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Lost century-old Antarctic images found and conserved

Posted on Friday, January 10th, 02014 by Catherine Borgeson
link   Categories: Digital Dark Age, Long News, Long Term Art   chat 0 Comments
png;base64ae8986ed5eff7765
Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
A small box of 22 exposed but unprocessed photographic negatives left nearly a century  ago in an Antarctic exploration hut has been discovered and conserved by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust.
“It’s the first example that I’m aware of, of undeveloped negatives from a century ago from the Antarctic heroic era,” Antarctic Heritage Trust Executive Director Nigel Watson said in a press release. “There’s a paucity of images from that expedition.”
aht1
Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
The team of conservationists discovered the clumped together negatives preserved in a solid block of ice in Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island. The hut served as one of the many supply depots of Captain Scott’s doomed Terre Nova Expedition to the South Pole (01910-01913). While the expedition made it to the Pole, they died during the return trip from starvation and extreme conditions. Today, preserved jars of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, John Burgess & Sons French olives and blocks of New Zealand butter can still be found in the hut, as well as a darkroom intact with chemicals and plates.
Two years after Scott’s expedition, the hut was inhabited by the Ross Sea Party of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (01914-01917). Ten marooned men lived there after being stranded on the ice for nearly two years when their ship, the SY Aurora, broke free from her moorings during a blizzard and drifted out to sea.  By the time of their rescue, three men had died, including the team’s photographer Arnold Patrick Spencer-Smith. While the photographer of the negatives cannot be proven, someone in the Ross Sea Party did leave behind the undeveloped images.
aht2
Chief Scientist Alexander Stevens looking south on the deck of Aurora. Hut Point Peninsula in the background. Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
ath3
Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
These never-before-seen images give testament to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. And only in places like Antarctica could such a situation exist. The photographer used cellulose nitrate film, which according to Kodak, is a relatively unstable base. The film breaks down in humidity and higher temperatures, giving off powerful oxidizing agents. However, if the conditions are right, the film may last for decades, or as the Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered, a century.
The photographs found in Captain Scott’s expedition base at Cape Evans, Antarctica required specialist conservation treatment. The Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ) engaged Photographic Conservator Mark Strange to undertake the painstaking task of separating, cleaning (including removing mould) and consolidating the cellulose nitrate image layers. Twenty-two separate sheets were revealed and sent to New Zealand Micrographic Services for scanning using a Lanovia pre-press scanner. The digital scans were converted to digital positives.

Retro Report Revisits News of the Not-Too-Distant-Past

Posted on Monday, September 16th, 02013 by Austin Brown
link   Categories: Long News, Long Term Science, Long Term Thinking   chat 2 Comments
retroreport
At what point does news become history? With the pace of modern journalism, one could argue it happens pretty quickly, but reality doesn’t always move as fast as the media. Many of the stories we actually need to hear simply don’t fit inside a hype cycle and thus aren’t fully told. One organization grappling with this problem is Retro Report:
Retro Report is there to pick up the story after everyone has moved on, connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.
Providing what they call “a timely online counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle,” Retro Report revisits the big stories of the not-too-distant-past and produces videos that explore what the media initially got right or wrong and how things unfolded after the cameras left.
As Carl Zimmer points out, one great application for this type of reporting is on the sciences. Science is inherently a slow, accumulative process and initial findings are often wrong:
In reality, a lot of science-related conclusions fall apart or have to be revised in later years. Science itself is starting to grapple with its flaws, with papers like “Most Published Research Findings Are False.” On the other hand, some findings gain strength over the years, as more and more evidence supports them. But those studies pile up like sand grains, and so it’s easy for journalists to overlook them, even after they’ve grown into a mountain.
Here, they tell the story of the Flavr Savr Tomato – the first transgenic crop to be sold in American grocery stores:

Even beyond science, Retro Report makes use of the advantages of hindsight to explore how the big stories of the past are still unfolding today.

Almost everything is getting better

Posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 02011 by Kirk Citron
link   Categories: Long News   chat 13 Comments
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
Last week The Millennium Project released its 02011 State Of The Future report, looking at trends for the past twenty years and projecting ahead for the next decade. (Not the 10,000 year future, but still of interest.) You can read an executive summary of the report here.
While the report finds many things to worry about – global warming, terrorism, corruption – overall the trends are surprisingly hopeful, as shown in their chart called “Where we are winning”:

Anthropocene arrives

Posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
link   Categories: Long News, Long Term Science, Long Term Thinking   chat 3 Comments
Since the end of the last ice age a little over 10,000 years or so ago, human civilization has blossomed in a climatically friendly epoch known as the Holocene. The flowers are still blooming, but as climate change begins to mix things up some have been predicting that the story of recent and pending human history will prove quite dramatic…and it will be written in stone. National Geographic reports:
Stratigraphers like Zalasiewicz are, as a rule, hard to impress. Their job is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact. They take the long view—the extremely long view—of events, only the most violent of which are likely to leave behind clear, lasting signals. It’s those events that mark the crucial episodes in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year story, the turning points that divide it into comprehensible chapters.
So it’s disconcerting to learn that many stratigraphers have come to believe that we are such an event—that human beings have so altered the planet in just the past century or two that we’ve ushered in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Standing in the smirr, I ask Zalasiewicz what he thinks this epoch will look like to the geologists of the distant future, whoever or whatever they may be. Will the transition be a moderate one, like dozens of others that appear in the record, or will it show up as a sharp band in which very bad things happened—like the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician?
That, Zalasiewicz says, is what we are in the process of determining.
Whether or not humans are ushering in such a singular moment in recent geologic history, there seems to be increasing support for the notion that we are leaving the Holocene behind, and that ‘we’ have enough to do with that transition to merit naming the new epoch after ourselves. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first used by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist, at a conference about ten years ago. It’s come a long way: today it is featured in the March issue of the National Geographic.
Crutzen…thinks its real value won’t lie in revisions to geology textbooks. His purpose is broader: He wants to focus our attention on the consequences of our collective action—and on how we might still avert the worst. “What I hope,” he says, “is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”
The photograph of the oil field above was taken by Edward Burtynsky, who spoke at our seminar series in 2008 on “The 10,000-year Gallery.”

The global brain

Posted on Monday, February 21st, 02011 by Kirk Citron
link   Categories: Long News   chat 1 Comment
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
Internet map of the Middle East
A computer defeats humans on a television game show. An information network brings down a series of dictatorships. We are witnessing a massive explosion in data, and an equally massive explosion in our ability to process and distribute it. The fall of the Soviet Union may have been driven, in part, by the fax machine; today, revolutions are driven by Wikileaks, Facebook, and Twitter. (You say you want a revolution? Google it.) Or, as Ken Jennings wrote on his monitor when he lost at Jeopardy to IBM’s Watson: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
Some recent news articles about information overload — as well as some additional stories:
1. “A whopping 94% of global data is now stored digitally, up from 0.8% 25 years ago”: As computer capacity soars, users drowning in data
5. Meanwhile: maybe our energy problems are solvable: Today’s clean tech could power the world by 2050
6. Unsettling news for climate change deniers and creationists: Global warming may reroute evolution
7. Shocking how many Americans don’t believe in evolution (this time, it’s the science teachers): Evolution still struggling in public schools
8. That’s okay, we can rewrite evolution anyway: Mammoth ‘could be reborn in four years’
We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

How Much Does a Kilogram Weigh?

Posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
link   Categories: Long News, Long Term Science   chat 2 Comments
As a recent New York Times article observes, the kilogram is officially defined as “a unit of mass equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.” Well, it turns out that the prototype, a chunk of platinum and iridium housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, has lost a bit of weight since it was made in the 1880s. The builders of the prototype did their best to design for the long-term, choosing a 90% platinum / 10% iridium alloy for its corrosion resistance and good thermal properties, sheltering it with bell jars and a vault, and minimizing its surface area. Time, however, has proven their efforts insufficient. The New York Times points out that the method for standardizing the kilogram has been going out of style:
The kilogram is the last base unit of measurement to be expressed in terms of a manufactured artifact. (Its cousin, the international prototype of the meter, was retired from active duty in 1960, when scientists redefined the meter. They redefined it again in 1983; a meter is now officially “the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second,” for those who would like to try it at home.)
Scientists now have similarly bold plans for the kilogram, and indeed for several other base units of measure. A draft resolution to be considered at the General Conference of Weights and Measures in October includes new and improved definitions for the ampere, the mole and the candela.
“This would be the biggest change in metrology since the metric system was introduced during the French Revolution,” Dr. Quinn said.
Which is all very exciting and very revolutionary. But it is easier said than done.
Indeed, we all take these standards for granted, but they are one of the things that allow us to build on the past and conceive into the future.  Their definition may seem esoteric, but one only has to go to a gas station in a country without standards enforcement to see the potential pit falls of a lack of them.  Moving into the future with standards not defined by physical items, the Bureau of Weights and Measures discusses some of the difficulties they face, such as the degree of uncertainty in Planck’s constant.

Lost century-old Antarctic images found and conserved

Lost century-old Antarctic images found and conserved

Posted on Friday, January 10th, 02014 by Catherine Borgeson
link   Categories: Digital Dark Age, Long News, Long Term Art   chat 0 Comments
png;base64ae8986ed5eff7765
Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
A small box of 22 exposed but unprocessed photographic negatives left nearly a century  ago in an Antarctic exploration hut has been discovered and conserved by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust.
“It’s the first example that I’m aware of, of undeveloped negatives from a century ago from the Antarctic heroic era,” Antarctic Heritage Trust Executive Director Nigel Watson said in a press release. “There’s a paucity of images from that expedition.”
aht1
Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
The team of conservationists discovered the clumped together negatives preserved in a solid block of ice in Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans on Ross Island. The hut served as one of the many supply depots of Captain Scott’s doomed Terre Nova Expedition to the South Pole (01910-01913). While the expedition made it to the Pole, they died during the return trip from starvation and extreme conditions. Today, preserved jars of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, John Burgess & Sons French olives and blocks of New Zealand butter can still be found in the hut, as well as a darkroom intact with chemicals and plates.
Two years after Scott’s expedition, the hut was inhabited by the Ross Sea Party of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (01914-01917). Ten marooned men lived there after being stranded on the ice for nearly two years when their ship, the SY Aurora, broke free from her moorings during a blizzard and drifted out to sea.  By the time of their rescue, three men had died, including the team’s photographer Arnold Patrick Spencer-Smith. While the photographer of the negatives cannot be proven, someone in the Ross Sea Party did leave behind the undeveloped images.
aht2
Chief Scientist Alexander Stevens looking south on the deck of Aurora. Hut Point Peninsula in the background. Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
ath3
Photo: Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ)
These never-before-seen images give testament to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. And only in places like Antarctica could such a situation exist. The photographer used cellulose nitrate film, which according to Kodak, is a relatively unstable base. The film breaks down in humidity and higher temperatures, giving off powerful oxidizing agents. However, if the conditions are right, the film may last for decades, or as the Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered, a century.
The photographs found in Captain Scott’s expedition base at Cape Evans, Antarctica required specialist conservation treatment. The Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZ) engaged Photographic Conservator Mark Strange to undertake the painstaking task of separating, cleaning (including removing mould) and consolidating the cellulose nitrate image layers. Twenty-two separate sheets were revealed and sent to New Zealand Micrographic Services for scanning using a Lanovia pre-press scanner. The digital scans were converted to digital positives.

Retro Report Revisits News of the Not-Too-Distant-Past

Posted on Monday, September 16th, 02013 by Austin Brown
link   Categories: Long News, Long Term Science, Long Term Thinking   chat 2 Comments
retroreport
At what point does news become history? With the pace of modern journalism, one could argue it happens pretty quickly, but reality doesn’t always move as fast as the media. Many of the stories we actually need to hear simply don’t fit inside a hype cycle and thus aren’t fully told. One organization grappling with this problem is Retro Report:
Retro Report is there to pick up the story after everyone has moved on, connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.
Providing what they call “a timely online counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle,” Retro Report revisits the big stories of the not-too-distant-past and produces videos that explore what the media initially got right or wrong and how things unfolded after the cameras left.
As Carl Zimmer points out, one great application for this type of reporting is on the sciences. Science is inherently a slow, accumulative process and initial findings are often wrong:
In reality, a lot of science-related conclusions fall apart or have to be revised in later years. Science itself is starting to grapple with its flaws, with papers like “Most Published Research Findings Are False.” On the other hand, some findings gain strength over the years, as more and more evidence supports them. But those studies pile up like sand grains, and so it’s easy for journalists to overlook them, even after they’ve grown into a mountain.
Here, they tell the story of the Flavr Savr Tomato – the first transgenic crop to be sold in American grocery stores:

Even beyond science, Retro Report makes use of the advantages of hindsight to explore how the big stories of the past are still unfolding today.

Almost everything is getting better

Posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 02011 by Kirk Citron
link   Categories: Long News   chat 13 Comments
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
Last week The Millennium Project released its 02011 State Of The Future report, looking at trends for the past twenty years and projecting ahead for the next decade. (Not the 10,000 year future, but still of interest.) You can read an executive summary of the report here.
While the report finds many things to worry about – global warming, terrorism, corruption – overall the trends are surprisingly hopeful, as shown in their chart called “Where we are winning”:

Anthropocene arrives

Posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
link   Categories: Long News, Long Term Science, Long Term Thinking   chat 3 Comments
Since the end of the last ice age a little over 10,000 years or so ago, human civilization has blossomed in a climatically friendly epoch known as the Holocene. The flowers are still blooming, but as climate change begins to mix things up some have been predicting that the story of recent and pending human history will prove quite dramatic…and it will be written in stone. National Geographic reports:
Stratigraphers like Zalasiewicz are, as a rule, hard to impress. Their job is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact. They take the long view—the extremely long view—of events, only the most violent of which are likely to leave behind clear, lasting signals. It’s those events that mark the crucial episodes in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year story, the turning points that divide it into comprehensible chapters.
So it’s disconcerting to learn that many stratigraphers have come to believe that we are such an event—that human beings have so altered the planet in just the past century or two that we’ve ushered in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Standing in the smirr, I ask Zalasiewicz what he thinks this epoch will look like to the geologists of the distant future, whoever or whatever they may be. Will the transition be a moderate one, like dozens of others that appear in the record, or will it show up as a sharp band in which very bad things happened—like the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician?
That, Zalasiewicz says, is what we are in the process of determining.
Whether or not humans are ushering in such a singular moment in recent geologic history, there seems to be increasing support for the notion that we are leaving the Holocene behind, and that ‘we’ have enough to do with that transition to merit naming the new epoch after ourselves. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first used by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist, at a conference about ten years ago. It’s come a long way: today it is featured in the March issue of the National Geographic.
Crutzen…thinks its real value won’t lie in revisions to geology textbooks. His purpose is broader: He wants to focus our attention on the consequences of our collective action—and on how we might still avert the worst. “What I hope,” he says, “is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”
The photograph of the oil field above was taken by Edward Burtynsky, who spoke at our seminar series in 2008 on “The 10,000-year Gallery.”

The global brain

Posted on Monday, February 21st, 02011 by Kirk Citron
link   Categories: Long News   chat 1 Comment
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
Internet map of the Middle East
A computer defeats humans on a television game show. An information network brings down a series of dictatorships. We are witnessing a massive explosion in data, and an equally massive explosion in our ability to process and distribute it. The fall of the Soviet Union may have been driven, in part, by the fax machine; today, revolutions are driven by Wikileaks, Facebook, and Twitter. (You say you want a revolution? Google it.) Or, as Ken Jennings wrote on his monitor when he lost at Jeopardy to IBM’s Watson: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
Some recent news articles about information overload — as well as some additional stories:
1. “A whopping 94% of global data is now stored digitally, up from 0.8% 25 years ago”: As computer capacity soars, users drowning in data
5. Meanwhile: maybe our energy problems are solvable: Today’s clean tech could power the world by 2050
6. Unsettling news for climate change deniers and creationists: Global warming may reroute evolution
7. Shocking how many Americans don’t believe in evolution (this time, it’s the science teachers): Evolution still struggling in public schools
8. That’s okay, we can rewrite evolution anyway: Mammoth ‘could be reborn in four years’
We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

How Much Does a Kilogram Weigh?

Posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
link   Categories: Long News, Long Term Science   chat 2 Comments
As a recent New York Times article observes, the kilogram is officially defined as “a unit of mass equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.” Well, it turns out that the prototype, a chunk of platinum and iridium housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, has lost a bit of weight since it was made in the 1880s. The builders of the prototype did their best to design for the long-term, choosing a 90% platinum / 10% iridium alloy for its corrosion resistance and good thermal properties, sheltering it with bell jars and a vault, and minimizing its surface area. Time, however, has proven their efforts insufficient. The New York Times points out that the method for standardizing the kilogram has been going out of style:
The kilogram is the last base unit of measurement to be expressed in terms of a manufactured artifact. (Its cousin, the international prototype of the meter, was retired from active duty in 1960, when scientists redefined the meter. They redefined it again in 1983; a meter is now officially “the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second,” for those who would like to try it at home.)
Scientists now have similarly bold plans for the kilogram, and indeed for several other base units of measure. A draft resolution to be considered at the General Conference of Weights and Measures in October includes new and improved definitions for the ampere, the mole and the candela.
“This would be the biggest change in metrology since the metric system was introduced during the French Revolution,” Dr. Quinn said.
Which is all very exciting and very revolutionary. But it is easier said than done.
Indeed, we all take these standards for granted, but they are one of the things that allow us to build on the past and conceive into the future.  Their definition may seem esoteric, but one only has to go to a gas station in a country without standards enforcement to see the potential pit falls of a lack of them.  Moving into the future with standards not defined by physical items, the Bureau of Weights and Measures discusses some of the difficulties they face, such as the degree of uncertainty in Planck’s constant.

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