Stop in Qeqertarsuaq (Big Island) on Disko island for walks to warm springs (1 to 6 degrees? - warm a relative concept), and a chance to walk in the town and surrounding hills and black basalt beaches.

There are a couple of Greenlanders with us as guides throughout the trip, Karin and Ludovik. Both are Greenlanders who have a Danish education. Karin works in tourism, but also has a geology background.

House and iceberg
[image by Nathan Gallagher
© copyright Nathan Gallagher]

A good contingent head for church (L's grandfather is the Pastor). The big draw is that the Lutheran service is in Greenlandic - a rare  chance to engage directly with Greenlanders on the trip, though the turnout per head of population turns out to be not much over the average English midlands C of E crowd. But engage we do with a perhaps misplaced have-a-go attitude to singing along with the hymns.

Karin suggests that the second-wave German missionaries who converted much of Greenland won the communities over with the quality of the storytelling in the bible, and the chance to gather to sing. They had a canny sense of what mattered locally in other ways too. In a modest amendment to the Lord's prayer the Greenlanders were taught to pray that the Lord might 'give us our daily meat' and the Lamb of God became the Seal of God.

Karin talks of the rapid rise in climate tourism - i.e. 'see the ice while you still can'. Big improvements in transport infrastructure mean they can meet growing demand (12,000 cruise ship passengers in the area in 2007, 17,000 in 2008). A steady flow of news film crews
come to illustrate the complex and abstract ideas about climate change as a story of e.g. glacial retreat or disappearing sea ice as 'the canary in the coalmine of climate change'. All this further helps to stoke interest around the world.

Most locals are, Karin suggests, delighted to have visitors come to experience the place they love. On such an enormous land mass a  population of just over 50,000 tend to offer a very warm welcome.

But climate change is also raising new questions for Greenland: warmer temperatures are making it easier to search for and exploit mineral resources. This is one of the issues in play in a forthcoming referendum considering independence from Denmark.

A question for my OU colleague Matthew Kurtz: 'climate tourism' is a phrase I think we've used in talking about how the Arctic is represented in the media. Is it one that's being used in Inuit communities in northern Canada or in Yupik Alaska? I can't avoid reading the phrase negatively - a very slow motion version of the rubber-necking you get passing a roadside crash. Of course the phrase rings bells with this expedition of urbanites from way South. We are well aware that we're just the latest in a long line of journalists and green-vote seeking politicians. What do you make of it? [read Matthew's answer]

Finally a competition that any readers of the Cape Farewell blogs can participate in: the naming of the Argo buoy that's being launched from the ship. Last year's winning entry was 'Arty Bob' (work it out).

Winning entries will have the name written on the buoy and I guess it'll be launched by someone suitably starry in a few days time. Post a comment to the Cape Farewell blog for Kathy Barber who designs and runs the excellent Cape Farewell website.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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OK so it is not quite Jason and the Argonauts - but it is close enough. I'll come to the reason for that title below but first a couple of words about who I am. My name is Mark Brandon and as Joe said I am a polar scientist working in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department of the Open University. Joe and I have worked together for a few years on cross disciplinary climate change projects such as the BBC TV season  Are We Changing Planet Earth, and also teaching together  on many courses such as the new U116 Environment: Journeys through a changing world. In all that time I have been going to the polar regions to study the ocean and climate change, and last year I wrote a blog on this site about one expedition. I am delighted that he has finally gone on a trip with some science to see what actually goes on!

One of the bits of kit being deployed from his ship is called an Argo Buoy and I can't bring myself to talk about the science without enthusing a little about what fantastic things they are.

Argo buoy.

They are only a small cylinder about 1 m long packed with electronic goodies and sensors to record the ocean, on the top is a little aerial. What you do is deploy (the fancy word for "chuck") the tube over the side of your ship, and then it is off. There was a great description written a few years ago on the BBC News website when the project was started.

They control their buoyancy and sink down and drift with the mean current for several days, before coming to the surface to send their position and the temperature and salinity of the water they have drifted in back to us over a satellite link. In total there are over 3100 of these buoys drifting in the worlds oceans and as they drift and report their positions there are some stunning images of the circulation of the global ocean. Today you can even track them in a google earth layer (you need the free Google Earth for this link to work).

Joe asked me what evidence have they provided about climate change? The answer is at trivial level not much yet. The record is still too short to talk about longer term climate change. But where they are making a huge breakthrough is in our understanding of the way that the ocean re-distributes heat around the planet. The fact that there are so few of these buoys in the Arctic means that the buoy the Cape Farewell Expedition are deploying could be very important. Increasing understanding of the oceans will improve climate models and enable predictions of our future world with much more confidence.

Joe's second question was how did this project come about given the cost? This is a great question. The answer is all about predicting the weather and climate. As more and more people live near the coasts weather prediction is vital. This means vast global resources are deployed to understand, track and forecast rapidly moving weather systems over short time scales, and to predict our climate over longer time periods. The scale of the climate system is so big that one nation couldn't possibly fund an entire observation system alone and so the Global Ocean Observing System (or GOOS) was born. GOOS is actually a key component of many other global projects working on the climate such as the Climate Variability and Predictability Experiment (CLIVAR). So far over 20 nations have provided Argo Buoys and the measurements being made in the North Atlantic right now are being used by UK Met Office to improve seasonal predictions of the UK climate. So the bottom line is whilst it may sound expensive - given the importance of the problem it really is cheap.

* Scientists can get a bad press about being dull, but the Argo buoy program is named after the mythical ship Argo which Jason and his argonauts used to find the Golden Fleece. Although the story was immortalized (for my childhood anyway!) by the fantastic animation of Ray Harryhausen in the 1963 film, some have suggested it was the first time an ancient Greek warship sailed on a high sea voyage. The data from the Argo buoys is also complementary to that provided by satellites and so the name links to the JASIN 1 space mission.

About the author

Dr Mark Brandon is a senior lecturer in the Earth Sciences Department at The Open University. In Spring 07 he blogged for us under the guise of Our Man in the Antarctic. Mark spent many years working for the Scott Polar Research Institute and the British Antarctic Survey before joining The Open University.

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In a morning briefing the science teams sketch out their own ambitions for the trip and plot the place of their own work within global climate science. It’s fair to call understanding climate change the most ambitious and important  intellectual project of the last 50 years. For the artists and musicians, but also for those of us that work on the political, social or design side of the climate story, this direct experience of science practice is one of the big payoffs on the trip. Carol, Simon, Dave and Emily are working long, long days to prepare their kit and get the experiments under way. For us onlookers there’s the satisfaction of getting to the base of the pyramid of evidence that underpins this enormous topic.

After a big dose of climate science there were plenty of people who wanted to have a conversation about whether climate change is a problem we can fix. A good chunk of the afternoon taken up with a presentation that architect Sunand and architectural engineer Francesca and myself put together hurriedly over lunch. About six hours of material to shoe horn into the hour set aside. We plot the main contours of current climate politics at an international level (with little effort to disguise our own sympathy for the contraction and convergence approach). We argue that the next ten years is going to be an exhilarating time to be working to change things for the better. Plenty of responsibility, plenty of opportunity.

With an audience stacked with artists we press the case that addressing climate change requires a cultural shift in perspective in parallel with good science or apt policy. The last third of the talk gives dozens of examples of green thinking being successfully deployed in architecture. The headline: CO2 emissions growth ‘IS a problem we can fix’… We know we haven’t talked enough about adaptation or the dread possibilities of being tipped rapidly into a different climatic state but there’s more than a week of talking ahead. If we get a chance to tidy up the slides we’ll post the presentation on the Cape Farewell website in due course.

Plenty of solo activity in the gaps – you’ll hear musicians noodling away in their cabins or trip over artists messily at work on deck. Plenty of film editing and tapping at keyboards too.

Vanessa Carlton gets creative.
[image by Nathan Gallagher
© copyright Nathan Gallagher]

For readers of the open2.net blog who may be OU students, you may know that we’re beavering away making a new short course (U116 Environment: Journeys through a changing world). I’ve a couple of questions for my co-authors. Today a question for polar scientist Mark Brandon. The science team are launching an Argo buoy in the next few days.

1. Can you post a few lines on what kind of evidence these 3000 or so data-gathering devices are offering about climate change?
2. How did the international collaborative framework come about that means that 3000 or so of these expensive pieces of kit (£25k each or so?) are bobbing around the oceans?

[Read Mark's response]

Impressive example of cooperation.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Musk ox burgers are one of the faster moving offers in the Kangerlussuaq airport café. A butchered deer and freshly shot Arctic hare were piled in the back of a pick up on the quay. The closest we’ve got to fauna and a good reminder of the fact that the Arctic wildlife, that to date I’ve known only as the subject of natural history films and photos, is a (fresh, tasty, free) resource for Greenlanders. Hunting for it is a job for some and a favoured pastime for most.

Cape Farewell board the Grigory Mikheev in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

A night and day at sea – ploughing north up the west coast of Greenland having left the shelter of several hours cruising down the startlingly beautiful Kangerlussuaq fjord. You’d have thought banalities about ‘the quality of the light’ wouldn’t go down too well on a boatload of overachieving artists and film people but it turns out everyone seems to have the same gawping reaction, and draw down on the same clichés. Even a sleepless night-long fairground ride on rough seas doesn’t seem to blunt our collective awe at being in this place.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Later today I’ll travel with a group of musicians and other artists and a team of scientists to the west coast of Greenland. The Cape Farewell project has been taking creative people to the Arctic since 2004, and this trip has a particular emphasis on musicians (the crew list reads like a CD collection). The charge of ‘climate tourism’ is never far away, but at the launch event at the Science Museum KT Tunstall did a tidy job of explaining why she felt it was important to get to grips with the science, to see some of the evidence first hand, and to see what being holed up for ten days with 40 creative people would do to inspire her own work.

KT Tunstall and David Buckland at launch
[image courtesy of Cape Farewell]

Some people have seen this project as a simple channelling of science information to the public via the arts. That misses the point. ‘Art as communication’ generally produces bad art and poor communications. No, this rare exchange between science and the arts comes at a time when humanity is trying to radically revise its sense of its place in the world. The work produced by the dozens of creative people in the wake of these trips must represent the richest body of cultural work responding to climate change that exists.

It’s a huge task, and one that is going to need everything that human creativity can throw at it.

This cultural work around climate change is essential if we are to make sense of the issue and be equipped to cope with it. ‘Coping’ means both reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (mitigation) and learning to adapt to the environmental changes that past emissions have already locked us all into. It means bringing the future and the non-human natural world into our politics and ethics. It’s a huge task, and one that is going to need everything that human creativity can throw at it.

That’s enough about the biggest challenge facing humanity – what about ME? My own mission on the trip is to make a bundle of multimedia resources for a new Open University environment course (launching in 2009). We’re just finishing a textbook about different ways of knowing about environmental change that is set in the Arctic. The co-authors are earth scientist Mark Brandon and cultural geographer Matthew Kurtz. Thankfully they know 100 times more about the Arctic than me. They’ve promised to answer questions and throw in their own comments on the Science, Technology and Nature blog over the next two weeks.

There are plenty of things to be anxious about: seasickness, cold and wet; will the video and recording kit perform? Will someone make me sing in front of strangers for the first time in three decades? And of course there is the news headline from yesterday running: Green idealists most likely to take long haul flights says study. We’ll all have to work our (several pairs of) socks off to make the substantial fossil fuel burn worth it.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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OU Lecturer and author Joe Smith, a regular on our Society blog, is off to the Arctic on the Cape Farewell Disko Bay expedition. He’ll be joining a surprising team of musicians, artists, film-makers, scientists and comedians (including KT Tunstall, Jude Kelly and Marcus Brigstocke). They’ll be witnessing climate change first-hand, and using their creative talents to respond.

Joe will be blogging the voyage for us, telling us about life in the changing Arctic. Learn more about the voyage, and read blogs from the rest of the team, at the Cape Farewell website, and watch this space for Joe’s reports.

Last week Sony UK released the somewhat awkwardly named PRS-505 electronic book reader; a handheld device about the size of a paperback novel that can store and display thousands of documents (so-called eBooks). Some of you may have previously read eBooks on your personal digital assistant (PDA), mobile phone or laptop and will be wondering what all the fuss is about.

The key difference with the Sony Reader lies with its 6” screen. Until recently, portable devices relied on energy-gobbling liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Most PDAs, mobile phones, portable games consoles and the like use LCD technology which is capable of producing detailed, richly-coloured images at extremely high resolution. However, LCDs require a constant trickle of electricity, both to maintain the displayed image, but also to and drive a light that makes them visible. The efficiency of LCDs has gradually improved, and the replacement of fluorescent backlights with white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have made them much more frugal; but the useful battery life of any device using an LCD is measured in hours rather than days or weeks.

The Sony Reader and its kindred us an alternative technology known as an electrophoretic display, better known as electronic paper. These displays differ from LCDs in that they do not need a constant supply of electricity; rather, they only consume power when they change. Turn off the power, and, in theory, electronic paper will retain an image for decades. Electronic paper has been a long time coming. The first practical electronic paper, called Gyricon, was developed by the Xerox Corporation in the 1990s. The Reader uses a related technology called E Ink created by the E Ink Corporation, a subsidiary of the Dutch electronics giant Philips.  E Ink displays can be thought of as a sandwich. The front of the display is a transparent sheet facing the user. It is divided into hundreds of thousands of pixels, each of which can hold an electrical charge. The back of the display is designed in a very similar way although it does not need to be transparent. The sandwich is filled with hundreds of thousands of hollow plastic capsules each about half the diameter of a human hair. The capsules are filled with a dark oily chemical and thousands of microscopic particles of titanium dioxide; a chemical so blindingly white that it is used to brighten everything from paint to toothpaste.

Crucially, titanium dioxide is attracted to a negative electrical charge. If a pixel on the front of the display is given a negative charge, the titanium dioxide in the capsules behind that pixel move towards the front of the display turning it white. If the same front pixel is given a positive charge, the titanium dioxide flees to the rear of the display revealing the dark oil and turning the pixel black. Electronic paper does not need a backlight; it relies solely on the light falling on the display; unlike an LCD that becomes increasingly hard to read in brighter conditions, electronic paper performs best in bright sunlight. (Of course, without a backlight, it is impossible to read electronic paper in darkness)

The most obvious drawback to electronic paper is that it is currently restricted to displaying black and white images (or to be strictly accurate very dark grey and very light grey images). Colour electronic paper is theoretically possible, but no practical demonstrations have yet been made. The second drawback, and the most serious, is that electronic paper is a relatively sluggish technology. It takes between half and one second to completely redraw a screen created on electronic paper – in comparison the latest LCDs can refresh an image in a few hundreds of a second. Electronic paper is not suited to displaying animated images such as movies and games, so it is unlikely to find a home on your computer or screen any time soon.

However, a screen holding an eBooks doesn’t need constant refreshing, it only needs to be changed when the reader goes to the next page. Rather than measure battery life in hours, E Ink displays measure their charge in page turns. A device the size of the Sony Reader can hold enough power to turn over 9000 pages! Which means a fully charged reader might not need recharging for weeks. If you’re like me, and liable to carry kilos of books on a trip, the prospect of replacing all that weight with one small device that doesn’t need power adaptors and cables must be very attractive. As well as Sony, E Ink has been adopted by a number of other manufacturers for devices such as the CyBook Reader and the iRex iLiad. In the UK, it is likely the Sony Reader will come to dominate the market. It is made by a well-known brand with enormous financial muscle and a tie-in to the Waterstones bookshop chain.

However, it would be unwise for Sony to be complacent as there is a superior product available in the United States. The Amazon Kindle uses the same E Ink technology as the Sony Reader, but its designers have chosen to design a stand-alone device rather than one that plugs into a PC. To accomplish this, the Kindle has a built-in wireless connection that allows the reader to connect to the Amazon online store and obtain books in a few seconds. Kindle users can buy books wherever they are without needing to spend time trying to find a computer with a network connection, web browser and necessary software.

The Kindle’s WhisperNet wireless technology is known as EVDO and runs on the older American CDMA mobile phone network that has never found favour in the UK and Europe. For this reason, the current Kindle cannot be used to buy eBooks outside the United States. However, there is no reason why a future Kindle could not support one of the more common 2G or 3G telephone networks that can be found on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even more advanced than the Kindle is a prototype device from a Cambridge start-up called Plastic Logic. Their eBook reader uses the same E Ink technology as other readers, but has sandwiched the display between two sheets of electronically conductive plastic. The change in material means that Plastic Logic’s displays are cheaper and larger than rival displays using fragile glass. Even more remarkably, there is no reason why the Plastic Logic display could not be made flexible, raising the possibility of screens that can be rolled up into cylinders or wrapped into watch bands, jewellery or clothes. Plastic Logic is promising to release their first consumer product in early 2009 and you can see a video of the extraordinarily thin device on the company’s home page.

So is the paper book doomed? Not entirely, and there are two reasons not to expect bookshops to die just yet.

The first reason is that eBooks are currently available in a multitude of formats, some of which are proprietary and restricted to certain devices. Amongst others there are the familiar TXT (plain text), RTF (a document interchange format used by many word-processors), DOC (Microsoft Word’s native format), HTML (the format used by the World Wide Web and understood by all browsers) and PDF (the Adobe Acrobat format). Less common formats are MOBI (Amazon’s MobiPocket format), LIT (for Microsoft’s Reader program), eReader (designed for Palm’s Digital Media electronic books), AZW (for the Amazon Kindle) and BBeB (Sony’s proprietary format). It is all too common to find an eBook, but to then discover you can’t read that format - a situation that has been called The Tower of eBabel! Fortunately, this situation is improving; a number of publishers and technology companies have collaborated to create the Open eBook platform; a document format that anyone is free to use. In theory any device or program that can understand Open eBook documents will be able to read any document published in that format. The format, known to users as ePub, OeBPS or IDPF is gradually gaining acceptance and may well soon come to dominate the market for eBooks.

The more serious problem lies with a topic I’ve mentioned previously – Digital Rights Management (DRM). Since eBooks are comprised of digital data, they could be copied a thousands of times in a fraction of a second and these copies distributed over the Internet for free. To protect against this, many commercial eBooks are protected by DRM that ties each book to a strictly limited number of devices. In some cases, the DRM ties are even more severe – you may be limited to the number of times you can download a book, you may be prevented from printing the book, it might even have a limited lifetime.

Compare this approach to a traditional book with which you can do almost anything; write marginal notes, tear out pages, add PostIt notes, lend it to a friend, sell it on… Current DRMed eBooks allow almost none of these – if you love a book and want someone else to enjoy it, you have to persuade them to buy their own copy. Worse still, if you upgrade your computer or have it stolen, then there’s a chance the DRM won’t allow you to read titles on your new computer. Some of the DRM schemes don’t even allow you to make backups of the titles you’ve purchased.

There’s no doubt that authors and publishers need to protect their incomes, but the current implementations of DRM do not respect paying customers. It should be mandatory that I can always download another copy of a book from a retailer; likewise I must be able to back up valuable eBooks in case of disaster. But why not go further - going back to the original paper book, if I lend a book to a friend and they like it, they may go on to buy their own copy. Even if they don’t, no sale has been lost. Why can’t I do the same with an eBook? Let me send a number of time-limited copies to friends. If they like it and buy the book, give me a discount on my next purchase; if they don’t, the book vanishes and no one is hurt.

If you want to start reading eBooks, you don’t need to buy a dedicated reader; your PC, laptop, PDA or mobile phone is almost certainly capable of running one or more eBook reader programs. You don’t even need to spend money on eBooks to get your hands on legitimate copies. A number of sites such as Project Gutenberg and feedbooks.com have huge collections of free titles made up from out-of-copyright books and those books where the author has chosen to make freely available.

So, have Sony killed the book? Not yet - eBooks and eBook readers are too expensive, too fragile and too restrictive to threaten the paperback; the technology behind them does show us what a future computer might look like - one that runs for weeks without charge, one that can be slipped into a pocket - perhaps even be part of your clothes, and one that is never out of touch with the rest of the world.

Mind you, that last point - never being out of touch with the rest of the world, makes me think of one of my favourite short stories - E.M. Forster's 1909 story 'The Machine Stops' - and coincidentally that's a free eBook!

About the author

Mike Richards joined the Open University in 1996 to help trial teaching over the Internet. Since then he has taught courses ranging from an introduction to robots to the engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci; but has spent most of his time writing about security - everything from the Enigma machines to e-shopping. He is currently working on a new course exploring the world of ubiquitous computers; imagine a world where computers so small and cheap they can be put in everyday objects - smartphones today, smartclothes tomorrow.

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Well, the physicists are getting excited, and the BBC are hyping it up , and has declared 10th September as 'Big Bang Day'  because that's when the first attempt will be made to circulate a beam of high energy protons in CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the French/Swiss border near Geneva. This is actually just another stage in a long commissioning process, and the first high energy collisions are not due to be attempted until October, but hey! 10 September is as good a day as any to celebrate a fantastic, and long awaited, new scientific tool.

I'm not a particle physicist, and for many years it has seemed to me that chasing after the ever more complex and abstruse families of fundamental particles was likely to be a never-ending struggle (perhaps I ought to refresh myself by studying the OU's modestly titled How the Universe Works that deals with fundamental particles and cosmology). However, if the LHC is able to create the so-called Higgs boson (the particle that imparts mass to matter) then that will be a tremendous step forward. On the other hand, if it does not find it, then decades of physics will need to be re-thought, and that will be a good thing too. Only by finding out the truth can science advance.

Don't hold your breath. I'd be suprised if any results are available soon. In the meantime, enjoy the BBC's Big Bang Day (the link leads you to where various rather surprising people comment (very well) on why they think this is important), and also the Hadron Rap!

About the author

Dave Rothery is a volcanologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. His current research includes studying volcanic eruptions on the Earth and characterising planetary surfaces, especially Mercury.

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