![Picture](/uploads/1/2/3/6/12365113/published/bergs.png?1499865040)
And so it was that a geoscientist in London described an iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg that broke off an ice shelf in Antarctica…scientists can be really funny. When I first read the headline, I thought, “Oh no… more bad news regarding the advance of climate change!” But scientists – at least in the article I read – were not unduly concerned about it. A second earth observation scientist in London dryly observed, “Everyone loves a good iceberg and this one is corker.”
Did you know the U.S. has a National Snow and Ice Data Center? It’s part of the University of Colorado -Boulder and is affiliated with NOAA. It’s been around since 1957. According to GlassDoor, it has somewhere between 50 and 200 employees. (One of them wasn’t happy – “Great mission; lots of dysfunction”) That aside, if you want to do a story about snow, avalanches, glaciers, ice sheets, permafrost and other Cold Things, they are the national brain trust to consult.
If I were a data geek, it would be an attractive place. They have a public access, free, searchable data center – you retrieve the data, not scientific articles about the data. It’s fascinating and powerful. Sixty years of government funding on a small niche of data ought to be pretty impressive, right? I oversee all of J&J’s data for environmental & safety and, while we’ve collected a lot over the years, it is incredibly immature in terms of where we could go. Last year was the first year we started to fund improvements in our systems, designed to mine for insights what data we do have better and start collecting better data. I could easily quadruple my team – releasing the data geeks in our world would be fun. But a corporation has to show value for the effort – or in this case, make a case that a huge investment today will someday return great enough value to justify the investment. That’d be a difficult leap of faith.
I’ll leave you for the day with some trivia to impress your friends. To be an iceberg, you have to be a chunk of ice greater than 16 feet. Do you know what baby icebergs are called? Bergy bits and growlers. See – scientists are fun.
Did you know the U.S. has a National Snow and Ice Data Center? It’s part of the University of Colorado -Boulder and is affiliated with NOAA. It’s been around since 1957. According to GlassDoor, it has somewhere between 50 and 200 employees. (One of them wasn’t happy – “Great mission; lots of dysfunction”) That aside, if you want to do a story about snow, avalanches, glaciers, ice sheets, permafrost and other Cold Things, they are the national brain trust to consult.
If I were a data geek, it would be an attractive place. They have a public access, free, searchable data center – you retrieve the data, not scientific articles about the data. It’s fascinating and powerful. Sixty years of government funding on a small niche of data ought to be pretty impressive, right? I oversee all of J&J’s data for environmental & safety and, while we’ve collected a lot over the years, it is incredibly immature in terms of where we could go. Last year was the first year we started to fund improvements in our systems, designed to mine for insights what data we do have better and start collecting better data. I could easily quadruple my team – releasing the data geeks in our world would be fun. But a corporation has to show value for the effort – or in this case, make a case that a huge investment today will someday return great enough value to justify the investment. That’d be a difficult leap of faith.
I’ll leave you for the day with some trivia to impress your friends. To be an iceberg, you have to be a chunk of ice greater than 16 feet. Do you know what baby icebergs are called? Bergy bits and growlers. See – scientists are fun.