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23 May 2022
#AntarcticLog: Communicating climate science
I’ve been listening to teachers, and reading their words. They’re overtired, overworked, underpaid, and, when it comes to science teachers, extra worried: they’re concerned about the hard line that has been drawn by many people against science.
13 May 2022
#AntarcticLog: It’s tough getting to Antarctica
I think we’ve established that it’s not easy to get to Antarctica. Ever since the Drake Passage opened ten million years ago, letting the Southern Ocean circle the Antarctic continent, it has rendered human arrival there perilous and arduous.
6 May 2022
#AntarcticLog: A Reef Called HOPE
#AntarcticLog is a series of comics by Karen Romano Young. You can find the originals here. You know, writing about climate change is a struggle. I want to share the information kids and other people need (in my view) while trying not to send their outlook through the floor. Among the most dire stories come from coral reefs — so vital, so damaged, and so at risk. And yet there’s incredible …
29 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: A small piece about a big deal
Artist Karen Romano Young explains through SciArt why tiny krill are a big deal for Antarctic food webs (and penguins, seals, orcas–and scientists).
22 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: Watch Your Language
#AntarcticLog is a series of comics by Karen Romano Young. You can find the originals here. Last week I posted about how I try to find the best visual image to convey the main point of a comic or visual story. This week I’m sharing just one image — an introduction to the JOIDES Resolution and Expedition #379, in which I took part three years ago, in 2019. I continue to …
15 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: Getting Graphic
At times the trouble isn’t finding science stories, it’s finding how to tell them. In comics, the words are vital, but the images are, dare I say, even more important. Why? Because they’re what catches your attention, clues you in, inviting you to read, and — in the best cases — they work to convey aspects of the science that just wouldn’t work as well in words. And, as experts in science education and communication know, the more modes you use to tell the story, the more eyes you’re going to get on your work.
8 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: Not just for kids
Illustrated stories are for kids, right? Not right at all! People of all ages read, laugh and cry over, learn from, and love pictures.
1 April 2022
#AntarcticLog: A Lite-Brite of SciArt
I got my start at Scholastic News, a classroom magazine for 11 and 12-year-olds that covered everything — so I had to interview everyone who was making news. I quickly realized that the people I liked talking to the most were scientists. They were the most passionate, the most enthralled, and they had the biggest lives — even as they focused on a small research topic or specific geographic area. To me they were dots of light that — like the Lite-Brite toy I’d grown up with — formed pictures.
18 March 2022
#AntarcticLog: (Climate) refugees
Sometimes there just aren’t words to express my response to what’s going on. That’s what led me to comics in the first place — a grievous story of walrus stranded by climate change — and it’s what leads me on. What “does not compute” in words can make a connection in visuals.
11 March 2022
#AntarcticLog: Coming together for science
My Twitter feed is full of calls for peace. And last week’s #AntarcticLog post had a call for “more science!” Coming right up. Actually, Antarctica is proof that we can have peace and science, and that the countries of the world can come together to secure it.
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.