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• October 4
  

October 10, 2004
October 9, 2004

        Columbus Day weekend.  I revised my personal site and surfed the Internet for current news on the Galápagos.  As we discussed in class, I read about the current situation of the Galápagos not having a park director, and the recent struggle between park rangers and fishermen.
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October 8, 2004

       Minutes from today's team meeting can be viewed here.  Bob was at this meeting.
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October 7, 2004

       I could not work on Mission today. 
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October 6, 2004

       Our alumni mentor Bob came to the meeting today.  It was a pleasure to meet and talk with him; he had much good advice to give us.  Minutes from the meeting are here.  Additionally, I gave a brief presentation to the section on team one's research progress to date.
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October 5, 2004

        During the Terrascope lunch meeting, I learned that the New England Aquarium in Boston was showing an IMAX movie entitled "Galápagos Islands 3D."  I decided to go to the 8:30 showing, and accompanying me was fellow classmate Lindsey and her roommate.  It was some adventure!  We were given 3D viewing glasses, which greatly enhanced the experience.  The following review of the movie was in the October 17, 2004 edition of the Globe:

Marvels by nature: IMAX film at New England Aquarium explores evolution in Galapagos archipelago
By Chris Bergeron / News Staff Writer
Sunday, October 17, 2004

        Just inches beyond your nose, a beady-eyed iguana chews a blade of grass between pink gums.  It drags a scaly belly over volcanic rocks with regal indolence, drooling as it digests lunch.  Reach out and almost touch the creatures of Galapagos that sparked Charles Darwin's theory of evolution 175 years ago.  A giant tortoise pokes its knobby head from beneath a moss-spackled shell. Moray eels slither soundlessly through the indigo waters. A bandy-legged frigate bird inflates its crimson breast pouch in a mating ritual unchanged for centuries.  They are just some of the stars of a new three-dimensional IMAX film that transports viewers into the primitive and pristine world of the Galapagos archipelago that provided a living laboratory for ideas that shaped modern science.
        The spectacular 40-minute film plays five times a day at the New England Aquarium's Simons IMAX Theatre in Boston. "Galapagos" is a hybrid documentary -- part science, part travelogue -- and always immensely entertaining.  From the beginning, visitors leaned forward in their seats reaching out to feel sea lions and hammerhead sharks that appeared to be leaping off the theater's 65-by-85-foot screen.  Narrated by English movie star Kenneth Branagh, "Galapagos" provides the adventurous fun of a high-school field trip to one of the remotest spots on earth.
        Living on an island without human predators, leathery iguanas, lumbering land tortoises, comical Sally Lightfoot crabs and strutting boobies never demonstrate camera shyness.  David Clark, a two-time Emmy Award winner, directed the movie's on-land sequences. Al Giddings, an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer, directed the underseas sequences in which an acrylic-domed submersible descends 3,000 feet under water.
        Charles Darwin first visited the islands as a naturalist on the British naval vessel HMS Beagle in the 1830s. The film explains how he found flora and fauna there developed in unique ways as a result of the islands' isolation, 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador. Darwin's observations played a key role in his groundbreaking 1859 work, "On the Origin of Species," which advanced the then controversial theory of natural selection.
        Mixing informed narration and innovative camerawork, the film lets viewers share Darwin's sense of discovery of a microcosm of fabulous bio-diversity.  It follows ichthyologist Carole Baldwin as she tramps across lava flats, rappels into caves, examines tidal pools and -- in the film's most beautiful sequences -- explores the ocean in a submersible vehicle.  The undersea sequences are magical.  Wearing scuba gear, Baldwin swims through a shimmering undersea landscape of coral and anemones gliding through benign schools of fish.  As the musical score turns more ominous, she meets menacing hammerhead sharks and then really creepy moray eels.  During her deepwater dive to collect specimens, Baldwin encounters luminescent sea cucumbers, colorful crustaceans and prehistoric fish so fierce they'll never grace a sushi plate.  A zoologist who specializes in marine life, she serves as a contemporary stand-in for Darwin by evincing equal amounts of scientific curiosity and outright wonder.
        So will viewers.
        Putting on the retro-looking, polarized 3-D glasses, Louis Guarino gazed, transfixed at the prehistoric terrain of islands unknown to man until 1535.  He saw two worlds, the lush and lunar landscape of the Galapagos' 19 islands and 42 islets and the teeming turquoise depths of the Pacific Ocean.
        "Things were literally jumping off the screen. I felt I could touch the iguanas, birds and fish," enthused Guarino, a Winthrop resident who took time off from his engineering job on the Big Dig to see the movie. "It was really educational."
        Theater director Derek Threinen explained the movie was filmed in Galapagos with a unique two-lens camera. After processing, it's shown on a special two-reel projector that sends separate images onto the IMAX screen.
        When the film was made, the 250-pound IMAX camera was the only one of its kind in the world. The polarized glasses viewers wear allow the right and left eyes to see slightly different images which "trick" the brain into creating a single three-dimensional image that "pops off the screen."  As 3-D technology has improved, "Galapagos" has none of the transparent clunkiness of old 3-D movies like Vincent Price's "House of Wax."  The islands and their occupants would have made a gorgeous travelogue as a "regular" documentary. The three-dimensional scenes seem to wrap themselves around visitors, bringing them into the teeming jungles, spooky caves and ocean depths.
        "Galapagos" was filmed over the course of two 2-month expeditions in 1998 and 1999. It is the first co-production between the National Museum of Natural History and Imax Ltd. It was sponsored by America Online, the Smithsonian Institute and Imax.  While making the movie, Baldwin, of the Smithsonian Institute, and her colleagues identified more than a dozen new species of marine life including scorpionfish, catshark, wrass, anthiine bass, lizardfish, pencil urchin, sponge and gastropod mollusk.  Their discoveries reflect Branagh's description of Galapagos as "a world still in the process of creation."
        Exploring a tropical forest, Baldwin explains how the tiny finches developed 13 different kinds of beaks -- one for each island -- to cope with different survival tasks, such as killing insects or digging out seeds.  She explains how Darwin realized animals' varied adaptations reflected the forces of evolution at work. For example, since the once airborne cormorants had no predators, their wings changed over the centuries into "short stubby" appendages to let them swim after food.
        Rebekah Stendahl, the aquarium's supervisor of family programs who visited Galapagos seven years ago, said the film captures the islands' unspoiled beauty while imparting important environmental lessons. Recalling her visit as part of a college science course, Stendahl said the varied geography triggered the diversity of animal life. "It's so obvious that each island is so different. The animals' diversity stares you in the face. It had to be influenced by the environment," she said.  Stendahl said the movie delivers an important environmental message in an entertaining way. "It's important to study the animals on and around Galapagos because they tell us about the inter-connectedness of life on land and in the ocean," she said. "These days, we tend to be too far removed from nature, especially young kids who spend so much time inside. Galapagos is one of those places where nature is right in front you."
        Just beyond your nose, in fact. And that's what makes it worth seeing.
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October 4, 2004

        Informational meeting today was on international biopreserves.  The minutes can be found be clicking here.