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This is a site that's a kilometer
long and half a kilometer wide,

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and it was constructed
on a coral reef flat,

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and it has a 100 really complex

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stone structures made of basalt,
something called columnar basalt.

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The whole island,
including the site, is just is covered

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with some of the densest vegetation
on Earth actually.

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It's one of the wettest places on Earth.

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There's a really great variety
of vegetation.

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There are vines there that grow a few feet
every day.

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We just couldn't believe the complexity

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of what we were seeing, and nobody knew it was there

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because the dynasty that built Nan

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Madol collapsed 4 or 500 years ago,
and without constant

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maintenance of vegetative clearance,

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the vegetation just covered everything.

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We got a NASA grant

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to utilize airborne lidar to scan the rest of the island,

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which is probably 100 times
larger than just Nan Madol

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and the close environs that we did before.

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And then we found that
the whole island was covered

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was the landscape
that radically transformed.

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And again, nobody, nobody knew.

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This is not going to be feasible
in many places on Earth.

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So what about--what about satellite lidar?

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The ICESat-2 data, you know, if you
if you analyze the data properly,

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it's really giving you this very precise
elevations for water, for sea level.

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We're looking into using

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ICESat-2 for that shallow water bathymetry

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because a lot of the, you know,
the coastal environment on Pohnpei

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is really interesting to us.

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In areas where the vegetation isn't so bad,

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I think there's a lot of promise,

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especially for like monitoring archaeological--

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like the the state of not just
archeological sites, but other things.

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Just like monitoring the kind
of the structural integrity of stuff.

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For example, we just like

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tested out in the Sacred Valley of Peru,
where is another place where we work.

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You can see some of these terraces
that, you know, people are still using.

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I mean, it shows up beautifully

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in these ICESat-2 transects because
they don't have vegetation on them.

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The application of this

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ICESat-2 data to monitoring

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sea level at some of these islands.
People know that sea level rise

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is going to endanger these islands.

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And I'm thinking about the human impact.

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I'm also thinking about the cultural
impact of losing that culture diversity.

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You have thousands of these islands
that are occupied by these

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very different groups, and each of them
has developed a really interesting

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and special culture, and if we lose that,
what are we actually losing?

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Think about that.

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And I'm thinking about the human impact.

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I'm also thinking
about the cultural impact of losing

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that culture diversity.

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That's probably

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not like any other place on Earth.

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it can also get, as we found out
when we were working

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with the data in Peru,
if there's not much vegetation, we can get

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very nice elevations from land as well
from, you know, terrestrial,

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you know, from the land surface itself.

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I mean, this would be,
I think, worth a program.

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I'm just suggesting this for,
I said to just

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maybe get some serious thought to deploy.

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And I said to over a handful or select,

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randomly selected
or carefully selected, collection

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of of islands in the Marshalls and,

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it's because it was the opportunity

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to communicate with other users

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where we are struggling
with these applications.

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And of course, being part of a network
of applied users increases the probability

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that we're going to be able
to answer some of the questions

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that we'd like to answer with these data,
because somebody else has done, done

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already done it,
or they've done something similar, or

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by having conversations with them,

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we can come up with a a new approach
that we haven't thought of yet.

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I think it's, you know,
I mean, the idea that people come up with

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scientific breakthroughs all on their own,
you know, is genius often.

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And that's,
that's not the way science works.

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It really it's a it's a community effort.

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It's always a team effort.

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And, you know,
when you're talking with people,

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you come up with these
ideas that I don't think one

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And it

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could
even give us something of the symmetry.

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So that's going to be very,
very important going forward

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because we're going to take that data
and we're going to take it to data

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that are recorded by a buoy there.

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And we're going to see, you know,
how how the water

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elevations vary at different sides
of, of the island.

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we think that this is
a real strong possibility and that there's

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a really big need for this because of,
you know, rising sea levels.

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We'd like to be able to track that,
And he was the one I think he

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that he's like quoted as I can remember
I read this.

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But anyway Adrian was the one who like,

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you know, he's interviewed somewhere
and he's like, oh, you know, we we

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we found out that like sort of
after the fact, after,

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after the engine was already operational,
all that you can get the there's

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some penetration, there's some water
penetration, there's ice at two photons.

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So you can get like shallow
water bathymetry.

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There are all kinds of things
that you can do.

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I mean, for the world in

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so the places
where we're working with, with lidar

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are actually really difficult places
to work with lidar,

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that's something that we didn't even
I didn't really fully grasp, you know,

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until really getting into it,

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the, the vegetation on Pohnpei, as
my father has mentioned, is really thick.

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It's not you know,

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there are a lot of places in the world
where vegetation is thick.

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You know, people
deal with it in Central America

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all the time, for instance,
in the archeological world.

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But I think it's increasingly clear
that Pompei is like really, really hard.

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The vegetation is really thinking that low
vegetation too, which makes it okay.

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again, our products and services,
sometimes it's research,

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sometimes it's purely research, sometimes
it's finding archeological sites.

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Sometimes it's tracking
environmental changes

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that are going to impact
those archeological sites.

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Sometimes it's interpreting
the relationship between,

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the archeological sites
and how they were formed

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and why they were formed and how there's
this dialectic that happens.

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Okay.

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I mean, you take a snapshot
of an archeological site.

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That's that's, that