EXPEDITION NEWS is a monthly review of significant expeditions, research
projects and newsworthy adventures. It is distributed online and by mail to
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explorers, environmentalists, and outdoor enthusiasts. This forum on
exploration covers projects that stimulate, motivate and educate.
The following are highlights from our September issue. To receive a free
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ETHNOMUSICOLOGISTS GIVE NEW MEANING TO “UNPLUGGED”
A collection of dusty 100-year-old Philippine instruments in the Anthropology
Department of the Field Museum in Chicago may yet play again if a museum
volunteer has anything to say about it. The project gives new meaning to the
term “unplugged.”
Cheryl Istvan, chairman of the Chicago Chapter of the Explorers Club, has had
a lifelong interest in music starting with a degree in Music at Wellesley
College, where she specialized in Early Music. Her focus eventually turned to
Ethnomusicology, the study of nonwestern music in its cultural environment.
For the past year she has been working as a volunteer in the Anthropology
Department of the Field Museum in Chicago to help document a group of musical
instruments from the Philippines, collected by anthropologists in the early
part of the twentieth century. It’s the largest such collection in the world,
surpassing those even in the Philippines.
The museum project entails creating a database and photo archive of the
instruments, including both musicological and ethnological information about
each item, which could be duplicated in a CD-ROM format. Upon completion, the
database will make these instruments accessible for research purposes to
ethnomusicologists from around the world who are interested in studying
ethnic Philippine music.
Celebrating the centennial anniversary of the beginning of the Heroic Age of
Antarctic exploration (1902-1914), the Ice Country Antarctic Expedition will
be a modern day voyage of discovery under sail.
The eight-person team’s goal
is a environmentally-motivated, self-reliant, marine and mountain circumpolar
exploration of the Southern Ocean, the sub-polar islands, and the West
Antarctic Peninsula during the austral summer of October 2001 - March 2002
aboard the 48-ft. ice-reinforced steel ketch Southern Oddessy.
EXPEDITION UPDATE
Kropp Sues to Defend His Name – In 1995-96, Swedish explorer Goran
(“Yore-um”) Kropp, astonished the adventure community when he mountain biked
with 260 lbs. of supplies from Sweden to Nepal, assisted in rescue efforts on
Everest during that fateful season, summited the mountain unaided and without
supplemental oxygen, then rode his bike and a train back home.
Kropp’s career hit a rough spot, however, in April, 2000, during a North Pole
expedition with Sweden’s Ola Skinnarmo. The two were criticized for fatally
shooting an attacking polar bear. “Shooting and probably killing one of the
bears was really a shock to them,” expedition spokeswoman Anneli Stromberg
said at the time. “But it was either them or the bears and there really was
no choice,” she added. In recounting the story, Kropp recently told EN, “He
was really hungry. The bear had made up his mind that breakfast was being
served.”
Kropp, who later had to abandon the trek because of frostbite (caused by
holding a cold gun in his bare hands), was denounced on his return to Sweden
by animal rights groups for having shot the bear, a protected species.
Now to protect his name, Kropp, goes to trial this month in a liable suit
against Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. The paper accused him of being part of a
criminal syndicate, which Kropp vehemently denies. The negative publicity
resulted in death threats. “I felt awful and was humiliated. That’s part of
the reason I don’t give interviews in Europe anymore,” he says. Does he have
any regrets? “There are 60,000 polar bears in the world. It could happen
again and I’d do the same thing to protect myself.”
EXPEDITION NOTES
Earliest Human Ancestors Found - A National Science Foundation
(NSF)-supported international team of researchers has announced it has
discovered the remains of the earliest known human ancestor, dating to
between 5.2 and
5.8 million years ago.
The fossil finds, reported in the July 12 issue of
Nature, were made over a four-year period in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash
study area, about 140 miles northeast of the capital, Addis Ababa. To the
team of scientists, the discovery represents more evidence to confirm
Darwin’s conclusion that the earliest humans, or hominids, the primate
zoological family that includes all species on the human side of the
evolutionary split with chimpanzees, arose in Africa.
Field Report: World’s Deepest Shipwreck Found
By David Concannon,
Special Correspondent
Eight members of The Explorers Club, all veterans of deep water exploration,
including expeditions to the Titanic, Bismarck, the Japanese WWII submarine
I-52, and the Mariana Trench, have discovered the world’s deepest wooden
shipwreck, a merchant ship almost two hundred years old resting 4,818 meters,
almost 16,000 feet, deep in the Blake Basin of the Atlantic Ocean, in the
heart of the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Curt Newport, widely known for
locating and recovering Liberty Bell 7, the Gus Grissom Mercury spacecraft,
announced this new find in Bermuda in July. Mike McDowell and Guy Zajonc, of
Deep Ocean Expeditions, Ltd., organized the Atlantic Sands 2001 expedition.
The target was originally revealed by side-scan sonar in 1999.
Read the full report in this month’s EN.
WebExpeditions.net Expedition Web Services - WebExpeditions.net specializes in building expedition web sites using our suite of expedition tools. Our field-verified tools (XJournal, XPlot, etc.) allow for web communications using low-bandwidth satellite systems, easily posting text and images directly to the web and monitoring team position. For additional info. and a portfolio, see http://www.webexpeditions.net, or contact Tim Harincar, 612-616-4947, tim@webexpeditions.net.
Africa and Himalaya with Daniel Mazur
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is published by Blumenfeld and Associates, Inc., 28 Center Street, Darien, CT 06820 USA. Tel. 203-855-9400, fax 203-855-9433, blumassoc@aol.com. Editor/publisher: Jeff Blumenfeld. ©2001 Blumenfeld and Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN: 1526-8977. Subscriptions: US$36/yr.; international postal rate US$46/yr. Highlights from EXPEDITION NEWS can be found at www.expeditionnews.com.