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5 August 2022
#AntarcticLog: Greetings from the Puerto Rico Trench
Greetings from the deepest place in the Atlantic Ocean! So far I’m reporting from the surface, but every day human-operated vehicle (HOV) Alvin carries scientists deeper. I mean, if you knew you had access to 99% of the seafloor — where before you had access to 2/3 — wouldn’t you head for the deepest spots?
15 July 2022
#AntarcticLog: Summertime
By Karen Romano Young The question of summer Arctic ice extent is up in the air — not to say it’s unknown. NASA goes to extra effort to assure the detailed accuracy of its measurements, including a new effort beginning this summer. Given the 40-plus-year coverage from space provided by the ICESat satellites, including ICESat-2, placed in orbit in 2018, our understanding of the volume of sea ice is exquisite any time …
8 July 2022
#AntarcticLog: Invisible Volcanoes
Artist Karen Roman Young shows us what we can learn about the below-ice geology of Marie Byrd Land in Antarctica.
3 June 2022
#AntarcticLog: Headed for Hawaii
Serendipity? My tickets to the big island of Hawaii were already bought when I read that the international nonprofit organization Mission Blue had designated its 141st Hope Spot — Hawaii’s second — right where I was headed. For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be learning about — and posting about — the changes taking place on Kahalu’u Bay.
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 …
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.
18 February 2022
#AntarcticLog: Being a Roughneck
Meet Ian Cortez, a roughneck (driller) working to bring sediment up from the seafloor to give scientists data that will allow them to tell the story of Antarctica’s deep past. Ian’s a second-generation roughneck, inspired by his father, who did as Ian is doing — leaving home and family in the Philippines to work at sea aboard the JR.
4 February 2022
#AntarcticLog: The Melting Continent
#AntarcticLog is a series of comics by Karen Romano Young. You can find the originals here. Here are a few questions I get asked: Who are you writing for? Why do you draw as much as write? Who is the audience for these comics? The underlying assumption, at times, is that comics are for kids. After all, the other arm of my work is creating books for audiences ages 8 …
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.