“Every contribution matters.” Anybody who ever played in a sport team probably heard this sentence at some point. Actually, this is completely true also as far as science is concerned. Whereas in the collective imagination science is about big discoveries made by a single genius, the truth is that great science is made little by little, step by step. Science is a community effort in which every contribution matters. And that is the concept from which this video was born.
Video contributions of many Antarctic surveys were collected from research institutes from all over the world, and edited all together by Giulia Massolino in this video. The aim is to celebrate the work done so far by the PAIS community, the SCAR Geoscience Past Antarctic Ice Sheet dynamics program, and to address the topic of new challenges in science and society.
The music of the video was designed and performed live by Marco Battigelli. Basically the idea behind the music was to take tiny motifs, or melodic fragments, and put them over a steady beat, which is called a 5:3 polyrhythm, in order to create a larger pattern that are repeated over and over again. Every pattern contains in itself a form of variation, like tiny temperature increases generate a huge climate change over the years. And this is actually the idea behind minimal music: the repeated patterns symbolize the tiny little increases in temperature in a never ending process.