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15 October 2021
#AntarcticLog: 200 million displaced by climate change
It’s a week to celebrate for me: #AntarcticLog #200 just posted. Here it is. To acknowledge the moment, I looked for a topic that would reflect that number: 200. And what I came up with was sobering: the World Bank’s assessment of the number of humans due to be displaced by climate change. (And that’s just the humans.)
8 October 2021
#AntarcticLog: Kids are our (climate) future
When I think about what the world’s kids have been through for the last year and a half — since the start of the pandemic — I want to cry. And yet look at them — out stumping for climate change action, using their artwork to voice their concerns, wishes, and — as it right for the next generation — demands.
1 October 2021
#AntarcticLog: Visualizing climate change
At the Bigelow Laboratory in East Boothbay, Maine, the walls are made of glass. It facilitates communication, not just because it’s transparent, but because it gives the scientists something to draw on. Did you realize that scientists are dedicated doodlers? They embrace visual imagery to convey their processes and their findings. Case in point: Stephanie Peart’s demonstration of cloud formation, in this #AntarcticLog comic:
24 September 2021
#AntarcticLog: Edible (kind of) spiders
If you were going to make an Antarctic cake, what would you put on it? Rose McAdoo — steward at McMurdo station, polar explorer, and baker extraordinaire — has baked cakes to display scientists’ data, taught prison inmates to decorate cakes, and created this one, complete with sea spider.
17 September 2021
#AntarcticLog: The importance of stories
By now I shouldn’t be surprised — just grateful — at the way certain stories have broad appeal. I’m beginning to learn to trust myself — that stories and images that appeal to me will affect others too. Maybe not the same way as they affect me, but in the way of individual people wherever they are. For example, this one, featuring Mother Earth.
3 September 2021
#AntarcticLog: Melting glaciers
The most vulnerable part of the Antarctic Ice is the Thwaites Glacier, part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Could it melt? Yes — and it’s likely that it has, under different conditions many years in the past.
24 August 2021
#AntarcticLog: Science Education
Unlike many people in the sciences, I didn’t have much formal education myself. Much of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned on my feet, by wandering around behind scientists, watching and asking questions. All the more reason that the moment I first walked into the science classroom at my middle school looms large in my mind.
13 August 2021
#AntarcticLog: Climate hope via Greta Thunberg
The International Panel on Climate Change released a report this week full of a big dollop of reality — the impact human life has had on global temperature — and a dose of hope — the potential to stem change if we act quickly. I thought about what I could say about this through #AntarcticLog, skimmed through my nearly 200 comics, and stopped cold at the ones about Greta Thunberg.
6 August 2021
#AntarcticLog: Warm in Any Weather
T-shirt weather in the northern hemisphere makes me think about measures taken to endure the extreme environments at the poles. When it comes to staying warm in high winds and low temperatures, #AntarcticLog has it covered.
30 July 2021
#AntarcticLog: So Chill
It’s frying hot in these parts, getting to be the Dog Days of Summer. So I thought I’d fill you in on the story behind some of the coolest science — and people — I know, while also filling you in on the sometimes serendipitous way that #AntarcticLog comics come together.
The Plainspoken Scientist is the science communication blog of AGU’s Sharing Science program. With this blog, we wish to encourage scientists to reach out to non-scientists and to do so with plainspoken discussion.