I recently came home from three months in Antarctica. As a software engineer,
Antarctica was the last place I expected to be. I was there as part of the
ANDRILL project, a multinational collaboration comprised of scientists,
educators, students, technicians, drillers, and support staff from Germany,
Italy, New Zealand, and the United States.
Their goal is to uncover the elusive geological history of Antarctica by
drilling and recovering sediment core samples from under the Antarctic ice
shelf and sea-ice in hopes it will reveal how the ice on and around
Antarctica reacted in past periods of climate change. They were using PSICAT
(pronounced sigh-cat), a Java-based graphical editing tool I developed, to
describe the core samples they were drilling. Since the expedition's fate
depended on this data, and because PSICAT was largely unproven, I accompanied
the project t... (more)