Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Adrienne Block: The Enormity of Things
Season 2010 Episode 17 | 2m 22s | Video has closed captioning.
Adrienne Block: The Enormity of Things
Aired: 02/18/10
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Season 2010 Episode 17 | 2m 22s | Video has closed captioning.
Adrienne Block: The Enormity of Things
Aired: 02/18/10
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
(logo whooshing) (upbeat music) - When I was younger, I was always into thinking about very large scale things like outer space, and I think that was because it made me feel really small.
If the universe is so big and I'm only this big, then my mistake is really, really tiny.
I was attracted to going to Antarctica because ice sheets are big.
That same wonderment of how big things are.
But when I got there, it was amazing to me that it's so big you can't even tell it's big.
Here in New York City, you know something's 20 blocks and it takes you about a minute to walk a block, so you know how far that is and how long it's gonna take you to get there, but in Antarctica, there's nothing.
There's just this flat ice going on for miles and miles.
So you can see something, but you don't know if it's 10 miles away or 20 miles away.
You have no idea.
For me.
I was like, "This is why early explorers thought the Earth was flat."
Because even though I've seen all the satellite photos and I've flown around the planet, you could convince me in that moment that maybe it was flat, just because the perspective was so extreme.
Antarctica has so many great unknowns, so many questions that no one has any idea about.
On my last trip to Antarctica, we were studying a mountain range that's completely underneath the ice sheet.
We've known that there are these mountains but we didn't know how big they were or how tall they were.
We put all of our equipment on an airplane and we send out our signals from that airplane, so we fly over the ice, sending out this information and listening as it comes back We can look right through it, we can see all the layers and we can see the rock at the bottom.
I just love getting the data back.
It makes me just excited every day, when the plane lands and you unload the data, you bring the hard drives back and get that first look at data that someone's never seen.
So our research group went and studied this mountain range in the most detail it's ever been studied and revealed what we've been calling the world's last unexplored mountain range.
I still appreciate the enormity of things.
I just never got over that "oh, wow" kind of moment.
(upbeat music)