This is a site that's a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide,
and it was constructed on a coral reef flat,
and it has a 100 really complex
stone structures made of basalt, something called columnar basalt.
The whole island, including the site, is just is covered
with some of the densest vegetation on Earth actually.
It's one of the wettest places on Earth.
There's a really great variety of vegetation.
There are vines there that grow a few feet every day.
We just couldn't believe the complexity
of what we were seeing, and nobody knew it was there
because the dynasty that built Nan
Madol collapsed 4 or 500 years ago, and without constant
maintenance of vegetative clearance,
the vegetation just covered everything.
We got a NASA grant
to utilize airborne lidar to scan the rest of the island,
which is probably 100 times larger than just Nan Madol
and the close environs that we did before.
And then we found that the whole island was covered
was the landscape that radically transformed.
And again, nobody, nobody knew.
This is not going to be feasible in many places on Earth.
So what about--what about satellite lidar?
The ICESat-2 data, you know, if you if you analyze the data properly,
it's really giving you this very precise elevations for water, for sea level.
We're looking into using
ICESat-2 for that shallow water bathymetry
because a lot of the, you know, the coastal environment on Pohnpei
is really interesting to us.
In areas where the vegetation isn't so bad,
I think there's a lot of promise,
especially for like monitoring archaeological--
like the the state of not just archeological sites, but other things.
Just like monitoring the kind of the structural integrity of stuff.
For example, we just like
tested out in the Sacred Valley of Peru, where is another place where we work.
You can see some of these terraces that, you know, people are still using.
I mean, it shows up beautifully
in these ICESat-2 transects because they don't have vegetation on them.
The application of this
ICESat-2 data to monitoring
sea level at some of these islands. People know that sea level rise
is going to endanger these islands.
And I'm thinking about the human impact.
I'm also thinking about the cultural impact of losing that culture diversity.
You have thousands of these islands that are occupied by these
very different groups, and each of them has developed a really interesting
and special culture, and if we lose that, what are we actually losing?
Think about that.
And I'm thinking about the human impact.
I'm also thinking about the cultural impact of losing
that culture diversity.
That's probably
not like any other place on Earth.
it can also get, as we found out when we were working
with the data in Peru, if there's not much vegetation, we can get
very nice elevations from land as well from, you know, terrestrial,
you know, from the land surface itself.
I mean, this would be, I think, worth a program.
I'm just suggesting this for, I said to just
maybe get some serious thought to deploy.
And I said to over a handful or select,
randomly selected or carefully selected, collection
of of islands in the Marshalls and,
it's because it was the opportunity
to communicate with other users
where we are struggling with these applications.
And of course, being part of a network of applied users increases the probability
that we're going to be able to answer some of the questions
that we'd like to answer with these data, because somebody else has done, done
already done it, or they've done something similar, or
by having conversations with them,
we can come up with a a new approach that we haven't thought of yet.
I think it's, you know, I mean, the idea that people come up with
scientific breakthroughs all on their own, you know, is genius often.
And that's, that's not the way science works.
It really it's a it's a community effort.
It's always a team effort.
And, you know, when you're talking with people,
you come up with these ideas that I don't think one
And it
could even give us something of the symmetry.
So that's going to be very, very important going forward
because we're going to take that data and we're going to take it to data
that are recorded by a buoy there.
And we're going to see, you know, how how the water
elevations vary at different sides of, of the island.
we think that this is a real strong possibility and that there's
a really big need for this because of, you know, rising sea levels.
We'd like to be able to track that, And he was the one I think he
that he's like quoted as I can remember I read this.
But anyway Adrian was the one who like,
you know, he's interviewed somewhere and he's like, oh, you know, we we
we found out that like sort of after the fact, after,
after the engine was already operational, all that you can get the there's
some penetration, there's some water penetration, there's ice at two photons.
So you can get like shallow water bathymetry.
There are all kinds of things that you can do.
I mean, for the world in
so the places where we're working with, with lidar
are actually really difficult places to work with lidar,
that's something that we didn't even I didn't really fully grasp, you know,
until really getting into it,
the, the vegetation on Pohnpei, as my father has mentioned, is really thick.
It's not you know,
there are a lot of places in the world where vegetation is thick.
You know, people deal with it in Central America
all the time, for instance, in the archeological world.
But I think it's increasingly clear that Pompei is like really, really hard.
The vegetation is really thinking that low vegetation too, which makes it okay.
again, our products and services, sometimes it's research,
sometimes it's purely research, sometimes it's finding archeological sites.
Sometimes it's tracking environmental changes
that are going to impact those archeological sites.
Sometimes it's interpreting the relationship between,
the archeological sites and how they were formed
and why they were formed and how there's this dialectic that happens.
Okay.
I mean, you take a snapshot of an archeological site.
That's that's, that