Rothera Station.

There’s a long tradition of do-it-yourself entertainment in Antarctica. Among the earliest explorers, who spent up to 18 months or more on the ice, it was the only choice they had. Costumes and wigs were part of the cargo on all of Shackleton’s expeditions and his crew competed in talent shows that starred cross-dressing sailors. Even today, with cable TV and DVDs available, there is plenty of homegrown arts and culture on the ice. During our expedition in 2001/2, we were lucky enough to catch “Ice Stock,” the New Years’ celebration of garage bands, arts, and chili-cook-off competition at McMurdo, the largest NSF research station in Antarctica.

That concert line-up in 2002 included a pro in the mix, guitarist Henry Kaiser pictured here in red with one of McMurdo’s house bands (written up in his Antarctica blog).

I love cracking open the morning newspaper and reading about somebody I’ve met (except, of course, if they’ve died or been arrested). Yesterday’s nerdy pleasure was a story in the New York Times about improving undergraduate teaching at Harvard that quoted physicist Eric Mazur. Professor Mazur was on a task force at Harvard that called for a new focus on learning and teaching, recommending that innovation and success in instruction be valued as highly as research and publication. It’s important, the task force report notes, that renowned scholars engage with students rather than just lecture to them.

This was the subject of a lunchtime brown bag talk that Professor Mazur gave to staff at the Exploratorium a few months ago. (Stephanie Chasteen, a postdoc at the Exploratorium recorded his talk which you can download from her website, along with Eric’s power point presentation). Eric Mazur is an advisor to the Exploratorium’s Nano project, part of a network of museums and science institutions funded by the National Science Foundation to improve the public’s understanding about nanoscience and technology. In his talk, Eric described how he gave up lectures in his introductory physics courses when he realized they weren’t working and that his students had failed to assimilate basic knowledge. Then he tried something radical: instead of providing answers, he started asking his students questions and giving them problems to solve in class. The students input answers in hand-held devices, consulting each other on possible solutions and then, as a class, they discuss the problem and its solution. In this model of inquiry learning, the students’ role is to think and discuss problems; the teacher’s role is to guide a deeper understanding of the underlying principles. This fosters critical thinking and problem-solving skills rather than rote memorization. As Professor Mazur is quoted in the Times, “You have to be able to tackle the new and unfamiliar, not just the familiar, in everything.”

Just for fun, here’s one of Eric Mazur’s typical class exercises—can you solve this simple circuit problem more accurately than Harvard physics students?

Since I’m new to the blogging world, I wanted to try an experiment to insert YouTube video into my blog. This video was taken a few years ago when I was in Antarctica for our Origins Project. I persuaded the National Science Foundation to let me dive under the ice and it was one of the most exhilirating experiences of my life: hundreds of feet of visibility and near-freezing temperatures.