By Carolyn Belardo
The long underwear is packed and the field sites mapped down to the very rocks where he’ll spend the holiday in freezing weather at the end of the earth.
Not the end where Santa lives, but the opposite pole—Antarctica.
Ted Daeschler, the Academy’s intrepid paleontologist and vice president for collections, leaves tomorrow on an expedition to explore Antarctic rocks dating to the Devonian Period, a time that ended some 120 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared. You might call it an expedition of a lifetime, except that he plans to go back again in two years!
The handful of colleagues are the only living things he will see once he reaches the field site; only bacteria and maybe some lichens exist where he is headed. Our recent blog post, “Journey to World’s Bottom,” outlines this scientific adventure.
We thought it would be fun to have Ted describe the odyssey in his own words. We hope you enjoy this Facebook Live video. And we can’t wait for Ted to return to his warm lab on the fourth floor of the museum in mid-January and to fill us in on how he spent his winter holiday.
Watch Ted discuss his upcoming trip with Academy Social Media Manager Mike Servedio:
One comment