Ari Daniel Shapiro: Narwhal tagging in the arctic
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2012
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As a grad student, Ari Daniel Shapiro has to tag some narwhals to collect data. The problem: it's in the arctic, the devices have never been tested, and if he fails he'll never be able to do research again. "The thing is, you have to get the tag back to get the data."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU a scientist? |
| 0:06.0 | I felt it. |
| 0:07.0 | I felt like. |
| 0:08.0 | And I just thought, well. |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. Hey, everyone. I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives. |
| 0:33.9 | This week's storyteller is Ari Daniel Shapiro. The story was recorded in January 2012 at Union Hall in Brooklyn. |
| 0:41.6 | The theme of the event was The Wilderness. |
| 0:50.8 | So back in the summer of 2004, I found myself north of the Arctic Circle on Baffin Island |
| 0:57.0 | in Canada. Most of Baffin Island is wilderness. There's nothing out there. There are a couple |
| 1:02.7 | of towns. And where I was spending my time with a field group, a science field group, there |
| 1:08.2 | was nothing. There was just kind of a brown rocky land, a beach, |
| 1:13.9 | and then the water, because Admiralty Inlet is where we were staying and it kind of cuts into |
| 1:19.4 | the northern part of Baffin Island. And behind us there was this kind of rocky plateau. And the |
| 1:24.5 | field team, we'd set up this kind of five or six tents where we were sleeping. |
| 1:29.2 | We had a cook tent where we were eating our meals and hanging out and a science tent where we were |
| 1:33.3 | getting all of our equipment ready. And the first night that I was there, I remember staring at |
| 1:38.0 | this bucket of seawater. My science instrument that I brought up was inside it, and I was trying |
| 1:43.1 | to see if it was going to work. |
| 1:44.4 | I'm looking at this bucket of water, hoping that the thing would work, knowing that it wouldn't, |
| 1:50.0 | and wondering how the hell I'd gotten myself into this predicament. |
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