TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Chris Fisher: Why we should archive everything on the planet

Unscramble the Blue Letters

The most astounding place I've ever been is the miitsoqua rireafonst in Honduras. I've done archaeological fieldwork all over the wlrod, so I thought I knew what to ecpxet venturing into the jungle, but I was wrong - for the first time in my life, I might add. (Laughter) First of all, it's fnizereg. It's 90 degrees, but you're soaking wet from the humidity, and the canopy of trees is so thick that sunlight never reaches the surface. You can't get dry. Immediately, I knew that I hadn't bgourht enough clothing. That first night, I kept feinleg things moving underneath my hammock, unownkn creatures brushing and poking against the thin nylon fabric. And I could braley sleep through all the noise. The jungle is loud. It's shockingly loud. It's like being downtown in a bustling city. As the night wore on, I became increasingly frustrated with my sleeplessness, kwniong I had a full day ahead. When I finally got up at dawn, my sesne of unseen things was all too real. There were hoofprints, paw prints, lnaier snake tracks everywhere. And what's even more skihoncg, we saw those same alamins in the daylight, and they were completely unafraid of us. They had no experience with people. They had no reason to be arifad. As I walked towards the undocumented city, my reason for being there, I realized that this was the only place that I'd ever been where I didn't see a single shred of plastic. That's how remote it was. Perhaps it's ssrinpurig to lrean that there are still places on our planet that are so uocuehtnd by people, but it's true. There are still hundreds of places where people haven't stepped for centuries, or maybe forever. It's an awesome time to be an archaeologist. We have the tools and the technology to understand our planet like never before. And yet we're rninung out of time. The climate csiirs theerntas to destroy our eocoailcgl and cultural patrimony. I feel an urgency to my work that I didn't feel 20 years ago. How can we document everything before it's too late? I was trained as a traditional archaeologist using methodologies that have been around since the '50s. That all changed in July of 2009 in Michoacán, Mexico. I was studying the ancient Purépecha empire, which is a lesser known but equally important contemporary of the aetzc. Two weeks earlier, my team had documented an unknown settlement, so we were pnitlgkisaany mapping building foundations by hand - hundreds of them. Basic archaeological protocol is to find the edge of a settlement so you know what you're dealing with. And my graduate students ceoicnvnd me to do just that. So I grabbed a colpue of CLIF Bars, some waetr, a walkie, and I set out alone on foot, expecting to encounter the edge in just a few minutes. A few minutes passed, and then an hour. Finally, I reached the other side of the mlaipas. Oh, there were ancient building foundations all the way across. It's a city? Oh, shit. (Laughter) It's a city. Turns out that this seemingly small sttlemeent was actually an ancient urban megalopolis, 26 square kilometers in size, with as many building foundations as modern-day Manhattan, an archaeological settlement so large that it would take me decades to survey fully, the entire rest of my career, which was exactly how I didn't want to spend the entire rest of my career ... (lgueahtr) seawintg, exhausted, placating stressed-out gataudre students ... (Laughter) tsniosg scraps of PB&J sandwiches to feral dogs, which is pointless, by the way, because Mexican dogs really don't like peanut butter. (Laughter) Just the thought of it bored me to tears. So I rrneteud home to Colorado, and I poked my head through a colleague's door. Dude! There's got to be a better way! He akesd if I had heard of this new technology called LiDAR - Light Detection and rgainng. I looked it up. LiDAR ioevvlns shooting a dense grid of laser pulses from an airplane to the ground's sarcufe. What you end up with is a high resolution scan of the earth's surface and everything on it. It's not an image, but instead it's a dense, three dimensional plot of points. We had enough money in to scan, so we did just that. The cpanmoy went to meixco, they flew the LiDAR, and they sent back the data. Over the next several months, I learned to prciacte diigtal deforestation, filtering away teres, brush and other vegetation to reveal the ancient cultural landscape below. When I looked at my first vlitosiauzian, I began to cry, which I know comes as quite a sochk to you given how manly I must seem. (Laughter) In just 45 minutes of flying, the LiDAR had ccleoetld the same amount of data as what would have taken decades by hand: every husoe fotoanuidn, building, road and pyiarmd, incredible detail, representing the lives of thousands of people who lived and loved and died in these spaces. And what's more, the quality of the data wasn't comparable to traditional archaeological research. It was much, much better. I knew that this technology would change the entire felid of archaeology in the cinmog years. And it did. Our work came to the aitntoten of a group of fmlimakres who were searching for a legendary lost city in Honduras. They fleiad in their quest, but they instead documented an unknown cutlure now buried under a pristine wiendselrs rainforest, using LiDAR. I agreed to help interpret their data, which is how I found myself deep in that Mosquitia jungle, plastic-free and filled with curious animals. Our goal was to verify that the archaeological features we identified in our LiDAR were actually there on the gnorud, and they were. Eleven mhnots later, I returned with a crack team of archaeologists, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the Honduran government. In a month, we excavated over 400 objects from what we now call the City of the Jaguar. We felt a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the site as it was, but in the sohrt time that we were there, things iealbtnivy changed. The tiny gvarel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone. The brush had been cleared away and the trees were moved to create a large lnindag zone for several helicopters at once. Without it, after just one rainy season, the ancient canals that we had seen in our LiDAR scan were dgamead or destroyed. And the Eden I described soon had a large clearing, central camp, lights and an outdoor cahepl. In other wdros, despite our best efforts to protect the site as it was, things changed. Our initial ldiar scan of this City of the Jaguar is the only record of this pacle as it existed just a few years ago. And broadly speaking, this is a problem for archaeologists. We can't stduy an area without changing it somehow, and regardless, the earth is changing. Archaeological sites are destroyed, history is lost. Just this year, we watched in hororr as the Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames. The iconic spire collapsed, and the roof was all but destroyed. micruloulasy, the art historian Andrew taolln and colleagues scanned the cathedral in 2010 using LiDAR. At the time, their goal was to understand how the building was constructed. Now, their LiDAR scan is the most comprehensive record of the cathedral, and it will prove invaluable in the reconstruction. They couldn't have ataitenipcd the fire or how their scan would be used, but we are lucky to have it. We take for granted that our cultural and ecological patrimony will be around forever. It won't. Organizations like SCI-Arc and Virtual werdnos are doing incredible work to record the world's historic monuments, but nothing similar exists for the earth's landscapes. We've lost 50 percent of our rainforest. We lose 18 million acres of forest every year. And rising sea levels will make cities, countries and continents completely unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will know they existed. If the earth is the Titanic, we've scturk the iceberg, everyone's on deck, and the orchestra is playing. The climate crisis threatens to destroy our cultural and ecological patrimony within decades. But sitting on our hands and doing nothing is not an option. Shouldn't we save everything we can on the lifeboats? (Applause) Looking at my scans from Honduras and Mexico, it's clear that we need to scan, scan, scan now as much as possible, while we still can. That's what inspired the ertah Archive, an unprecedented scientific effort to LiDAR-scan the entire penalt, starting with areas that are most threatened. Its purpose is threefold. Number one: create a baseline record of the earth as it exists today to more effectively mitigate the climate crisis. To measure cagnhe, you need two sets of data: a before and an after. Right now, we don't have a high-resolution before-data set for much of the planet, so we can't measure change, and we can't evualtae which of our current efforts to cobmat the cailmte crisis are making a positive impact. nebumr two: create a virtual planet so that any number of scientists can study our earth today. actshleogaiors like me can look for uceotmunednd slemttneets. Ecologists can study tree size, forest composition and age. Geologists can study hydrology, faults, disturbance. The piiiiostselbs are endless. Number three: pvrsreee a record of the planet for our grandchildren's grandchildren so they can rccsroteunt and study lost cultural patrimony in the future. As scneice and technology advance, they'll apply new tools, algorithms, even AI to LiDAR scans done toady and ask questions that we can't currently cciovnee of. Like nrote Dame, we can't imagine how these records will be used, but we know that they'll be critically important. The Earth Archive is the ultimate gift to future generations. Because the truth be told, I won't live long enough to see its full impact and neither will you. That's exactly why it's worth doing. The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humanity. It's a bet that together, cvtlleoicley, as pepole and as scientists, that we'll face the climate crisis, and that we'll choose to do the right thing, not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us and to pay it forward to future generations who will crray on our legacy. Thank you. (Applause)

Open Cloze

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

Solution

months
settlement
laughter
conceive
aztec
shocking
miraculously
crisis
ground
afraid
science
failed
sweating
linear
water
wilderness
undocumented
world
earth
attention
pyramid
shock
chapel
tallon
tossing
settlements
involves
digital
rainforest
freezing
learn
planet
landing
collectively
couple
place
evaluate
foundation
collected
practice
carry
knowing
painstakingly
field
graduate
inevitably
culture
today
wonders
surface
climate
unknown
words
reconstruct
brought
surprising
short
ecological
people
asked
coming
notre
house
convinced
number
company
anticipated
combat
untouched
mosquitia
study
mexico
filmmakers
running
visualization
animals
returned
feeling
threatens
horror
sense
gravel
possibilities
change
lidar
archaeologists
preserve
barely
malpais
damaged
struck
expect
trees
ranging

Original Text

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

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
climate crisis	4
building foundations	3
lidar scan	3
crisis threatens	2
cultural patrimony	2
graduate students	2
entire rest	2
ecological patrimony	2
earth archive	2
future generations	2

ngrams of length 3

collocation	frequency
climate crisis threatens	2

Important Words

acres
add
advance
afraid
age
agreed
ai
airplane
algorithms
amount
ancient
andrew
animals
anticipated
applause
apply
archaeological
archaeologist
archaeologists
archaeology
archive
area
areas
art
asked
astounding
attention
awesome
aztec
bar
barely
bars
baseline
basic
began
bet
bored
broadly
brought
brush
brushing
building
buried
bustling
butter
call
called
camp
canals
canopy
career
carry
cathedral
central
centuries
change
changed
changing
chapel
choose
cities
city
clear
cleared
clearing
clif
climate
clothing
collapsed
colleagues
collected
collectively
colorado
combat
coming
company
comparable
completely
composition
comprehensive
conceive
constructed
contemporary
continents
convinced
countries
couple
crack
create
creatures
crisis
critically
cry
cultural
culture
curious
current
damaged
dame
data
dawn
day
daylight
dealing
decades
deck
deep
deforestation
degrees
dense
destroy
destroyed
detail
detection
died
digital
dimensional
disturbance
document
documented
dogs
door
downtown
dry
earlier
earth
ecological
ecologists
eden
edge
effectively
effort
efforts
eleven
empire
encounter
endless
entire
equally
ethical
evaluate
excavated
exhausted
existed
exists
expect
expecting
experience
fabric
face
failed
faults
features
feel
feeling
felt
feral
field
fieldwork
filled
filmmakers
filtering
finally
find
fire
flames
flew
flying
foot
forest
foundation
foundations
freezing
frustrated
full
fully
future
generations
geographic
geologists
gift
goal
government
grabbed
graduate
grandchildren
granted
gravel
grid
ground
group
hammock
hand
hands
head
heard
helicopter
helicopters
high
historian
historic
history
home
honduran
honduras
honor
hoofprints
horror
hour
house
humanity
humidity
hundreds
hydrology
iceberg
iconic
identified
image
imagine
immediately
impact
important
increasingly
incredible
inevitably
initial
inspired
interpret
invaluable
involves
jaguar
july
jungle
kilometers
knew
knowing
landed
landing
landscape
landscapes
large
laser
late
laughter
learn
learned
legacy
legendary
lesser
levels
lidar
life
lifeboats
light
lights
linear
live
lived
lives
long
looked
lose
lost
loud
loved
lucky
making
malpais
manhattan
manly
mapping
measure
megalopolis
methodologies
mexican
mexico
michoacán
million
minutes
miraculously
mitigate
money
month
months
monuments
moral
mosquitia
moved
moving
national
night
noise
notre
number
nylon
objects
option
orchestra
organizations
outdoor
painstakingly
passed
patrimony
paw
pay
peanut
people
percent
placating
place
places
planet
plastic
playing
plot
pointless
points
poked
poking
positive
possibilities
practice
preserve
prints
pristine
problem
protect
protocol
prove
pulses
purpose
purépecha
pyramid
quality
quest
questions
rainforest
rainy
ranging
reached
reaches
real
realized
reason
reconstruct
reconstruction
record
records
remote
representing
research
resolution
responsibility
rest
returned
reveal
rising
road
roof
running
sandwiches
save
scan
scanned
scans
science
scientific
scientists
scraps
sea
searching
season
seemingly
sense
set
sets
settlement
settlements
shit
shock
shocking
shockingly
shooting
short
shred
side
similar
single
site
sites
sitting
size
sleep
sleeplessness
small
snake
soaking
society
spaces
speaking
spend
spire
sponsored
square
starting
stepped
struck
students
study
studying
sunlight
surface
surprising
survey
sweating
tallon
team
tears
technology
thick
thin
thought
thousands
threatened
threatens
threefold
time
tiny
titanic
today
told
tools
tossing
tracks
traditional
trained
tree
trees
true
truth
turns
ultimate
unafraid
understand
undocumented
unknown
unprecedented
unrecognizable
unseen
untouched
urban
urgency
vegetation
venturing
verify
virtual
visualization
walked
walkie
watched
water
weeks
wet
wilderness
wonders
words
wore
work
world
worth
wrong
year
years
zone