Earth is changing faster than anyone can comprehend. Every day, more forests burn, more glaciers melt
and more evidence of the world's ancient cultures slips away. Change of
some kind is, of course, inevitable — but it is happening more quickly
and more severely because of the effects of human-caused climate change.
And that has some scientists worried: The quicker Earth changes, the
less time there is to learn from its past and understand its mysteries.
Recently, two researchers proposed a way to preserve a record of our
planet in its present state: use lasers to create a high-resolution, 3D
map of the entire world. It's now the mission of a new nonprofit project
called The Earth Archive, which is spearheaded by archaeologist Chris Fisher and geographer Steve Leisz, both of Colorado State University.
"The climate crisis threatens to destroy our cultural and ecological
patrimony within decades," Fisher said earlier this year in a TEDx talk. "How can we document everything before it's too late?"
The answer, Fisher said, is light detection and ranging, or lidar — a
method of remote scanning that uses aircraft to shower a landscape with
a dense net of laser beams. From this bombardment of light, researchers
can create high-resolution, 3D maps of a given area and then digitally
edit out foliage and other features that might be concealing
hard-to-spot secrets near Earth's surface.
The technique has
become more prominent in archaeological surveys in the past decade,
helping researchers uncover lost cities in heavily forested parts of Africa and South America, buried roads in ancient Rome and previously undiscovered cityscapes in Cambodia.
In 2007, Fisher was part of a team that used lidar to uncover traces of
a lost metropolis in the Honduran rainforest. These scans, Fisher said
in his TEDx talk, revealed more details about the city's ruins in 10
minutes than he and his colleagues could have found in 10 years of
research on the ground.
The experience convinced Fisher that
scientists need to "scan, scan, scan" to capture the world's most
vulnerable places before they disappear. The Earth Archive's efforts
would focus on scanning the planet's entire land area, which encompasses
about 29% of the planet's surface, beginning with the most threatened
regions, such as the Amazon rainforest and coastal regions at risk of
being washed away by rising sea levels. The project would likely take
decades, Fisher said, but the resulting snapshot of Earth would be "the
ultimate gift to future generations."
Doing this, of course, will
require lots of funding; the project needs about $10 million just to
scan most of the Amazon within the next three years, Fisher told The Guardian.
That price tag has some other researchers worried about The Earth
Archive's tenability. Mat Disney, a professor in the University College
London Department of Geography, told The Guardian that such a project
would inevitably draw funding away from other research projects. Even
with proper funding, he added, getting permission to fly a research
aircraft over restricted airspaces would prove to be a logistical
hurdle.
"Who is going to give them permission to fly over Brazil?
The Brazilian government aren't," Disney said, referring to Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro's ongoing efforts to undermine science and open parts of the protected rainforest to commercial interests.
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