Happy New Year from Palmer Station!

Palmer Station.

For most people on Station, the day was subdued and relaxed. Folks gathered in the galley and lounged about--napping, doing crossword puzzles and snacking on left overs. The weather was glorious and every bit as pleasant as it was on Christmas Day.

For Steve and me, we had a very busy day preparing for our one-hour live soundscape broadcast to Köln, Germany. As with the day before yesterday, Steve and Howie Tobin made the trip to Torgersen Island to set up the wireless, remote microphone in the Adelie colony, while I did the sound check from Station. All the other transducers in the array were patched into the studio room in the Bio Lab. Klaus Schöning, the Director of the Studio Akustische Kunst at Westdeutscher Rundfunk, his colleagues and the sound technicians checked in with us several times over the course of the day--to make sure that things were on track and that the satellite connections were stable. At ten minutes to seven o'clock (Palmer time), we got on the air and started to broadcast live from Antarctica at the top of the hour. It was 11:00pm in Germany, and this was a nice way to end the first day of the new Millennium. The transmission came off without a hitch and we signed off right at midnight!

I am particularly grateful to the following, for their support and for contributing the technology and expertise to make this and the other broadcast endeavours possible...


The National Science Foundation

International Transducer Corporation

Telos Systems


Commercial Satellite Systems

BBI Engineering

Special thanks to the following for their technical assistance... Chip Dunn, Kevin Caccamise, Andy Sutton, Rolf Taylor, Steve Navarro, Keith Tuley, Howard Tobin, Tim Young and especially my colleague, Steve Dunbar.

The soundscape is a landscape heard: a resonance of place that echoes down through the ages. Listening is a way of being mindful, of being present, in time and in the lives we live. Here, at one of the planet's last frontiers, in the twilight of the Millennium, the rumble of glacial ice is the same now as it was half a million years ago, the sea lapping against the shore sounds much like it has since the waters first formed. The soundscape itself is a persistence of memory...


New Year's Day TeraScan satellite image of the Antarctic Peninsula and the tip of South America. Palmer Station is indicated by the red dot. (Photo processing by the Palmer Station Science Technician).

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