Betsy Weatherhead: You can see the kind of confused look of the seal as they’re looking up at this strange little object. You can see their eyes!
You're listening to Betsy Weatherhead, she is describing the view from an unmanned aircraft, only one or two meters in wingspan(翼幅), as it flies over the Arctic to monitor wildlife.
Betsy Weatherhead: They’re something you could have in your garage, and take out and play with if you really wanted to. We send them out over the Arctic Ocean, for long distances, often 500 miles or more, taking measurements low over the ocean, trying to understand what’s out there, because we don’t send manned aircraft out there.
Weatherhead is a senior research scientist at University of Colorado-Boulder. She spoke to us at a science meeting in late 2009. She said it can be very dangerous to send human pilots into polar conditions. So scientists control these aircraft from the ground, gathering important data from the scientific instruments and cameras loaded on board.
Betsy Weatherhead: Sea ice has been changing dramatically in the Arctic over the past few years, and the mammals are affected by that – the polar bear, the ice seal, the walrus(海象)– and we don’t know exactly how they’re affected by it.
Weatherhead uses the data and images from the unmanned aircraft to count populations of Arctic species to understand how the animals are adapting to polar warming.
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