I was happy to have a radio interview before my presentation at the Jackson Hole Geologist’s club meeting on Tues Feb 2, 2016. The 89.1 KHOL Interview was done in studio, so I had the chance to answer some questions on the air.
This particular interview was about the specific science aspects I was going to cover for the Jackson Hole Geologists. Compared to the adventure story I presented for the Teton County Library Mountain Story program, this focused on specific scientific aspects of Antarctica:
- Geology
- Geography
- Magnetic vs geographic South Pole
- Weather
- Atmosphere
KHOL Interview
KHOL has featured me in a few interviews, so being on the radio was familiar territory. The interviewers (in this case Cassandra) have always been courteous and helpful in the online and broadcast media world. The community service announcements are appreciated by the people of Jackson Hole, as there aren’t a lot of media outlets here.
Listen to the 89.1 KHOL interview broadcast on Feb 2, 2016 at 8:30am and noon:
Thank you to Cassandra and the staff at 89.1 KHOL for having me on. They’ve provided me with the chance to share Antarctica, expeditions, photography, and motivation over the past year.
89.1 KHOL: The radio station
The 89.1 KHOL office is located in the Center for the Arts on the grounds of the old high school in Jackson, WY. The DJs and program managers all run their shows from this location. I always thought one needed a great deal of room to run a radio station.
How wrong I was.
The tireless folks of this community service station, working on donations from the community, provide programming with little or no advertising. It’s difficult to imagine running an entire radio station on community funding and donations, but the little town of Jackson Hole seems to pull it off year after year. I have to congratulate the staff at 89.1 KHOL for keeping their station on the air.
JH Geologist February Program
You can read the incredible description written by the the JH Geologist club in the above PDF. It was a tall order to deliver something to this standard in only an hour. It was a fun program and I was honored to speak at the JH Geologist’s club meeting.
Here’s the text excerpt:
THE COUNTRY WITHOUT A MAN
Human presence on earth has a powerful impact on our perception of geography. Think about Mount Everest and you are likely to see in your mind’s eye a string of prayer flags. Think about Egypt and you will see the Great Pyramids. Places are distinguished as much by the people who occupy them as they are by landscapes. Different foods, languages, philosophies and ideas are so deeply embraced and institutionalized by the inhabitants of different places that something as ethereal as a political boundary between two nations can give the otherwise identical ground on either side of almost any border altogether different feels. When we travel abroad, we experience the people as much as we do their land, and they leave us with a sense of place every bit as strong as that imparted by the scenery. There is a human identity, it seems, associated with every landscape on the planet.
Or almost, anyway. There is one place on earth – and probably only one place – that largely maintains an identity independent of humanity. It is a big continent, larger by far than the United States. It does not have a single permanent human inhabitant. No indigenous tribes, seat of government, military, or constitution, no ancient ruins or timeless architectural wonders, and no Jerry Springers, rap musicians, pirates, thugs, politicians, or highway men. Instead, its emperor is a penguin, it has sheets of ice 9,000 feet thick, unclimbed mountains, the only location on earth where it is impossible to go south in any direction, days and nights that last for months, and 61 to 70% of the planet’s fresh water.
While there are no Antarcticans, many nations have of course laid claim to large wedges of this continent at the end of the earth. But such claims are nearly empty gestures, anchored in place with a smattering of 30 or so research camps (mostly along the coast) that provide shelter for some 5,000 summer visitors and less than 1,000 winter visitors, all of whom are imported and entirely provisioned by ships and aircraft from far, far away.
Humanity needs this land without a people to remain as it is. Its vast and icy emptiness lends critical insight into our own nature by reflecting a stage upon which we are notably absent. Some nations may have other long-term designs for Antarctica, but there is a fundamental virtue in the idea that there can still be one place on this earth that exists without the cultural identity that we inexorably impart to the lands we inhabit. A place that just is. And a needful reminder of what this planet would be without us.
This Tuesday, (February 2nd) at the Teton County Library Auditorium at 6:00pm, polar explorer, world-adventurer, and writer-photographer Aaron Linsdau will show us the Antarctica he has experienced. Only the second American to ski solo 700 miles from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole, Aaron’s perspective on Antarctica was earned the honest, old-fashioned way, and we are fortunate to have the opportunity to see it all through his eyes this week. This is one of those lectures for which you might want to arrive early. Once all the chairs are full, the Fire Marshal insists that the tardy be banished to the lobby.
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