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The above photo is of Jim Head and two students in the Antarctic landscape.
On Thursday, November 21 in the Digital Scholarship Lab, Jim Head will talk about exploring the remote and extremely cold Antarctic Dry Valleys and what challenges this presents for scientists and students.
Jim Head has spent five field seasons in the Antarctic. His talk will touch on the reasons for persevering through months of camping in sub-zero temperatures as well as outlining how one gets to the United States base in McMurdo and then by helicopter to the Dry Valleys. He will also share some of the scientific returns from these Antarctic missions and how they’re related to global climate change and understanding the climate history of the planet Mars.
Bio: Jim Head is the Louis and Elizabeth Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University. He earned an undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University (BS, 1964) and received his PhD from Brown University in 1969. From 1968 to 1972, while serving at NASA Headquarters (Bellcomm, Inc.), he participated in the selection of landing sites for the Apollo program, in training Astronaut crews in geology and surface exploration, in planning and evaluating the package of experiments to be deployed on the Moon, in mission operations in Houston during lunar surface exploration, and in preliminary analysis of the lunar samples returned by the Astronauts. His research centers on the study of geological processes that form and modify the surfaces, crusts and lithospheres of planets, how these processes vary with time, and how such processes interact to produce the historical geological record preserved on the planets. He has been an investigator on numerous missions, including the missions to Venus, Jupiter, and Mars.
Title: Exploring the Antarctic Dry Valleys
Date: November 21, 2013
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Digital Scholarship Lab
Contact: Mark Baumer | 401-863-3642
