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Old 01-24-2020, 07:02 PM   #5
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Scientific Specializations for Exploring Unknown Island

Start with satellite imaging and overflights by photoreconnaissance aircraft and get some cartographers to make you maps. Get in touch with Michael Goodchild at UC Santa Barbara and get him to lend you a couple of PhD candidates to set up a geographical information system so that your explorers' findings are properly located and logged.

You are going to want testimony about the geology, botany, and zoology, so you want geologists, botanists, ornithologists, entomologists (well, arthropoidologists), ichthyologists, herpetologists…. You ought to recruit them from a wide range of universities, and get a mixture of about 25–30% people with enough reputation and publication record to be believed and the rest young postdocs and PhD candidates who are looking for something new. It is probably very important that most of them were trained or did their fieldwork in the Caribbean and on its shores so that they will recognise the anomalies and not be susceptible to having their discoveries dismissed as failures to recognise something endemic.

You are going to want to show that this intrusion of another world has another history. For that, you want palaeobotanists, and in particular someone on top of pollen stratigraphy, someone used to doing landscape archaeology informed by soil cores. I don't know whether geologists also have a speciality doing that. If your island has volcanic rock on it, someone credible in the field of palaeogeomagnetism might be handy.

Do not overlook the possibility of finding people or archaeological remains. You ought to pack an anthropologist, a prehistorian, and a field archaeologist who will (a) be able to recognise useful material when they see it, and (b) be able to authoritatively rule in or rule out that the evidence has been left by visitors from the historical shores of the Caribbean and the Gulf. People with specific knowledge of the history, pre-history, and anthropology of the area are a must.

You've got two types of Texan millionaire. The first makes sure that he has people from UT, Texas A&M, and several other institutions (maybe even U Chicago!) so that a healthy rivalry will overcome any tendency to groupthink, and to build a broader base of creditability. The other type makes sure that he gets people from the USA, UK, Netherlands, France, Spain, Mexico, and Venezuela, and from Central American and Caribbean states if possible, so that a healthy rivalry will overcome any tendency to groupthink, to build the broadest possible base of creditability, and so that his team's familiarity with the area is both broad and deep. The latter would love to have some Cuban collaborators, but politics….
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