After climbing around Rjukan, I moved on to Oslo hoping to learn more about Norway’s exploratory pedigree. The epicenter of this history lies in a quad-fecta of museums on the Bygdoy Peninsula, a short drive around the harbor from downtown Oslo.

Chronologically, the first stop is the Viking ship museum, which houses three impressive boats dating from the 900s. These vessels, archaeologists believe, were used to carry rich and famous Vikings around, not to sail the high seas on long-haul voyages. That said, the construction of these boats gives a sense of the strategies that made Norwegian Vikings so successful. The ships are strong, light, and perfectly shaped to cut through the water with minimal drag. While other ships of the day struggled to keep water out, the Vikings used pine tar (and later iron rivets) to seal the planks together. The ships on display at the museum are very wide at the center, an adaptation that allowed them to sail easily in shallow waters.

Next up, the Fram, arguably the most important vessel in the history of polar exploration.

The boat was dreamed up by Fridtjof Nansen, who dreamed of sailing farther north than anyone had before. Ice was a common killer in the polar oceans, crushing ships like matchsticks and leaving the crew to fend for themselves in the harshest environment on Earth. Nansen designed the Fram to deal with the ice in a new way – rather than trying to withstand the force of the ice with brute strength, it would be pushed up by the ice, free from the ship-cracking strain.

Nansen took the ship on its maiden voyage from 1893-1896, spending three years locked in polar ice to learn about sea/ice currents. While the scientific bounty was important (ultimately getting people to see the Arctic as a resource-rich region rather than merely a frozen icescape), Nansen was driven largely by the record book. It soon became clear that the drifting ice would not take him to the north pole, so he tried to ski the rest of the way, leaving the Fram in the hands of the Otto Sverdrup. He didn’t get too far, and was soon picked up by a British expedition and returned home. Oh yeah, and he has a second life as a diplomat and human rights advocate, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

Nansen’s room on the Fram

Sverdrup next took the Fram on a journey to the Canadian Arctic to learn more about the ecology and geology of the high arctic. He discovered a number of islands, charting a total of 260,000 square kilometers. The key to the mission’s longevity and success was Sverdrup’s perceptive adoption of Inuit methods in clothing, transportation, and hunting. This adaptability and “live off the land” ethic was key, and Sverdrup was hailed as a national hero upon his return to Norway.

Fram got the most press for its role in Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition from 1910-1912. Amundsen was competing with British explorer Robert Falcon Scott in a highly-publicized race to the bottom of the Earth. I’ve written a bit about this trip here, but the key factor in Amundsen’s success was his ability to adapt to his conditions. Scott used donkeys; Amundsen used dogs. Scott dressed in wool layers; Amundsen wore seal fur. In the end, Amundsen not only beat Scott to the pole, but also lived to tell the tale.

Up until a few years ago, Fram had sailed farther north and farther south than any other ship.

[Side note: in preparation for his South Pole journey, Amundsen cruised around the Arctic, becoming the first person to cross the Northwest passage — yet another trophy the Brits had spent a lot of human and financial capital pursuing. Amundsen’s ship for that journey, the Gjoa, is also on display at the Fram museum.]

The most recent subject matter on Bygdoy Peninsula can be found at the Kon Tiki museum, a monument to Thor Heyerdahl’s contributions to exploration, anthropology, and cultural preservation. One of Heyerdahl’s guiding theses was the notion that ancient civilizations could have been much more intimately connected than we think. He posited that ancient peoples used low-tech but highly-adapted materials and technologies to sail far and wide across the oceans. The famous Kon Tiki raft was built of balsa wood in Peru and sailed across the Pacific Ocean. This and other expeditions prove that it was likely possible for ancient South Americans to colonize Polynesia and Easter Island, but most anthropologists still think the movement was West to East, based on linguistic and genetic evidence.

Kon Tiki:

Certainly Norwegians have made enormous contributions to global exploration over the centuries. From their launchpad at the confluence of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, Norwegian explorers sailed to the ends of the Earth embracing, not dodging, the hardships and unpredictability of nautical journeys. Perhaps most importantly, they traveled light and used the right materials for their environments (from the Vikings’ pine tar to Amundsen’s furs to Heyerdahl’s reed rafts), lessons that remain applicable even today.

Boats in Oslo’s harbor

What is it about Norway that breeds some of the world’s greatest explorers? Norwegians have racked up many of the most impressive milestones of exploration (particularly high-latitude exploration) even since a 25 year-old Leiv Eiriksson discovered America in ~1000 AD. But why? What allows this small country to punch so far above its weight?

I’ve been in the mountains of Norway for the last week trying to find an answer to this question. Ok ok, so I’ve actually been in the secluded town of Rjukan for some ice climbing, but I have gotten a sense of what makes Norwegians the Sherpas of exploration. First of all, to state the obvious, Norwegian winters are cold: just getting by in this environment is an accomplishment – one that selectively breeds the crucial qualities of endurance and fortitude. There are no “soft” Norwegians; complaining about a negative 20 degree wind chill or a foot of snow would make you a monotonous bore. More tellingly, people seem to not merely endure the elements but embrace them. Kids sled joyfully down hillsides, old women ski down the sidewalks, and every other store sells nordic skis and parkas.

The first step is endurance. The second step is appreciation. And the third step is to get on a well-built boat. I believe that a fervent appreciation for the outdoors almost inevitably leads to a desire to push the boundaries and peer over the next mountain, figuratively and literally. Given Norway’s historical arc, I think that’s exactly the model we’re seeing. Countries generally explore for because of imperial ambitions, religious evangelism, national pride, or curiosity / scientific knowledge. After the Viking age, it’s hard to make a case for a territorial expansionist motive. Other powers such as Spain and England were much more interested in converting other people to Christianity, and Norway doesn’t seem overly concerned with proving itself to anyone. So it seems that, more than most countries’, Norway’s brand of exploration is remarkably “pure,” inspired by a craving for a challenge and a desire to push the boundaries born from an appreciation for nature’s most difficult obstacles.

Rjukan winterscapes

For those with an exploratory instinct, there’s nothing more exciting than an incomplete map. Blank areas are left to the imagination, full of potential, ripe with adventure. But incomplete maps don’t last for long, as our innate curiosity quickly compels us to fill in the gaps. Fortunately, there is always a frontier with new lands to chart, and these days, one of the most intriguing frontiers is Saturn’s charismatic moon Titan.

The Cassini spacecraft has been running circles around Saturn and its many moons for several years now, sending back vast amounts of data about the famed rings, the planet itself, and its remarkable moons. To me, the most amazing thing about this phase of exploration is how quickly our understanding of the most fundamental things changes. Before Cassini, telescopes gave our best views of Titan, and most scientists speculated about the presence of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. Cassini arrived and saw a few splotches from orbit, dark patches that looked a lot like lakes. Subsequent passes have confirmed the lake hypothesis and narrowed down their composition to a simple hydrocarbon blend, mostly methane and ethane. Now the Cassini team is beginning to understand the full scope of the moon’s hydrocarbon dynamics. Last February, mission scientists calculated that Titan has more hydrocarbons than all of Earth’s known oil and gas reserves on its surface alone. (Maybe Big Oil money is coming to space exploration!) Most recently, the spacecraft has shown the true extent of the lakes and captured seasonal changes in their perimeters – likely the result of rainfall. (See map below.) The dynamics of the hydrocabon cycle remains a mystery (might there be a large subsurface “aquafer” of liquid methane?), but Cassini is making real progress.

These rapid-fire discoveries about an entire moon’s most basic geographic traits are impressive. Given the ultra-specialization that membership in today’s scientific community demands, it must be pretty liberating to be discovering fundamental facts about an entire planet. The ever-changing map of Titan reminds me of European maps in the 15th and 16th centuries as whole new continents were discovered and explored (and exploited). Seeing the progression as the shape of the Americas are refined from amorphous blobs to the more familiar contours we know today, one senses an intellectual investment, a real curiosity to understand precisely what is where.

Of course, the process can’t stop now: the natural and cultural wonders of the Americas took decades, if not centuries, to fully explore. The more lucrative discoveries came early (the unfortunate Incas and the Aztecs), while “natural phiIosophers” took a couple of centuries to come into fashion. But in the end, the most lasting discoveries from the New World changed our views of science, of the Earth, and of our relationship with the natural world.

So even if Shell does decide to suck Titan dry, we should make sure a latter-day Darwin get his (or her) chance to change everything first.

I really enjoyed this article about my glorious state’s new senator, Michael Bennet. It paints the picture of a talented generalist, a man who’s delved into the uppermost levels of a number of different fields. Bennet has gone from law school to finance to the mayor’s staff to Denver schools superintendent to US senator, apparently making seamless transitions along the way.

Bennet’s career resonates because I admire his ability to transfer his skills to new situations. Before making millions of dollars for a prominent Denver businessman, Bennet had never seen a balance sheet, and prior to his job as the head of Denver schools, he had no background in education. Without knowing much about him, it’s clear that his true gift is not necessarily technical expertise, but in how he thinks about and solves problems.

I’ve always resisted the pressure to be pigeon-holed as a particular type of a group of a subsection of scientist; the more prefixes in your job description (biogeochemist might just take the cake), the harder it is to pursue other interests. In an age when specialization seems to be a one-way street, it’s often hard to make a case for why someone with less job-specific training might be the right person to do that job. The best hope may be the drive toward interdisciplinary study, the understanding that cross-ferilization often yields the most unexpected and innovative results. I also believe that horizontal thinking and the constant stimulation of new problems keeps us all on our toes, more dynamically engaged with our work.

And if you keep your options open, you might just be picked to be a senator some day…

Pretty important discovery coming out of NASA HQ yesterday: methane on Mars. If you think you may have heard this claim before, it’s probably because you have. In 2004, a group claimed to have detected the gas in the martian atmosphere, but the data wasn’t overly convincing, and interest faded. Yesterday’s announcement of data (see the story here) from way back in 2003 changes things, providing an all-important second data set confirming the inital claim. The discovery identifies 3 regions on Mars where the gas was coming from: Terra Sabae, Nili Fossae and Syrtis Major.

So why is the discovery of localized methane sources interesting? As far as we know, the gas is made either volcanically or by a class of microbes known as methanogens. To make things more interesting, methane is broken down in the martian atmosphere, meaning that it could only last a few years or decades before being extinguished. This suggests that the gas has been released recently, not necessarily that it has been produced recently – an important distinction. The study’s lead author, Michael Mumma, points out that the gas could have been produced long ago and released only recently as subsurface ground thawed.

The jury’s still out on the source, but the important thing is that methane seems to be there. The next best chance of further observation is the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which recently passed over one of the three methane sites, Nili Fossae, as a potential landing site. But the mission’s recent delay, from this year to 2011, might re-open the door. Mission planners admitted the possibility at yesterday’s news conference, but they’d have some catching up to do. Previous studies have shown that Nili Fossae is high in clays and contains the mythical martian carbonates – both of which are often associated with life. Seems like it’s worth a second look…

The dawn of a new year is always a good time to take stock of priorities, hopes, and goals. True, it’s a somewhat artificial designation, but by turning the page of the calendar, we symbolically open a new chapter of our lives. In this spirit of reflection, I was intrigued by a recent article in the Times. The premise was this: what one scientific discovery would change everything? What key piece of information would completely alter our perception of our universe and our place in it?

Several influential people (scientists and otherwise) were asked this question, and answers varied from “personal genomics” to “radiotelepathy” to, yes, “finding (or not) life on Mars.” Whether or not you agree with any of these luminaries, the article is important in re-affirming the transformative, paradigm-shifting power of science. In the trenches, it’s often hard to lose sight of the potential impact of our work, but it’s clear that science can, has, and will fundamentally change things.

An inspiring thought on the first Monday of 2009. And now, back to the trenches.

On Saturday morning, I found myself delighting in a free breakfast (as any good student would do) and talking with they guy across the table from me. We covered the basics – the weather, how amazing the mangos were, etc. A few hours later, my new friend Neil Laughton was on-stage, talking about his various world records and expeditions to places such as Mt. Everest. Oh, and the various companies he’s founded on the side to pay for it all.

This episode was a typical experience at Explore last weekend, where many of the world’s greatest explorers mingled with bright-eyed students to share wisdom, ideas, and contact information.

As an icebreaker of sorts, delegates were asked at one point to write their dream expedition, irrespective of costs or practicalities, on the back of a card. The resulting work of art looked something like this:

And, zooming in a bit…

(no, that wasn’t mine).

Of all dream destinations, by far the most popular were space-based – the Moon, Mars, or the space station. On the one hand, this may come as no surprise; these are adventurers after all, and the most extreme location is often the most alluring. That said, I was actually pretty surprised that space polled so well. One of space’s greatest weakenesses as an adventure destination is the absence of human-based attractions: the wonder that comes with exploring a new culture, eating new food, or hearing new languages is unavailable. The preference of space among the “exploration elite” is a very encouraging sign – it suggests that at the cost of comfort and familiarity, we still clearly value exploration for its own sake.

It’s about that time of year again for the highlight of any explorer’s calendar – the aptly-named Explore conference at the Royal Geographic Society.

The RGS.

It’s all going down this weekend, when hundreds of explorers and field scientists will gather to exchange ideas, expertise, and inspiration. The speaker’s list is pretty intimidating; seems like about half have climbed Everest, and the ones that haven’t were too busy walking across Greenland in the winter with only a t-shirt while dragging a Land Rover behind them and juggling polar bears.

It all gets started tonight with a lecture from Paul Rose, the host of the BBC’s eye-candy Oceans series. I’ve become an addict of BBC documentaries, and “Oceans,” though prone to its fair share of eco-platitudes, can’t help but inspire wanderlust.

Explore also marks a noteworthy intersection between exploration and science. Exploration is rarely undertaken for its own sake – it has been tied throughout history first to survival, then to trade, evangalism, and politics. After the scientific revolution, science became a key partner, beginning with freelance scientists who would hitch rides on any ship they could find and progressing to multi-ship missions dispatched around the globe to solve scientific problems (i.e. by observing eclipses to get at the longitude dilemma).

Today, it seems that exploration serves four masters. Science is the most prominant impetus, for the quest to understand our universe naturally pushes us into the unknown: robots crawl around on Mars and teams hack through the rainforest looking for useful new drugs.

The second driver is difficult to characterize, but it involves the pursuit of physical, mental, and emotional limits – think of intrepid men and women trudging across continents or over mountains. This is slightly more “adventure” than “exploration”, but in many ways it is the pursuit of the new. (More on this in the future…)

Politics is also a driving factor for exploration, particularly with regard to state-sponsored manned space exploration. This component is a bit of a relic from the Cold War, but we see nationism rising again as the Asian Space Race heats up.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, economics. Even the supposedly noble causes of science and “limit-pushing” are often undertaken with economic motivations, either of commercial products down the line or good publicity for a sponsor. Space exploration (particularly of the manned variety) would no doubt cease to exist if it didn’t create jobs and generate so many lucrative spin-off technologies. Sad but true, money rules the world and our exploration of it.

So that to me is the state of exploration on the eve of Explore. I look forward to a couple days of engaging conversation and inspiration, and I hope to get a better sense of what exploration means in a modern and future context.

Updates to come!

Sad but true: the Phoenix Mars Lander officially died on Monday as mission planners stopped listening for a heartbeat. Phoenix has been silent for about a week now as dust accumulation and waning hours of daylight conspired to starve the Lander’s solar panels of light. But as project manager Barry Goldstein said yesterday, the team is “declaring an end to mission operations at this point.”

That said, the mission was, if not Earth-shattering, certainly a success. Its 5-month lifespan was 2 months longer than scheduled (though usually target timeframes are low-balled in order to lower expectations), and our knowledge of the planet’s geochemistry deepened with several important finds. With Mars exploration, it seems that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Pre-Mars Exploration Rovers, scientists had assumed that the planet had ancient oceans and lots of carbon dioxide, leading to the deposition of carbonates, which on Earth are particularly good at preserving evidence of life.

Chemical evidence from Opportunity turned all of this upside-down. The rover extrapolated a very acidic water chemistry that would have precluded carbonate precipitation. Around the same time, hyperspectral orbiters started finding sulfate deposits that tended to confirm the high-acidity, carbonate-free interpretation of Mars’ watery past.

And then came Phoenix. While the most flashy discovery was its detection of water ice, more unexpected data came from soil analysis: not only was the soil more alkaline than the MERs had led us to believe, but Phoenix also detected calcium carbonate – the first encounter with the long-awaited carbonate deposits of Mars.

And so, the plot thickens. Perhaps the most important take-away is that Mars was and is a complicated place. Just like on Earth, different places at different times produce very different conditions: we now see that it was quite possible to have acidic water producing sulfates at one location and more alkaline water precipitating carbonates elsewhere. To me, this is encouraging as we delve deeper into the search for life. If one potentially habitable micro-environment comes up empty, there are probably several other very different niches to examine.

Meanwhile, the Mars Exploration Rovers live on…

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