Live broadcast from the North Pole Environmental Observatory (NPEO)
Thursday, April 24th at 3pm EDT
To register and listen to the broadcast:
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?50@@.f3e220f
Thursday, April 24th at 3pm EDT, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin
will broadcast live over the Internet from the North Pole Environmental
Observatory (NPEO). Reporters from the New York Times and Peter West,
media officer for the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at the
National Science Foundation, are currently at the North Pole field
station. To access an earlier article and the web broadcast it is
necessary to register, but it is free
http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?50@@.f3e220f. Anyone, including
students or school classrooms, can email Andrew questions to be answered
during the broadcast.
Since 2000 researchers with the NPEO have conducted annual expeditions
to the North Pole to take the pulse of the Arctic Ocean and learn how
the world's northernmost sea helps regulate global climate. The team
observatory is a collection of un-manned scientific platforms to record
data throughout the year on everything from the salinity of the water to
the thickness and temperature of the ice cover. Observatory measurements
are taken from:
- Drifting data buoys reporting via satellite provide coverage over a
wide geographic area by following the drift of the ice pack, - Oceanographic moorings anchored to the ocean floor recording
internally measure long-term time series at a single position beneath
the ice, and - Aerial surveys of hydrographic casts profiling parameters from the
surface become possible using the light aircraft used in the April
mooring and buoy deployments.
The NPEO is sponsored by the Arctic System Science program at the
National Science Foundation. For more information about the North Pole
Environmental Observatory, the projects, the investigators and the field
site, see the NPEO web site at http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/.