![]() Credit: Brian Zgliczynski 100 Island Challenge Nicole Pederson pilots the mosaic camera system taking images of the coral reef ecosystem off the coast of Rarotonga. “Coral reefs at risk of dissolving as oceans get more acidic,” announced Reuters in February. ![]() “Coral Reefs at ‘Make or Break Point’, UN Environment Head Says,” blared another January story in The Guardian. “Coral reefs are bleaching four times as frequently as they did in the 1980s, scientists say,” read a Washington Postheadline in January. Over a dinner of wahoo fillets and Cooks Lager, the local brew, following the first day of diving in Rarotonga, the scientists say they could already see that the island’s reefs, alive with new growth of diverse coral species and crowded with fish scraping away excess algae, are not like those that have dominated the news lately. “You guys are idiots,” Zgliczynski says she told them. The 100 Island Challenge is so wildly ambitious that even one of its co-leaders, Scripps coral reef ecologist Jennifer Smith, thought it would be absurd to try when Sandin, the project’s lead investigator, and Zgliczynski, a postdoctoral researcher, pitched it to her several years ago. The more than 4,000 dives the team will make over five years are the data-collection component of an unprecedented attempt to characterize five examples of every type of reef on the planet-twice-to see how each is responding to climate change, ocean acidification, pollution, overfishing, and the other insults humans have been throwing at many of them with increasing frequency and intensity over the last few decades. The images she’s gathering-4 billion pixels comprising 70 to 80 gigabytes of data, just from today-will ultimately help the team build a three-dimensional model of the 100-square-meter (1,076-square-foot) plot of reef Pedersen is swimming over in a lawn mower pattern.Īs she gently flaps her black-and-yellow fins, maintaining as constant a speed as is possible underwater where waves and currents can toss her off course, marine ecologists Stuart Sandin and Brian Zgliczynski swim alongside her, counting every fish in the plot and marking on a waterproof data sheet each one’s species and approximate size. Pedersen, 25, is a staff researcher at Scripps, part of the University of California, San Diego, and the image digitization coordinator for a natural experiment called the 100 Island Challenge, launched in the summer of 2016. ![]() ![]() It’s the last of 12 dives she and colleagues from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have made over three days of their research expedition here. Within it, twin DSLR cameras automatically photograph a reef a quarter-mile off the coast of Rarotonga. If she'd had Growing Up Skipper (long off the market by the time she was old enough to appreciate it), or perhaps if her teachers did, the whole incident could have been avoided.RAROTONGA, COOK ISLANDS-Twenty-one degrees, 12 minutes south of the equator, 2,771 miles south-southeast of the southern tip of the island of Hawaii, 30 feet below 4-foot swells, Nicole Pedersen swims slowly, wearing a wetsuit, headband, and full scuba gear and carrying a custom-built plexiglass-and-PVC case the size of a tackle box. The faculty were projecting their own perceptions onto her nubile young body, the sick freaks. Now, the outfit was more modest than what at least some of her schoolmates were wearing that very day. Her attire, her teachers felt, was a little too mature for a junior high school student. Someone I know has told me the story of being called into the principal's office to be queried about her home life. I suppose (again, never having been a prepubescent girl) geeklizzard isn't wrong to say that menstruation is more disruptive, if nothing else, than bigger tits, but the visible bodily changes can be traumatic too. ![]() A friend, a year younger than I, says she had one of these growing up.įor actual women, I imagine, it was a way to experience the phenomenon at a remove, as it were. Maybe it's because I'm a man that I found this disturbing when I first learned of it-after all, I never had to deal with my own breasts growing, and the ensuing change in how I was regarded by my peers (actually, my breasts did grow, but I digress). ![]()
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