What it is
Mars College is situated in a striking landscape beside the Salton Sea, an odd lake with an even stranger history. The Desert Ecology program invites you to step away from the computer screen for a day and explore this fascinating natural world with field trips and science experiments.
This program will be a weekly offering by Seamus (Scott) Kildall. You can join for every expedition, or drop in on specific sessions. No prior knowledge is required.
(Collecting water samples from the Salton Sea)
Why I’m leading this
The natural world fascinates me more than the one behind the screen. While I use digital tools in my own work, increasingly, my time away from the screen is what gives me both joy and growth, which is especially the case at Mars College.
And, this is why I co-founded Natural Intelligence Camp, which aligns with my personal discoveries.
The physical site around Mars College teems with fascinating biology, geology, and history, which I want to explore in, learn from, conduct science experiments with and share knowledge of.
Some Specific Adventures
Setting up an Air Quality Monitoring network
How toxic is the air in Bombay Beach? Much has been written about it in the media. While asthma cases are high in the area, there are many correlative factors in the data, so it’s to hard tell what is really going on.
In the 1st week at Mars, we will set up 10-20 air quality monitoring devices at Mars College and around the town of Bombay Beach. These will feed live data onto the web, which we can then monitor with a web browser, providing an essential service to the community.
Additionally, the devices will transmit data over the three-month period at Mars to a server. We will then publish the results, serving as a beacon of citizen science. There has not been a comprehensive air quality study like this in the area to date, making it a valuable tool for increasing knowledge around this important issue.
(Custom-built Air Quality Sensor)
Collecting Purple Bacteria from the Salton Sea
We will collect muddy samples from the Salton Sea, led by our resident biologist Marzipan. We will incubate these, and after about a month they will develop into vibrant Purple Bacteria.
In my preliminary studies from samples taken last year, I discovered that these Purple Bacteria emit significantly fluctuating electrical currents in correlation to diurnal rhythms.
At Mars, Marzipan and I will tease apart their dynamic roles using different techniques including artificial light regimes and electrical conductance.
Both of us are interested in using the data from this for visualizations and/or sonficiations, and want to open these samples up for artistic exploration.
(Some Purple Bacteria samples from the Salton Sea)
Gathering and Mixing Clay-Based Building Materials with Charlie
Charlie, a Martian from last year, led us on some fascinating talks about building with clay, and he also did some prototyping and preliminary studies. He plans to return this year and get deeper into what the earth here has to offer us.
We will collaborate with him and gather clay-based materials from the ground, and mix them to use for building, a time-honored technique that takes us back to the earth and offers possibilities for sustainable futures.
