Making the Origin of Water and the Cleanest Waters on the Planet Visible

Fourth chapter of Ricardo Rozzi et al.’s virtual exhibition, From Hand Lenses to Telescopes: Exploring the Microcosm and Macrocosm in Chile’s Biocultural Laboratories.

From Hand Lenses to Telescopes: Exploring the Microcosm and Macrocosm in Chile’s Biocultural Laboratories

Chile is a land drawn with the rhythm of nature itself. It is a natural laboratory that invites us to look up into the macrocosm and down into the microcosm. At both extremes of this long and narrow country, science activities have a major global impact. Today, over 50 percent of the world’s astronomical observations use the telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutions installed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Complementarily, at its southern end Chile established the Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation (CHIC) to investigate the microcosms, from the largest organism, planet Earth, to the smallest ones. CHIC explores diverse forms of knowledge and values to understand and protect the biosphere in the context of global socio-environmental change. This virtual exhibition enhances the integration of the sciences, arts, and humanities through a novel partnership with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, inviting visitors to be enchanted across the multiple scales of the cosmos.

About the Exhibition

About the author

Contador, Tamara

Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation, Chile

Tamara Contador is a professor and researcher at the University of Magallanes in Chile. She is a researcher at the Cape Horn International Center (CHIC), at the Millennium Institute for Biodiversity of Antarctic and Subantarctic Ecosystems (BASE), and at the Millennium Nucleus of Invasive Salmonids (INVASAL). Her research focuses onnadaptations of terrestrial and freshwater invertebrates to climate change, particularly in subantarctic and antarctic ecosystems. She works at Omora Park in Navarino Island, where she seeks to promote the integration of environmental ethics and ecological sciences to contribute to biocultural conservation in freshwater ecosystems.

orcid.org/0000-0002-0250-9877

de Gregorio-Monsalvo, Itziar

European Southern Observatory

Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo is an astrophysicist at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, where she acts as head of the Office for Science and as faculty chair. Before, she was the head of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Program management group. She did her PhD at the Spanish National Institute for Aerospace Technology, using the NASA Deep Space Network antennas to perform star-formation studies at centimeter wavelengths. She joined ESO in 2006 as an ESO ALMA fellow with duties at the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, the Atacama Test Facility in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Operations Support Facilities near San Pedro de Atacama, in Chile. Her research focuses on stars, brown dwarfs, and planet formation.