full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Chris Fisher: Why we should archive everything on the planet


Unscramble the Blue Letters


The most astounding palce I've ever been is the Mosquitia rainforest in Honduras. I've done archaeological fieldwork all over the world, so I thought I knew what to expect venturing into the jungle, but I was wrong - for the first time in my life, I might add. (Laughter) First of all, it's freienzg. It's 90 degrees, but you're soaking wet from the himtdiuy, and the canopy of trees is so thick that sunlight never raheces the surface. You can't get dry. Immediately, I knew that I hadn't bouhrgt enough clothing. That first night, I kept fineleg things moving underneath my hammock, unknown creeuarts brsnuhig and poking against the thin nylon fabric. And I could barely sleep through all the noise. The jungle is loud. It's shockingly loud. It's like being downtown in a bustling city. As the night wore on, I became increasingly frustrated with my sleeplessness, knwnoig I had a full day ahead. When I flnilay got up at dawn, my sense of unseen things was all too real. There were hoofprints, paw prints, linear snake tracks everywhere. And what's even more shocking, we saw those same aamnlis in the daylight, and they were completely unafraid of us. They had no exniepcree with people. They had no reason to be afraid. As I walked towards the undocumented city, my reosan for being there, I realized that this was the only place that I'd ever been where I didn't see a single shred of psaitlc. That's how remote it was. Perhaps it's surprising to learn that there are still places on our planet that are so untouched by people, but it's true. There are still hundreds of plecas where people haven't stepped for centuries, or maybe forever. It's an awemsoe time to be an archaeologist. We have the tools and the tcnohogley to understand our planet like never before. And yet we're running out of time. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our ecological and cultural patrimony. I feel an urgency to my work that I didn't feel 20 years ago. How can we document everything before it's too late? I was trained as a traditional arooaisglhect using methodologies that have been around since the '50s. That all changed in July of 2009 in Michoacán, Mexico. I was studying the ancient Purépecha empire, which is a lesser known but equally important contemporary of the Aztec. Two wkees earlier, my team had documented an unknown settlement, so we were painstakingly mapping building foundations by hand - hundreds of them. Basic acrolhoaaecigl ptcorool is to find the edge of a settlement so you know what you're dealing with. And my graduate students convinced me to do just that. So I grabbed a couple of CLIF Bars, some water, a walkie, and I set out alone on foot, etiepxncg to encounter the edge in just a few minutes. A few minutes passed, and then an hour. Finally, I reached the other side of the malpais. Oh, there were ancient building foundations all the way across. It's a city? Oh, shit. (Laughter) It's a city. tnrus out that this smienlgey small settlement was actually an ancient ubarn megalopolis, 26 square kilometers in size, with as many building faonndituos as modern-day Manhattan, an archaeological seltetemnt so large that it would take me decades to survey fully, the entire rest of my career, which was exactly how I didn't want to spned the entire rest of my career ... (Laughter) sawntieg, exhausted, placating stressed-out graduate students ... (Laughter) toisnsg sparcs of PB&J sandwiches to frael dogs, which is pointless, by the way, because Mexican dogs really don't like peanut butter. (Laughter) Just the thohgut of it bored me to tears. So I returned home to crloaodo, and I poked my head through a colleague's door. Dude! There's got to be a better way! He asked if I had heard of this new technology called LiDAR - Light ditteeocn and Ranging. I looked it up. LiDAR involves shooting a dense grid of lsaer pesuls from an airplane to the ground's surface. What you end up with is a high resolution scan of the earth's surface and everything on it. It's not an image, but instead it's a dnsee, three dimensional plot of points. We had enough money in to scan, so we did just that. The company went to meicxo, they flew the LiDAR, and they sent back the data. Over the next several months, I learned to practice digital deforestation, filtering away trees, busrh and other vegetation to reveal the ancient cultural lcdapanse below. When I looked at my first vtsizilouaian, I began to cry, which I know comes as quite a shock to you given how manly I must seem. (Laughter) In just 45 mentuis of flying, the ladir had collected the same amount of data as what would have taken decades by hand: every house foundation, building, road and pyramid, inebrildce daeitl, representing the lives of thousands of ppolee who lived and loved and died in these spaces. And what's more, the quality of the data wasn't comparable to traditional archaeological research. It was much, much better. I knew that this technology would change the eintre felid of ahocagorely in the coming years. And it did. Our work came to the atotietnn of a gurop of filmmakers who were searching for a legendary lost city in Honduras. They flaied in their quest, but they instead documented an unknown culture now buried under a pristine wesldnires rainforest, using LiDAR. I agreed to help interpret their data, which is how I found myself deep in that miituosqa jungle, plastic-free and filled with curious animals. Our goal was to verify that the archaeological features we identified in our LiDAR were actually there on the ground, and they were. Eleven mtohns later, I returned with a crack team of archaeologists, sponsored by the naitonal Geographic Society and the Honduran government. In a month, we excavated over 400 objects from what we now call the City of the Jaguar. We felt a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the site as it was, but in the short time that we were there, things inevitably changed. The tiny gravel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone. The brush had been cleared away and the teers were moved to create a large landing zone for several hterelipcos at once. Without it, after just one rainy season, the ancient canals that we had seen in our LiDAR scan were damaged or destroyed. And the Eden I described soon had a large clearing, central camp, lhitgs and an odutoor chapel. In other words, despite our best efforts to protect the site as it was, things changed. Our initial LiDAR scan of this City of the jaagur is the only record of this place as it existed just a few years ago. And broadly speaking, this is a problem for archaeologists. We can't study an area without changing it somehow, and regardless, the earth is changing. Archaeological sites are destroyed, history is lost. Just this year, we watched in horror as the Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames. The iinocc spire collapsed, and the roof was all but destroyed. Miraculously, the art historian Andrew Tallon and colleagues scnnead the cathedral in 2010 using LiDAR. At the time, their goal was to understand how the building was constructed. Now, their LiDAR scan is the most comprehensive record of the cathedral, and it will prove ilvbunalae in the reconstruction. They couldn't have anticipated the fire or how their scan would be used, but we are lucky to have it. We take for gntread that our cultural and ecological panmitory will be around forever. It won't. Organizations like SCI-Arc and Virtual Wonders are doing incredible work to record the world's historic monuments, but nothing similar eistxs for the earth's lapescdans. We've lost 50 prnceet of our rainforest. We lose 18 million acres of forest every year. And rising sea levels will make cities, countries and continents completely unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will know they existed. If the earth is the ttnaiic, we've struck the iceberg, everyone's on deck, and the orchestra is playing. The climate crisis threatens to dsetroy our cultural and ecological patrimony within decades. But sitting on our hands and doing nothing is not an option. Shouldn't we save everything we can on the lifeboats? (Applause) Looking at my scans from Honduras and Mexico, it's clear that we need to scan, scan, scan now as much as possible, while we still can. That's what ipserind the Earth Archive, an unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR-scan the entire planet, starting with areas that are most tenheaterd. Its purpose is threefold. neumbr one: create a baseline record of the earth as it exists today to more effectively miaittge the climate crisis. To muerase cngahe, you need two sets of data: a before and an after. Right now, we don't have a high-resolution before-data set for much of the planet, so we can't measure change, and we can't evaluate which of our current efforts to cabomt the climate ciriss are making a positive ipmact. Number two: create a virtual planet so that any number of scientists can study our earth tadoy. Archaeologists like me can look for undocumented settlements. etlgocioss can study tree size, forest composition and age. Geologists can study hydrology, faults, disturbance. The possibilities are endless. Number three: preserve a record of the pnaelt for our grandchildren's grandchildren so they can reconstruct and study lost cuultarl patrimony in the future. As siccnee and technology advance, they'll apply new tools, algorithms, even AI to LiDAR scans done today and ask questions that we can't currently conceive of. Like Notre Dame, we can't imagine how these records will be used, but we know that they'll be crlciality important. The erath Archive is the ultimate gift to future gieeoratnns. Because the truth be told, I won't live long enough to see its full impact and neither will you. That's exactly why it's worth doing. The Earth aicrhve is a bet on the future of huintmay. It's a bet that together, collectively, as people and as scientists, that we'll face the climate crisis, and that we'll choose to do the right thing, not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy. Thank you. (aulsppae)

Open Cloze


The most astounding _____ I've ever been is the Mosquitia rainforest in Honduras. I've done archaeological fieldwork all over the world, so I thought I knew what to expect venturing into the jungle, but I was wrong - for the first time in my life, I might add. (Laughter) First of all, it's ________. It's 90 degrees, but you're soaking wet from the ________, and the canopy of trees is so thick that sunlight never _______ the surface. You can't get dry. Immediately, I knew that I hadn't _______ enough clothing. That first night, I kept _______ things moving underneath my hammock, unknown _________ ________ and poking against the thin nylon fabric. And I could barely sleep through all the noise. The jungle is loud. It's shockingly loud. It's like being downtown in a bustling city. As the night wore on, I became increasingly frustrated with my sleeplessness, _______ I had a full day ahead. When I _______ got up at dawn, my sense of unseen things was all too real. There were hoofprints, paw prints, linear snake tracks everywhere. And what's even more shocking, we saw those same _______ in the daylight, and they were completely unafraid of us. They had no __________ with people. They had no reason to be afraid. As I walked towards the undocumented city, my ______ for being there, I realized that this was the only place that I'd ever been where I didn't see a single shred of _______. That's how remote it was. Perhaps it's surprising to learn that there are still places on our planet that are so untouched by people, but it's true. There are still hundreds of ______ where people haven't stepped for centuries, or maybe forever. It's an _______ time to be an archaeologist. We have the tools and the __________ to understand our planet like never before. And yet we're running out of time. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our ecological and cultural patrimony. I feel an urgency to my work that I didn't feel 20 years ago. How can we document everything before it's too late? I was trained as a traditional _____________ using methodologies that have been around since the '50s. That all changed in July of 2009 in Michoacán, Mexico. I was studying the ancient Purépecha empire, which is a lesser known but equally important contemporary of the Aztec. Two _____ earlier, my team had documented an unknown settlement, so we were painstakingly mapping building foundations by hand - hundreds of them. Basic ______________ ________ is to find the edge of a settlement so you know what you're dealing with. And my graduate students convinced me to do just that. So I grabbed a couple of CLIF Bars, some water, a walkie, and I set out alone on foot, _________ to encounter the edge in just a few minutes. A few minutes passed, and then an hour. Finally, I reached the other side of the malpais. Oh, there were ancient building foundations all the way across. It's a city? Oh, shit. (Laughter) It's a city. _____ out that this _________ small settlement was actually an ancient _____ megalopolis, 26 square kilometers in size, with as many building ___________ as modern-day Manhattan, an archaeological __________ so large that it would take me decades to survey fully, the entire rest of my career, which was exactly how I didn't want to _____ the entire rest of my career ... (Laughter) ________, exhausted, placating stressed-out graduate students ... (Laughter) _______ ______ of PB&J sandwiches to _____ dogs, which is pointless, by the way, because Mexican dogs really don't like peanut butter. (Laughter) Just the _______ of it bored me to tears. So I returned home to ________, and I poked my head through a colleague's door. Dude! There's got to be a better way! He asked if I had heard of this new technology called LiDAR - Light _________ and Ranging. I looked it up. LiDAR involves shooting a dense grid of _____ ______ from an airplane to the ground's surface. What you end up with is a high resolution scan of the earth's surface and everything on it. It's not an image, but instead it's a _____, three dimensional plot of points. We had enough money in to scan, so we did just that. The company went to ______, they flew the LiDAR, and they sent back the data. Over the next several months, I learned to practice digital deforestation, filtering away trees, _____ and other vegetation to reveal the ancient cultural _________ below. When I looked at my first _____________, I began to cry, which I know comes as quite a shock to you given how manly I must seem. (Laughter) In just 45 _______ of flying, the _____ had collected the same amount of data as what would have taken decades by hand: every house foundation, building, road and pyramid, __________ ______, representing the lives of thousands of ______ who lived and loved and died in these spaces. And what's more, the quality of the data wasn't comparable to traditional archaeological research. It was much, much better. I knew that this technology would change the ______ _____ of ___________ in the coming years. And it did. Our work came to the _________ of a _____ of filmmakers who were searching for a legendary lost city in Honduras. They ______ in their quest, but they instead documented an unknown culture now buried under a pristine __________ rainforest, using LiDAR. I agreed to help interpret their data, which is how I found myself deep in that _________ jungle, plastic-free and filled with curious animals. Our goal was to verify that the archaeological features we identified in our LiDAR were actually there on the ground, and they were. Eleven ______ later, I returned with a crack team of archaeologists, sponsored by the ________ Geographic Society and the Honduran government. In a month, we excavated over 400 objects from what we now call the City of the Jaguar. We felt a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the site as it was, but in the short time that we were there, things inevitably changed. The tiny gravel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone. The brush had been cleared away and the _____ were moved to create a large landing zone for several ___________ at once. Without it, after just one rainy season, the ancient canals that we had seen in our LiDAR scan were damaged or destroyed. And the Eden I described soon had a large clearing, central camp, ______ and an _______ chapel. In other words, despite our best efforts to protect the site as it was, things changed. Our initial LiDAR scan of this City of the ______ is the only record of this place as it existed just a few years ago. And broadly speaking, this is a problem for archaeologists. We can't study an area without changing it somehow, and regardless, the earth is changing. Archaeological sites are destroyed, history is lost. Just this year, we watched in horror as the Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames. The ______ spire collapsed, and the roof was all but destroyed. Miraculously, the art historian Andrew Tallon and colleagues _______ the cathedral in 2010 using LiDAR. At the time, their goal was to understand how the building was constructed. Now, their LiDAR scan is the most comprehensive record of the cathedral, and it will prove __________ in the reconstruction. They couldn't have anticipated the fire or how their scan would be used, but we are lucky to have it. We take for _______ that our cultural and ecological _________ will be around forever. It won't. Organizations like SCI-Arc and Virtual Wonders are doing incredible work to record the world's historic monuments, but nothing similar ______ for the earth's __________. We've lost 50 _______ of our rainforest. We lose 18 million acres of forest every year. And rising sea levels will make cities, countries and continents completely unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will know they existed. If the earth is the _______, we've struck the iceberg, everyone's on deck, and the orchestra is playing. The climate crisis threatens to _______ our cultural and ecological patrimony within decades. But sitting on our hands and doing nothing is not an option. Shouldn't we save everything we can on the lifeboats? (Applause) Looking at my scans from Honduras and Mexico, it's clear that we need to scan, scan, scan now as much as possible, while we still can. That's what ________ the Earth Archive, an unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR-scan the entire planet, starting with areas that are most __________. Its purpose is threefold. ______ one: create a baseline record of the earth as it exists today to more effectively ________ the climate crisis. To _______ ______, you need two sets of data: a before and an after. Right now, we don't have a high-resolution before-data set for much of the planet, so we can't measure change, and we can't evaluate which of our current efforts to ______ the climate ______ are making a positive ______. Number two: create a virtual planet so that any number of scientists can study our earth _____. Archaeologists like me can look for undocumented settlements. __________ can study tree size, forest composition and age. Geologists can study hydrology, faults, disturbance. The possibilities are endless. Number three: preserve a record of the ______ for our grandchildren's grandchildren so they can reconstruct and study lost ________ patrimony in the future. As _______ and technology advance, they'll apply new tools, algorithms, even AI to LiDAR scans done today and ask questions that we can't currently conceive of. Like Notre Dame, we can't imagine how these records will be used, but we know that they'll be __________ important. The _____ Archive is the ultimate gift to future ___________. Because the truth be told, I won't live long enough to see its full impact and neither will you. That's exactly why it's worth doing. The Earth _______ is a bet on the future of ________. It's a bet that together, collectively, as people and as scientists, that we'll face the climate crisis, and that we'll choose to do the right thing, not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy. Thank you. (________)

Solution


  1. incredible
  2. finally
  3. cultural
  4. crisis
  5. sweating
  6. entire
  7. knowing
  8. creatures
  9. laser
  10. combat
  11. visualization
  12. today
  13. detection
  14. feeling
  15. months
  16. landscape
  17. humanity
  18. attention
  19. brush
  20. pulses
  21. freezing
  22. mexico
  23. experience
  24. ecologists
  25. destroy
  26. brought
  27. settlement
  28. science
  29. planet
  30. reason
  31. helicopters
  32. threatened
  33. reaches
  34. national
  35. weeks
  36. iconic
  37. trees
  38. inspired
  39. animals
  40. granted
  41. critically
  42. detail
  43. change
  44. titanic
  45. archaeology
  46. lidar
  47. brushing
  48. outdoor
  49. lights
  50. people
  51. percent
  52. field
  53. jaguar
  54. number
  55. protocol
  56. group
  57. failed
  58. archive
  59. humidity
  60. thought
  61. dense
  62. mosquitia
  63. awesome
  64. scanned
  65. wilderness
  66. minutes
  67. turns
  68. patrimony
  69. applause
  70. archaeological
  71. landscapes
  72. places
  73. measure
  74. generations
  75. technology
  76. foundations
  77. tossing
  78. expecting
  79. feral
  80. urban
  81. impact
  82. colorado
  83. scraps
  84. plastic
  85. exists
  86. mitigate
  87. place
  88. invaluable
  89. earth
  90. archaeologist
  91. spend
  92. seemingly

Original Text


The most astounding place I've ever been is the Mosquitia rainforest in Honduras. I've done archaeological fieldwork all over the world, so I thought I knew what to expect venturing into the jungle, but I was wrong - for the first time in my life, I might add. (Laughter) First of all, it's freezing. It's 90 degrees, but you're soaking wet from the humidity, and the canopy of trees is so thick that sunlight never reaches the surface. You can't get dry. Immediately, I knew that I hadn't brought enough clothing. That first night, I kept feeling things moving underneath my hammock, unknown creatures brushing and poking against the thin nylon fabric. And I could barely sleep through all the noise. The jungle is loud. It's shockingly loud. It's like being downtown in a bustling city. As the night wore on, I became increasingly frustrated with my sleeplessness, knowing I had a full day ahead. When I finally got up at dawn, my sense of unseen things was all too real. There were hoofprints, paw prints, linear snake tracks everywhere. And what's even more shocking, we saw those same animals in the daylight, and they were completely unafraid of us. They had no experience with people. They had no reason to be afraid. As I walked towards the undocumented city, my reason for being there, I realized that this was the only place that I'd ever been where I didn't see a single shred of plastic. That's how remote it was. Perhaps it's surprising to learn that there are still places on our planet that are so untouched by people, but it's true. There are still hundreds of places where people haven't stepped for centuries, or maybe forever. It's an awesome time to be an archaeologist. We have the tools and the technology to understand our planet like never before. And yet we're running out of time. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our ecological and cultural patrimony. I feel an urgency to my work that I didn't feel 20 years ago. How can we document everything before it's too late? I was trained as a traditional archaeologist using methodologies that have been around since the '50s. That all changed in July of 2009 in Michoacán, Mexico. I was studying the ancient Purépecha empire, which is a lesser known but equally important contemporary of the Aztec. Two weeks earlier, my team had documented an unknown settlement, so we were painstakingly mapping building foundations by hand - hundreds of them. Basic archaeological protocol is to find the edge of a settlement so you know what you're dealing with. And my graduate students convinced me to do just that. So I grabbed a couple of CLIF Bars, some water, a walkie, and I set out alone on foot, expecting to encounter the edge in just a few minutes. A few minutes passed, and then an hour. Finally, I reached the other side of the malpais. Oh, there were ancient building foundations all the way across. It's a city? Oh, shit. (Laughter) It's a city. Turns out that this seemingly small settlement was actually an ancient urban megalopolis, 26 square kilometers in size, with as many building foundations as modern-day Manhattan, an archaeological settlement so large that it would take me decades to survey fully, the entire rest of my career, which was exactly how I didn't want to spend the entire rest of my career ... (Laughter) sweating, exhausted, placating stressed-out graduate students ... (Laughter) tossing scraps of PB&J sandwiches to feral dogs, which is pointless, by the way, because Mexican dogs really don't like peanut butter. (Laughter) Just the thought of it bored me to tears. So I returned home to Colorado, and I poked my head through a colleague's door. Dude! There's got to be a better way! He asked if I had heard of this new technology called LiDAR - Light Detection and Ranging. I looked it up. LiDAR involves shooting a dense grid of laser pulses from an airplane to the ground's surface. What you end up with is a high resolution scan of the earth's surface and everything on it. It's not an image, but instead it's a dense, three dimensional plot of points. We had enough money in to scan, so we did just that. The company went to Mexico, they flew the LiDAR, and they sent back the data. Over the next several months, I learned to practice digital deforestation, filtering away trees, brush and other vegetation to reveal the ancient cultural landscape below. When I looked at my first visualization, I began to cry, which I know comes as quite a shock to you given how manly I must seem. (Laughter) In just 45 minutes of flying, the LiDAR had collected the same amount of data as what would have taken decades by hand: every house foundation, building, road and pyramid, incredible detail, representing the lives of thousands of people who lived and loved and died in these spaces. And what's more, the quality of the data wasn't comparable to traditional archaeological research. It was much, much better. I knew that this technology would change the entire field of archaeology in the coming years. And it did. Our work came to the attention of a group of filmmakers who were searching for a legendary lost city in Honduras. They failed in their quest, but they instead documented an unknown culture now buried under a pristine wilderness rainforest, using LiDAR. I agreed to help interpret their data, which is how I found myself deep in that Mosquitia jungle, plastic-free and filled with curious animals. Our goal was to verify that the archaeological features we identified in our LiDAR were actually there on the ground, and they were. Eleven months later, I returned with a crack team of archaeologists, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the Honduran government. In a month, we excavated over 400 objects from what we now call the City of the Jaguar. We felt a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the site as it was, but in the short time that we were there, things inevitably changed. The tiny gravel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone. The brush had been cleared away and the trees were moved to create a large landing zone for several helicopters at once. Without it, after just one rainy season, the ancient canals that we had seen in our LiDAR scan were damaged or destroyed. And the Eden I described soon had a large clearing, central camp, lights and an outdoor chapel. In other words, despite our best efforts to protect the site as it was, things changed. Our initial LiDAR scan of this City of the Jaguar is the only record of this place as it existed just a few years ago. And broadly speaking, this is a problem for archaeologists. We can't study an area without changing it somehow, and regardless, the earth is changing. Archaeological sites are destroyed, history is lost. Just this year, we watched in horror as the Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames. The iconic spire collapsed, and the roof was all but destroyed. Miraculously, the art historian Andrew Tallon and colleagues scanned the cathedral in 2010 using LiDAR. At the time, their goal was to understand how the building was constructed. Now, their LiDAR scan is the most comprehensive record of the cathedral, and it will prove invaluable in the reconstruction. They couldn't have anticipated the fire or how their scan would be used, but we are lucky to have it. We take for granted that our cultural and ecological patrimony will be around forever. It won't. Organizations like SCI-Arc and Virtual Wonders are doing incredible work to record the world's historic monuments, but nothing similar exists for the earth's landscapes. We've lost 50 percent of our rainforest. We lose 18 million acres of forest every year. And rising sea levels will make cities, countries and continents completely unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will know they existed. If the earth is the Titanic, we've struck the iceberg, everyone's on deck, and the orchestra is playing. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our cultural and ecological patrimony within decades. But sitting on our hands and doing nothing is not an option. Shouldn't we save everything we can on the lifeboats? (Applause) Looking at my scans from Honduras and Mexico, it's clear that we need to scan, scan, scan now as much as possible, while we still can. That's what inspired the Earth Archive, an unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR-scan the entire planet, starting with areas that are most threatened. Its purpose is threefold. Number one: create a baseline record of the earth as it exists today to more effectively mitigate the climate crisis. To measure change, you need two sets of data: a before and an after. Right now, we don't have a high-resolution before-data set for much of the planet, so we can't measure change, and we can't evaluate which of our current efforts to combat the climate crisis are making a positive impact. Number two: create a virtual planet so that any number of scientists can study our earth today. Archaeologists like me can look for undocumented settlements. Ecologists can study tree size, forest composition and age. Geologists can study hydrology, faults, disturbance. The possibilities are endless. Number three: preserve a record of the planet for our grandchildren's grandchildren so they can reconstruct and study lost cultural patrimony in the future. As science and technology advance, they'll apply new tools, algorithms, even AI to LiDAR scans done today and ask questions that we can't currently conceive of. Like Notre Dame, we can't imagine how these records will be used, but we know that they'll be critically important. The Earth Archive is the ultimate gift to future generations. Because the truth be told, I won't live long enough to see its full impact and neither will you. That's exactly why it's worth doing. The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humanity. It's a bet that together, collectively, as people and as scientists, that we'll face the climate crisis, and that we'll choose to do the right thing, not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
climate crisis 4
building foundations 3
lidar scan 3
crisis threatens 2
cultural patrimony 2
graduate students 2
entire rest 2
ecological patrimony 2
earth archive 2
future generations 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
climate crisis threatens 2


Important Words


  1. acres
  2. add
  3. advance
  4. afraid
  5. age
  6. agreed
  7. ai
  8. airplane
  9. algorithms
  10. amount
  11. ancient
  12. andrew
  13. animals
  14. anticipated
  15. applause
  16. apply
  17. archaeological
  18. archaeologist
  19. archaeologists
  20. archaeology
  21. archive
  22. area
  23. areas
  24. art
  25. asked
  26. astounding
  27. attention
  28. awesome
  29. aztec
  30. bar
  31. barely
  32. bars
  33. baseline
  34. basic
  35. began
  36. bet
  37. bored
  38. broadly
  39. brought
  40. brush
  41. brushing
  42. building
  43. buried
  44. bustling
  45. butter
  46. call
  47. called
  48. camp
  49. canals
  50. canopy
  51. career
  52. carry
  53. cathedral
  54. central
  55. centuries
  56. change
  57. changed
  58. changing
  59. chapel
  60. choose
  61. cities
  62. city
  63. clear
  64. cleared
  65. clearing
  66. clif
  67. climate
  68. clothing
  69. collapsed
  70. colleagues
  71. collected
  72. collectively
  73. colorado
  74. combat
  75. coming
  76. company
  77. comparable
  78. completely
  79. composition
  80. comprehensive
  81. conceive
  82. constructed
  83. contemporary
  84. continents
  85. convinced
  86. countries
  87. couple
  88. crack
  89. create
  90. creatures
  91. crisis
  92. critically
  93. cry
  94. cultural
  95. culture
  96. curious
  97. current
  98. damaged
  99. dame
  100. data
  101. dawn
  102. day
  103. daylight
  104. dealing
  105. decades
  106. deck
  107. deep
  108. deforestation
  109. degrees
  110. dense
  111. destroy
  112. destroyed
  113. detail
  114. detection
  115. died
  116. digital
  117. dimensional
  118. disturbance
  119. document
  120. documented
  121. dogs
  122. door
  123. downtown
  124. dry
  125. earlier
  126. earth
  127. ecological
  128. ecologists
  129. eden
  130. edge
  131. effectively
  132. effort
  133. efforts
  134. eleven
  135. empire
  136. encounter
  137. endless
  138. entire
  139. equally
  140. ethical
  141. evaluate
  142. excavated
  143. exhausted
  144. existed
  145. exists
  146. expect
  147. expecting
  148. experience
  149. fabric
  150. face
  151. failed
  152. faults
  153. features
  154. feel
  155. feeling
  156. felt
  157. feral
  158. field
  159. fieldwork
  160. filled
  161. filmmakers
  162. filtering
  163. finally
  164. find
  165. fire
  166. flames
  167. flew
  168. flying
  169. foot
  170. forest
  171. foundation
  172. foundations
  173. freezing
  174. frustrated
  175. full
  176. fully
  177. future
  178. generations
  179. geographic
  180. geologists
  181. gift
  182. goal
  183. government
  184. grabbed
  185. graduate
  186. grandchildren
  187. granted
  188. gravel
  189. grid
  190. ground
  191. group
  192. hammock
  193. hand
  194. hands
  195. head
  196. heard
  197. helicopter
  198. helicopters
  199. high
  200. historian
  201. historic
  202. history
  203. home
  204. honduran
  205. honduras
  206. honor
  207. hoofprints
  208. horror
  209. hour
  210. house
  211. humanity
  212. humidity
  213. hundreds
  214. hydrology
  215. iceberg
  216. iconic
  217. identified
  218. image
  219. imagine
  220. immediately
  221. impact
  222. important
  223. increasingly
  224. incredible
  225. inevitably
  226. initial
  227. inspired
  228. interpret
  229. invaluable
  230. involves
  231. jaguar
  232. july
  233. jungle
  234. kilometers
  235. knew
  236. knowing
  237. landed
  238. landing
  239. landscape
  240. landscapes
  241. large
  242. laser
  243. late
  244. laughter
  245. learn
  246. learned
  247. legacy
  248. legendary
  249. lesser
  250. levels
  251. lidar
  252. life
  253. lifeboats
  254. light
  255. lights
  256. linear
  257. live
  258. lived
  259. lives
  260. long
  261. looked
  262. lose
  263. lost
  264. loud
  265. loved
  266. lucky
  267. making
  268. malpais
  269. manhattan
  270. manly
  271. mapping
  272. measure
  273. megalopolis
  274. methodologies
  275. mexican
  276. mexico
  277. michoacán
  278. million
  279. minutes
  280. miraculously
  281. mitigate
  282. money
  283. month
  284. months
  285. monuments
  286. moral
  287. mosquitia
  288. moved
  289. moving
  290. national
  291. night
  292. noise
  293. notre
  294. number
  295. nylon
  296. objects
  297. option
  298. orchestra
  299. organizations
  300. outdoor
  301. painstakingly
  302. passed
  303. patrimony
  304. paw
  305. pay
  306. peanut
  307. people
  308. percent
  309. placating
  310. place
  311. places
  312. planet
  313. plastic
  314. playing
  315. plot
  316. pointless
  317. points
  318. poked
  319. poking
  320. positive
  321. possibilities
  322. practice
  323. preserve
  324. prints
  325. pristine
  326. problem
  327. protect
  328. protocol
  329. prove
  330. pulses
  331. purpose
  332. purépecha
  333. pyramid
  334. quality
  335. quest
  336. questions
  337. rainforest
  338. rainy
  339. ranging
  340. reached
  341. reaches
  342. real
  343. realized
  344. reason
  345. reconstruct
  346. reconstruction
  347. record
  348. records
  349. remote
  350. representing
  351. research
  352. resolution
  353. responsibility
  354. rest
  355. returned
  356. reveal
  357. rising
  358. road
  359. roof
  360. running
  361. sandwiches
  362. save
  363. scan
  364. scanned
  365. scans
  366. science
  367. scientific
  368. scientists
  369. scraps
  370. sea
  371. searching
  372. season
  373. seemingly
  374. sense
  375. set
  376. sets
  377. settlement
  378. settlements
  379. shit
  380. shock
  381. shocking
  382. shockingly
  383. shooting
  384. short
  385. shred
  386. side
  387. similar
  388. single
  389. site
  390. sites
  391. sitting
  392. size
  393. sleep
  394. sleeplessness
  395. small
  396. snake
  397. soaking
  398. society
  399. spaces
  400. speaking
  401. spend
  402. spire
  403. sponsored
  404. square
  405. starting
  406. stepped
  407. struck
  408. students
  409. study
  410. studying
  411. sunlight
  412. surface
  413. surprising
  414. survey
  415. sweating
  416. tallon
  417. team
  418. tears
  419. technology
  420. thick
  421. thin
  422. thought
  423. thousands
  424. threatened
  425. threatens
  426. threefold
  427. time
  428. tiny
  429. titanic
  430. today
  431. told
  432. tools
  433. tossing
  434. tracks
  435. traditional
  436. trained
  437. tree
  438. trees
  439. true
  440. truth
  441. turns
  442. ultimate
  443. unafraid
  444. understand
  445. undocumented
  446. unknown
  447. unprecedented
  448. unrecognizable
  449. unseen
  450. untouched
  451. urban
  452. urgency
  453. vegetation
  454. venturing
  455. verify
  456. virtual
  457. visualization
  458. walked
  459. walkie
  460. watched
  461. water
  462. weeks
  463. wet
  464. wilderness
  465. wonders
  466. words
  467. wore
  468. work
  469. world
  470. worth
  471. wrong
  472. year
  473. years
  474. zone