Moving lakes: Angua in the news

[sgt_Angua]

So I mentioned a while back that I got a scientific article published and presented the findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December. Well, here's a boiled down second hand version of it all since I'm nearly certain that I can't link you all to the original article and even I barely understood a lot of it.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...tic-lakes.html

(Don't worry, this is a very short article.)

Douglas MacAyeal at the University of Chicago gave undergraduate interns the "boring" job of digitising a series of satellite photographs of Antarctic lakes. One student, Claire LaBarbera, noticed that the lakes moved, relative to features on land, from year to year. "I thought, what a nice curiosity," MacAyeal says. Then he took a closer look and realised that the lakes were moving five to 10 times faster than the ice shelf, and in a different direction.

"We found a beautiful curiosity that probably exists nowhere else in the world," he says (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2011GL049970).

[Rockonman]

Now that is pretty damn cool. It would be interesting to know how/why the lakes move like that.

It must be cool for you to have your project get some attention like that.

[Shinoi]

Well, congratulations, that is awesome!

[Victory]

I love how briefly you're mentioned. I get a real Client-Agent relationship from that mental picture.

[sgt_Angua]

To be fair, most of what I did was boring but necessary busywork, but I suspect this is a lot of the New Scientist just being like "undergrad? Pfft!" since Doug tends to be very nice about giving me more credit than I deserve on this (I wasn't the one to notice that the lakes move, but I set up the movie of satellite images that allowed him to notice). But hey, even so it's a boiled down version I can actually link people to, and it's cool that this got picked up at all.

[Rimmy]

I think you did something that you can be proud of there, even if you don't think you actually did much.

[DrunkCat]

[Zola]

I'm glad for you, keep it up like this!
This is an interesting topic indeed.

[sgt_Angua]

I just found out that the article also has the cover for the issue of Geophysical Research Letters that it's being published in.

[sgt_Angua]

Double post reviving the thread because it turns out this is in the news again. This one addresses Doug's hypothesis on why the lakes move and talks about how this can relate to ice shelf collapse.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46206480.../#.TyjCmCMSrbE

[Killing_Time]

This is something that'd be kind of noteworthy in a CV, student researcher C.H. LaBarbera!

[sgt_Angua]

Yeah, it'd be a lot more useful if I was still planning to go into the sciences, but still cool.

[DrunkCat]

If I were any more jelly I'd be on bread.

[Rockonman]

If I were any more jelly I'd be on bread.

Same here. You've gotten very lucky there, Angua.

[Tyemdi]

Congratulations, Angua! Boring work at first maybe, but discovering something and making a cameo in the news: nice job!