5-True story: A prop plane, a bucket, and a trip to Antarctica

Pacifica Sommers is an ecologist and explorer. From the deserts of Arizona to the Antarctic tundra, Pacifica has looked at how organisms from tardigrades to pocket mice live in extreme environments. We talked with her about some of the most beautiful places on Earth, the diversity of folks who can be scientists,  and what exactly that bucket is for on the flight to Antarctica.

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Staff Picks: Toxic City Under the Ice

In 1959, the United States built an unusual military base under the surface of the Greenland ice Sheet. Camp Century was a hub for scientific research, but it also doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic. When Camp Century was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be forever entombed beneath the colossal sheet of ice.  

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The unusual relationship between climate and pandemics

Well-documented torrential rains and unusually cold temperatures affected the outcomes of many major battles during World War I from 1914 to 1918. Poet Mary Borden described the cold, muddy landscape of the Western Front as “the liquid grave of our armies” in her poem “The Song of the Mud” about 1916’s Battle of the Somme, during which more than one million soldiers were killed or wounded.  

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Third Pod Live: The Dirty Links between Soil and Climate

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is an Associate Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry at the Life and Environmental Sciences unit, University of California, Merced. She received her PhD in Biogeochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley; M. Sc. in Political Ecology from Michigan State University, and BS in Soil and Water Conservation from University of Asmara, Eritrea…Basically, she rocks.

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Earthrise

On 24 December 1968, humans witnessed our home planet rise over the horizon of another world for the first time. The crew of Apollo 8 looked up from the Moon to see the blue and white swirls of Earth poised above the stark grey lunar surface—a single oasis in a big, dark universe.

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