Antártida se parecia com os Alpes há 34 milhões de anos

Reinaldo José Lopes Do G1, em São Paulo

Equipe usou dados de radar para mapear relevo debaixo da 'neve eterna'.
Mudanças climáticas criaram continente gelado após 20 milhões de anos.

Quem entrasse numa máquina do tempo rumo a um verão qualquer na Antártida de 34 milhões de anos atrás daria de cara não com o continente gelado de hoje, mas com deslumbrantes paisagens alpinas, não muito diferentes das fotografias abaixo. Usando dados obtidos por radar, uma equipe internacional de pesquisadores conseguiu "enxergar" através de quilômetros de geleiras eternas e determinar que as montanhas Gamburtsev, no centro da Antártida, tinham vales, rios e geleiras semelhantes aos dos Alpes nessa época remota.

O relato das descobertas está na edição desta semana da revista científica "Nature". A equipe liderada por Martin Siegert, da Universidade de Edimburgo (Reino Unido), afirma que a antiga topografia alpina da Antártida ficou preservada debaixo das camadas de gelo.


Segundo os pesquisadores, levando em conta o relevo característico dessas estruturas, a temperatura média da região durante o verão era igual ou superior a 3 graus Celsius positivos. Parece pouco, mas é um calor bem maior do que as dezenas de graus negativos que dominam a área hoje.


Mudanças ligadas à circulação das correntes marítimas e ao posicionamento dos continentes acabaram levando ao gradual congelamento da Antártida continental, concluído por volta de 14 milhões de anos atrás.






Montanhas do País de Gales dão ideia de como era o ambiente antártico, como nesta foto (Foto: Martin Siegert/Divulgação)








Outro exemplo galês é o vale de Cwm Idwal (Foto: Martin Siegert/Divulgação)








Outra visão galesa do que pode ter sido a Antártida no passado remoto (Foto: Martin Siegert/Divulgação)



FONTE: http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Ciencia/0,,MUL1181423-5603,00-ANTARTIDA+SE+PARECIA+COM+OS+ALPES+HA+MILHOES+DE+ANOS+DIZ+ESTUDO.html
JUNHO 2009

ESANTAR - nossa base antes da antartica

Falei com o Juca, meu afilhado que mora e estuda em Rio Grande e ele me falou da base chamada ESANTAR, que auxilia e prepara a partida de quem vai pro gelo.

Dá pra visitar, ver as roupas e os navios sendo abastecidos, conversar com pessoas de lá nesse site tem umas fotos.

O site deles está fora do ar, mas o endereço é esse:
http://www.furg.br/furg/unidad/esantar/

A sugestão do Juca é focarmos nosso projeto num conceito que está bem em voga no meio científico e também para os militares. A AMAZÔNIA AZUL, que é como é definida nossa costa oceânica e a antartica.

As pesquisas científicas que protegem e estudam especialmente os FITOPLÂNCTONS, (que atuam como "pulmão da Terra",mais que as arvores amazônicas), tem pouca repercussão, por isso vale pensar em um projeto que pense na preservação do planeta mesmo. Como vimos no vídeo do ártico. Ah, e ele frisou a importância da marinha em todo e qualquer ida à Antartica, eles são mais de 2/3 da tripulação de qualquer navio ou avião que vai pra lá.

para ler - Bienal do Fim do Mundo

Bienal do Fim do Mundo

links que o guilherme passou...

algumas coisas que eu achei aqui:

antony gormley entrevista ian mc ewan


o saite do cape farewell

matéria sobre o mcewan na expedição [com fotos]

trechos entrevista

Trechos da Entrevista que está neste site.

Acho que essa parte inicial poderia ser um empurrão para o nosso projeto, quando eles falam da relaçãao com uma paisagem poderosa.



Entrevista entre Ian McEwan e Antony Gormley



IM: (...) Being in a powerful landscape does what we hope art does - it enlarges your immediate mental arena.

AG: I guess I am trying to make art that is part of that widening. It's a very cheeky thing to think you can make a bit of real coastline into an imaginative or dream place but the idea of Another Place is you're using a hundred memories of a particular body at particular times in its breathing cycle, all looking out to the horizon as a catalyst to thinking the very thoughts that you're intimating. The human perceptual world is limited by a horizon but there is always that human need to imagine what's beyond it. That's what this piece is about and why it's called Another Place. It's an open question where that place might be. The idea is to provide somebody walking the dog with an extension to their experience of the beach; they witness that they themselves are part of a field of witnessing.

IM: Another Place seems to suggest the power of collective dreaming. All these figures are facing out to sea. The work has great power because they're facing the same direction and thinking the same thing - well I think they're thinking the same thing. It's not just a solitary thought, it's a collective ambition.

AG: It's a congregation, a communion of attention, but the location of the work has to be inside people as well.

IM: A field of dreams.



-------------


IM: Time is very important in this. I'm talking about time in a landscape - geological time, evolutionary time, human time. Time does a curious thing to human sorrow - it weathers it, the way water might weather rock. So you might stand by a ruined croft in Scotland where a family was driven away, and all that remains is an echo of the tragedy. Your sculpture has something of this weathered quality.

AG: I believe it has something to do with the weather being the thing that everything suffers but is also the elemental condition that carries on, and in it there is another form of consolation. I think we learnt that from the tsunami after the Iraq war; human- based tragedy in the context of natural disaster, and the pain involved is perhaps more bearable. There is no one to blame. Which reminds me that I wanted to talk about anxiety. I'm aware that you've become more forgiving and articulate more positions, but when I first read your early work I recognised and responded to a difficult and "uncertain-about-everything" world. The feeling of the foreignness of territory inside other houses, the feeling of not knowing what's going on in somebody else's head. So perhaps there's also inspiration to be taken from discomfort and uncertainty?

IM: A young artist can be dark and reckless and indulge a savage pessimism. It's a thrill, like driving round corners too fast. You're wild and free because you're never going to die. Then, after an endless transition, you realise fully, sensually, right there in your body, that your days are numbered, that life is going to shrug you off. It's all going to go on without you. And you've come to love the human adventure. It's enraging, tragic, joyous and unbelievably diverse. You want it to go on, to succeed against the odds. A sense of obligation develops towards the joy as well as the terror. What I was trying to do in Saturday was describe private happiness against a background of gathering fear.

AG: Joy is very, very difficult. You can paint things pink but they often as not end up looking tragic.

IM: There is a line of Peter Medawar, the biologist, which I had my character in Saturday invoke - to abandon all hope of progress is a meanness of spirit. One has to be wary of the delicious, seductive joys of pessimism. In art it can turn into an empty mannerism. And in the universities, in the humanities, all intellectuals are required to be card-carrying pessimists. You have to go to the sciences today to find any real sense of wonder, any real joy in the intellectual life.

AG: I think the story is far from over on what precisely the part is that we might play in the unfolding story of the evolution of matter. It is completely an open question. I go to science in the most crude and amateur way as a huge resource and everything to do with post-particle physics for me is extraordinarily rich, both in its language and the cosmological idea of an event horizon. We are being forced to try to imagine something beyond language. Physics, and particularly string theory when expressed in mathematical terms, takes us somewhere unimaginable in the terms of our physical universe and that fascinates me.

IM: I'm writing the introduction to a book in which 140 thinkers, most of them scientists, answer the question "What do you believe that you cannot prove?" What comes across is the excitement among these scientists - whether string theory is going to accommodate quantum mechanics, or what the interface is going to be between the machine and the brain, or whether we will find life, or intelligent life, beyond the earth, or how computer software is going to change this and that.

AG: Isn't there much more crossover than before, so artificial intelligence now is informing neuroscience and neuroscience is informing evolutionary psychology and psychology is informing the development of biochemical therapies?

IM: Exactly so. They appear to be working towards the formation of a common language. The biologists need the mathematicians, as do the neuroscientists, and the physicists and biologists have a strong emerging interface. To understand each other they have to speak in common English, which is what makes it accessible and interesting for the layman. The old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge is beginning, only just beginning, to emerge. Had you asked cultural theorists and literary critics the same question you would get a much darker view, and no solutions. When it comes to the intellectual landscape, I'd rather cross it with scientists like these, and with artists like yourself.

(c) Ian McEwan 2005

(c) Antony Gormley 2005

Ian McEwan's latest novel is 'Saturday',

está dada a largada...

Então é isso, o Projeto Polar (ou Antártica? ou Brama?) está começado.
Temos um longo caminho pela frente e o blog veio ao mundo para ajudar na organização do projeto.
A ideia é alimentarmos o blog com as dicas, referências, coisas relacionadas à Antártica (ou Antártida, li que os dois são corretos).
Mãos à obra!

marina