What an excellent vacation! Bears, elk, coyotes, tourists - endless wildlife.
Best sights of the last week:
1) an osprey nest built on top of a girder bridge over a milky-blue river
2) a fire-fighting helicopter plummeting (almost) into a lake to scoop up a bucket of water
3) my two year olds face stepping off a monster ice transport onto the Athabasca Glacier
4) my 3.5 year olds face when I took her canoeing on Lake Louise
5) pulling into our drive at 11pm last night after driving for 14 hours
An interesting comment on business versus research - the Brewster company that runs the glacier tours on the Athabasca Glacier has 21 of these specially made monster buses. 9 of them cost $960k each and the rest cost $720k each. The only other one (!) that exists is used in the Antarctic for research (I'm guessing by the NSF).
I was talking to my wife over breakfast this morning about how these would be a wonderful tool for researchers in the Arctic/Antarctic but how researchers can't afford them. Shows how little is invested in this kind of research as opposed to business to exploit it. I guess the same is probably true of the tour ships that go to Antarctica compared with the research vessels in use there.
Anyway, Banff was wonderful and its good to be back in touch with the world!
Cheers,
Paul.
Originally posted by chewiei think most of the research vessels etc are ex-military - infact, isn't most of the research military funded? rather than buisness funded?
What an excellent vacation! Bears, elk, coyotes, tourists - endless wildlife.
Best sights of the last week:
1) an osprey nest built on top of a girder bridge over a milky-blue river
2) a fire-fighting helicopter plummeting (almost) into a lake to scoop up a bucket of water
3) my two year olds face stepping off a monster ice transport onto the Athabasc ...[text shortened]... Anyway, Banff was wonderful and its good to be back in touch with the world!
Cheers,
Paul.
Originally posted by geniusI don't know about the research vessels but most Antarctic (for instance) research is government funded. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US and the BAS (British Antarctic Survey) are both govt funded research bodies.
i think most of the research vessels etc are ex-military - infact, isn't most of the research military funded? rather than buisness funded?
My point was more that there's a huge amount of business money available to exploit frozen places but hardly any money (of any kind) is channeled into research and preservation of the same places.
Paul.