Bundle up and fill that Thermos Re/Cappers, we’re getting Arctic today with a lead Re/Cap featuring drones, maritime LiDAR, and environments that make The Revenant feel like a Caribbean cruise.
What these researchers and academics are doing - and where - is quite unprecedented. But seeing as what constitutes the “Arctic” is absolutely massive, it’s got a storied reality capture, survey, and data collection history.
You’ve got your Canadian Arctic mapping jamboree of 2011 here, your Norwegian High Arctic geospatial documentation there. But all historical roads really lead back to IPY, or the International Polar Year.
Though the tundra tradition began in 1881, there have only been four of them, occurring when enough nations collaborate to warrant it.
IPY1 marked the beginning of coordinated polar research efforts. Proposed by Austrian scientist Karl Weyprecht, it involved 12 countries establishing 15 expeditions to polar regions. WITH ZERO HAND WARMERS.
The primary focus was on meteorology, aurora, and earth's magnetism, aiming to improve weather forecasting and navigation. While not obsessive over mapping, some geographical research was conducted, primarily through manual surveying and sketching. And voila, the first coordinated dataset of polar conditions.
IPY2 (1932-1933) saw 40 nations grab their parkas on the icecapade’s 50th anniversary, with advancements in surveying capabilities courtesy of enhanced tools, airplanes, and motorized vehicles. Multiple fields, particularly geophysics, would be grasped in ways no preceding civilization could dream of. Good thing this got knocked out before everyone got, uh, busy in a few years.
IPY3 (1957-1958) said “New name, who dis?” with its 67 countries. No, really, it was such a big deal in the context of the Cold War isolationism that it became known as the International Geophysical Year (IGY). This IPY played a crucial role in the formation of the Antarctic Treaty.
Which brings us to IPY4 (2007-2008), a 50,000-researcher bonanza of LiDAR, photogrammetry, remote sensing, bathymetric mapping, and myriad other technologies across the largest swath of Arctic terrain yet. It established large-scale baseline datasets crucial for future change assessments…not unlike what the researchers we’re about to cover are improving, by harnessing aerial LiDAR.
IPY4 even generated excitement about this asinine notion of visualizing data on a computer-generated map of the Arctic.
So if that was 16 years ago, and this was 140…
Aurora borealis during 1883’s IPY1, as recorded at a Swedish research & mapping station in Svalbard. Image credit Digital Encyclopedia of European History
What the heck might 10 from now be?
What’s Cappenin’ This Week: Drones heat up Arctic research, ancient Greek and Egyptian education get rethought thanks to photogrammetry, a notoriously packed Madrid road tees up BIM and GIS integration, generative design software choices overwhelm, and an AEC Error of the Week in the city that never sleeps…but does drop ice from 80 stories up.
Mini ‘Cappenins: Amazon tests Drones in Italy, Leica’s Sr. Product Manager gets interviewed, xAI welcomes a trio of heavyweight chip partners, Meta teams with Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron for VR experiences, a TED Talk on whether AI may be stuck, and the three construction firms Meta’s using for a $10bn data center.
Last week: Fujitsu builds a municipal twin, optical metrology’s 800-year story, Pittsburgh plays host to hundreds of robots, kit-of-parts is a sum greater than its parts for construction, and an AEC Error of the Week that really leaned into its medieval roots.
Ernest Shackleton, lauded early 1900s Antarctic explorer and dude you should definitely think of the next time you think you’re having a rough day, once said “Difficulties are just things to overcome after all.”
Well, for decades, scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Geophysical Institute have been faced with several difficulties. But thanks to drones & LiDAR, they’ll soon be overcome, or at least diminished.
On Alaska’s Arctic coast, the Long-range Airborne Snow and Sea Ice Thickness Observing System - LASSITOS - gets some reps in. Image credit Bryan Whitman/UAF
Long impeded by challenging environments, the scientists have been unable to attain the measurements of snow & sea ice they dream of. Similarly, they’ve had to shelve the idea of a proper sea floor survey.
But the tide is turning, as we’ll soon hear when the UAF presents newfound drone capabilities to the 2024 American Geophysical Union (AGU) at their Fall Meeting. They’ll detail LASSITOS - The Long-range Airborne Snow and Sea Ice Thickness Observing System, as well as a customized maritime LiDAR system for sea floor stuff.
Oh, and all that’s before the expanded education that’s to accompany these developments. Cold plunge into this success story below, courtesy of DroneLife.
The enduring belief among contemporary scholars is that Greek and Egyptian education, which collectively produced some of humanity’s most exalted thinkers and even some huge triangle things in Giza, operated in total separation.
Well, that school of thought may be out for summer, and all seasons thereafter, thanks to a sweeping European grant and subsequent research project.
A wooden tablet featuring text from The Iliad, soon to be far more accessible to far more people. Image credit The Trustees of the British Museum
EduGRE: Education in Graeco-Roman Egypt – An Intercultural Approach is the five-year, €2 million-study which will hone in on artifacts, from tablets and potsherds to papyri. That means a lot of travel, museums, photogrammetry, 3D modeling, and online-platform building. It’s an instance of breaking silos that may simultaneously shed light on the history of our pedagogy and knowledge accumulation. Take the odyssey below thanks to the University of Exeter, whose own Dr. Chiara Meccariello will be helming the five-year excursion.
Madrid, Spain’s Calle 30 ring road boasts two “mosts” on its record: innermost ring road in the city, and busiest any-kind-of-road in the whole country!
Such qualities made it fertile ground for a grande study on the integration of GIS and BIM, specifically how it could augment O&M of urban infrastructure.
The conclusions were better than jamón ibérico.
Primary formats to create the BIM–GIS model for an FM app’s development. Image credit J.J. Cepa, M.G. Alberti, R.M. Pavon, Juan A. Calvo via MDPI
The detailed model of the Calle 30 road within its Madridian mayhem gave city officials new toys and insights galore: incident management, traffic impact assessment, outer-infrastructure communication, not to mention profoundly improved training for O&M technical staff.
For you methodology nerds, this one goes deep, from geodatabase and SHP formats to coordinated reference systems and SQL. Conquer the full study here, or get the broad strokes below from AZoBuild.
Generative design software has become for architects, engineers and clients what ChatGPT is for recipe generation after telling it you have only kidney beans, turkey jerky, and a white chocolate Hershey bar in your pantry.
Unlike traditional manual design, GD software rapidly generates diverse options whether the focus is on dimensions and spatial layout requirements, or unit mix and energy efficiency. They’re helping business boom, but their own accessibility has boomed as well, making it easy to feel overwhelmed over which to choose.
Automated Data Driven Design’s wheel of GD winners. Image credit AEC Magazine
One of the stories from AEC Magazine’s November/December issue tackles this. Allister Lewis of Automated Data Driven Design uses the above image as a nexus of sorts, but also meditates on the expanding landscape, barriers to adoption, stage-by-stage effects on designers, risks & challenges, how to assess GD tools, and what the future is likely to hold. Full of keen insight and contagious enthusiasm, the piece is a lifevest for the software saturation that’s likely to define the 2020s.
NYC’s 2014 Ice-ocalypse, as seen here at 1 World Trade Center. Image credit NY Daily News
Big Apple? Try the Big Ice Cavern, at least if we transport to 2014.
That year’s frigid winter in New York City saw sidewalks become impromptu ice rinks, and forced pedestrians to play a high-stakes game of "Are We on the Set of Final Destination?"
Yep. Skyscrapers waged war on unsuspecting New Yorkers, turning city streets into a frozen obstacle course (preface, friends - no fatalities in this tale).
Picture this: Barry Negrod, just minding his own business near Rockefeller Center, suddenly finds himself on the receiving end of a football-sized ice missile that leaves him with 80 stitches. Talk about a New York welcome! The city's newest high-rises, those gleaming monuments to energy efficiency, were keeping so much heat inside that their exteriors became perfect ice-formation factories, turning architectural innovation into a public safety nightmare…and heart attack culprit.
Streets around 1 World Trade Center - the nation's tallest building - were closed faster than a hot dog stand during a health inspection, as massive sheets of ice threatened to turn unsuspecting tourists into human popsicles. Yellow caution tape became the season's hottest accessory, with "Falling Ice" signs popping up more frequently than hipster coffee shops in Brooklyn.
Now, imagine if we had unleashed an army of tech-savvy solutions on this icy menace. Picture thermal imaging cameras scanning building facades and spotting heat leaks faster than a Midtown pickpocket.
High-resolution 3D scanners could've mapped out ice buildup while bolstering structural integrity. Drones, buzzing around skyscrapers like caffeinated pigeons, could've kept human inspectors safely on the ground. And let's not forget the piece de resistance: BIM systems so smart, they could predict ice formation with more accuracy than a psychic predicting tourist behavior in Times Square.
With this reality capture dream team, building managers could've turned potential ice-fall zones into no-fly zones for frozen projectiles.
So here's to the winter of 2014 - when skyscrapers proved that in the concrete jungle, sometimes the most dangerous predators are sheets of ice precariously hanging from 50 stories up. Stay warm, stay alert, and consider investing in a really good hard hat.
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