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The most astounding place I've ever been
is the Mosquitia Rain Forest in Honduras.
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I've done archaeological fieldwork
all over the world,
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so I thought I knew what to expect
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venturing into the jungle,
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but I was wrong.
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For the first time
in my life, I might add.
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(Laughter)
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First of all, it's freezing.
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It's 90 degrees, but you're
soaking wet from the humidity,
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and the canopy of trees is so thick
that sunlight never reaches the surface.
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You can't get dry.
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Immediately, I knew that
I hadn't brought enough clothing.
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That first night, I kept feeling things
moving underneath my hammock,
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unknown creatures brushing and poking
against the thin nylon fabric.
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And I could barely sleep
through all the noise.
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The jungle is loud. It's shockingly loud.
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It's like being downtown
in a bustling city.
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As the night wore on,
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I became increasingly frustrated
with my sleeplessness,
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knowing I had a full day ahead.
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When I finally got up at dawn,
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my sense of unseen things
was all too real.
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There were hoof prints, paw prints,
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linear snake tracks everywhere,
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and what's even more shocking,
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we saw those same animals in the daylight
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and they were completely unafraid of us.
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They had no experience with people.
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They had no reason to be afraid.
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As I walked toward the undocumented city,
my reason for being there,
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I realized that this was the only place
that I had ever been
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where I didn't see
a single shred of plastic.
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That's how remote it was.
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Perhaps it's surprising to learn
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that there are still places on our planet
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that are so untouched by people,
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but it's true.
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There are still hundreds of places where
people haven't stepped for centuries,
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or maybe forever.
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It's an awesome time
to be an archaeologist.
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We have the tools and the technology
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to understand our planet
like never before.
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And yet, we're running out of time.
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The climate crisis threatens to destroy
our ecological and cultural patrimony.
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I feel an urgency to my work
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that I didn't feel 20 years ago.
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How can we document everything
before it's too late.
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I was trained as
a traditional archaeologist
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using methodologies that
have been around since the '50s.
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That all changed in July of 2009
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in Michoacán, Mexico.
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I was studying the ancient
Purépecha Empire,
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which is a lesser known
but equally important contemporary
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of the Aztec.
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Two weeks earlier, my team
had documented an unknown settlement,
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so we were painstakingly mapping,
building foundations by hand,
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hundreds of them.
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Basic archaeological protocol
is to find the edge of a settlement
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so you know what you're dealing with,
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and my graduate students
convinced me to do just that.
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So I grabbed a couple of Clif Bars,
some water, a walkie,
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and I set out alone on foot
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expecting to encounter the edge
in just a few minutes.
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A few minutes past, and then an hour.
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Finally, I reached
the other side of the malpaís.
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Oh, there were ancient
building foundations all the way across.
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It's a city?
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Oh, shit.
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(Laughter)
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It's a city.
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Turns out that this
seemingly small settlement
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was actually an ancient urban megalopolis,
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26 square kilometers in size,
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with as many building foundations
as modern day Manhattan,
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an archaeological settlement so large
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that it would take me
decades to survey fully,
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the entire rest of my career,
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which was exactly how I didn't want
to spend the entire rest of my career.
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(Laughter)
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Sweating, exhausted,
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placating stressed out graduate students.
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(Laughter)
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Tossing scraps of PB&J sandwiches
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to feral dogs,
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which is pointless by the way
because Mexican dogs
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really don't like peanut butter.
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(Laughter)
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Just the thought of it bored me to tears.
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So I returned home to Colorado
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and I poked my head
through a colleague's door.
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"Dude, there's gotta be a better way."
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He asked if I had heard
of this new technology called LiDAR --
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Light Detection And Ranging.
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I looked it up.
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LiDAR involves shooting
a dense grid of laser pulses
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from an airplane to the ground's surface.
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What you end up with
is a high resolution scan
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of the earth's surface
and everything on it.
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It's not an image,
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but instead it's a dense,
three-dimensional plot of points.
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We had enough money in the scan,
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so we did just that.
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The company went to Mexico,
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they flew the LiDAR,
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and they sent back the data.
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Over the next several months, I learned
to practice digital deforestation,
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filtering away trees, brush,
and other vegetation
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to reveal the ancient
cultural landscape below.
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When I looked at my first visualization,
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I began to cry,
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which I know comes
as quite a shock to you,
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given how manly I must seem.
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(Laughter)
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In just 45 minutes of flying,
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the LiDAR had collected
the same amount of data
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as what would have taken decades by hand:
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every house foundation,
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building, road, and pyramid,
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incredible detail,
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representing the lives
of thousands of people
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who lived and loved and died
in these spaces.
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And what's more, the quality of the data
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wasn't comparable to traditional
archaeological research.
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It was much, much better.
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I knew that this technology would change
the entire field of archaeology
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in the coming years,
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and it did.
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Our work came to the attention
of a group of filmmakers
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who were searching for a legendary
lost city in Honduras.
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They failed in their quest
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but they instead documented
an unknown culture,
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now buried under a pristine
wilderness rainforest,
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using LiDAR.
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I agreed to help interpret their data,
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which is how I found myself deep
in that Mosquitia jungle,
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plastic-free and filled
with curious animals.
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Our goal was to verify
that the archaeological features
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we identified in our LiDAR
were actually there on the ground,
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and they were.
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Eleven months later, I returned
with a crack team of archaeologists
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sponsored by the
National Geographic Society
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and the Honduran government.
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In a month, we excavated over 400 objects
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from what we now call
the City of the Jaguar.
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We felt a moral and ethical responsibility
to protect this site as it was,
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but in the short time that we were there,
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things inevitably changed.
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The tiny gravel bar where we first
landed our helicopter was gone.
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The brush had been cleared away
and the trees removed
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to create a large landing zone
for several helicopters at once.
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Without it,
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after just one rainy season,
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the ancient canals that we
had seen in our LiDAR scan
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were damaged or destroyed.
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And the eden I described
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soon had a large clearing,
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central camp,
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lights
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and an outdoor chapel.
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In other words, despite our best efforts
to protect the site as it was,
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things changed.
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Our initial LiDAR scan
of this City of the Jaguar
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is the only record of this place
as it existed just a few years ago.
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And broadly speaking,
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this is a problem for archaeologists.
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We can't study an area
without changing it somehow,
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and regardless, the earth is changing.
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Archaeological sites are destroyed.
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History is lost.
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Just this year, we watched in horror
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as the Notre Dame cathedral
went up in flames.
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The iconic spire collapsed,
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and the roof was all but destroyed.
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Miraculously, the art historian
Andrew Tallon and colleagues
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scanned the cathedral in 2010 using LiDAR.
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At the time, their goal was to understand
how the building was constructed.
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Now, their LiDAR scan is the most
comprehensive record of the cathedral,
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and it'll prove invaluable
in the reconstruction.
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They couldn't have anticipated the fire,
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or how their scan would be used,
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but we're lucky to have it.
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We take for granted that our cultural
and ecological patrimony
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will be around forever.
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It won't.
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Organizations like SCI-Arc
and Virtual Wonders
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are doing incredible work
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to record the world's historic monuments,
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but nothing similar exists
for the earth's landscapes.
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We've lost 50 percent of our rainforests.
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We lose 18 million acres
of forest every year.
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And rising sea levels will make cities,
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countries and continents
completely unrecognizable.
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Unless we have a record of these places,
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no one in the future
will know they existed.
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If the earth is the Titanic,
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we've struck the iceberg,
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everyone's on deck,
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and the orchestra is playing.
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The climate crisis threatens to destroy
our cultural and ecological patrimony
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within decades,
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but sitting on our hands and doing nothing
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is not an option.
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Shouldn't we save everything
we can on the lifeboats?
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(Applause)
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Looking at my scans
from Honduras and Mexico,
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it's clear that we need
to scan, scan, scan
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now as much as possible
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while we still can.
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That's what inspired the Earth Archive,
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an unprecedented scientific effort
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to LiDAR scan the entire planet,
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starting with areas
that are most threatened.
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Its purpose is threefold.
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Number one: create a baseline record
of the earth as it exists today
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to more effectively mitigate
the climate crisis.
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To measure change, you need
two sets of data:
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a before and an after.
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Right now, we don't have
a high-resolution before data set
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for much of the planet,
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so we can't measure change,
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and we can't evaluate
which of our current efforts
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to combat the climate crisis
are making a positive impact.
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Number two: create a virtual planet
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so that any number of scientists
can study our earth today.
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Archaeologists like me
can look for undocumented settlements.
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Ecologists can study tree size,
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forests composition and age.
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Geologists can study hydrology,
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faults, disturbance.
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The possibilities are endless.
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Number three: preserve
a record of the planet
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for our grandchildren's grandchildren
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so they can reconstruct and study
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lost cultural patrimony in the future.
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As science and technology advance,
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they'll apply new tools, algorithms,
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even AI to LiDAR scans done today
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and ask questions that we
can't currently conceive of.
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Like Notre Dame, we can't imagine
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how these records will be used,
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but we know that they'll
be critically important.
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The Earth Archive is the ultimate gift
to future generations,
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because the truth be told,
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I won't live long enough
to see its full impact,
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and neither will you.
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That's exactly why it's worth doing.
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The Earth Archive is a bet
on the future of humanity.
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It's a bet that together,
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collectively,
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as people and as scientists,
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that we'll face the climate crisis
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and that we'll choose
to do the right thing,
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not just for us today
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but to honor those who came before us
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and to pay it forward
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to future generations
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who will carry on our legacy.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)