Your Comments


Nick Sheard takes a team approach to life and mine-finding

Compliments to Nick Sheard on his professional success

I first met Nick Sheard [Featured Explorer] in 1983 when I was managing a geophysical crew for Zonge Engineering in Australia.  We were contracted to do a CSAMT survey on the Stuart Shelf and Nick visited the crew on a few occasions.  He had a great irreverent sense of humor and would break every day in the afternoon to fix tea in his billy.  We would have large bonfires at night that Nick kept stoking until I am sure you could see the fire from space.  He invited the crew to his home in Adelaide and made us feel welcome as expats doing a difficult job away from home.  I am glad to have met Nick and compliment on all his professional success.

Mark Thoman
Senior Consulting Geologist
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold



Within a few years, the critical gap between the demand for
more data, and the supply of expertise to process it,
may widen past the point of no return.

Problem of data access applies even more to Government

A well written article [Knowledge management closes the data-personnel gap], one that expresses some of the ideas I have considered in past years. The problem of data access and setting "point of truth" sources applies even more so to Government organisations that accumulate exploration reports from companies as well as our own data and knowledge.

Mal Jones
Senior Geologist - Remote Sensing
Geological Survey of Queensland
Queensland, Australia  



The surface of the Greenland ice sheet. Photo courtesy of Michael Studinger, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Antarctica a crucial element in the debate on climate change

I am pleasantly surprised at receiving my first print issue of your beautifully carved magazine Earth Explorer. Particularly I was deeply engrossed in reading the "Phantom Mountains" article. What a beautiful denomination of the unexplained mysteries that have been brought out by a total team effort. But I feel that man is yet a beginner to understand the processes of earthly dynamics although we have the latest technology at hand.

I wish to add that Antarctica is a crucial element in the debate on climate change the world over, this is because it is relatively pristine. Moreover how importantly it holds in its ice-cores half a million-year old carbon records, trapped in its layers of ice. It is my firm belief that to study and examine the Earth's past present and future, Antarctica is the best place to go.

B.M. Dhawan
Chandigarh, India