Science Out of Africa

But first, people like Mark must go out in the field to gather the data.

"You learn really quickly the extraordinary means you have to go through to get the job done," Mark said.

Coping with the dangers of African wildlife kept Mark on his toes. His team conducted some of their experiments at an instrument tower in Krugar National Park in South Africa. The park offered favourable conditions for the measurements, but working there meant dealing with the ever-present threat of lions.

"The lions own the place," Mark said. "You don't get out of your car at all, and you don't go out at night."

"When I went out to the tower site, I had to park the car some distance away so that the instruments were not measuring the car. I had to hire a game guard -- a big guy with a big gun -- and his job was to keep his eyes open and scare off any big game."

Even when travelling outside of wildlife preserves, Mark and his colleagues would pitch their tents on top of their truck just to be safe.

"The tents are on top so that lions don't get you when you go camping across the countryside," he said. "They won't climb the ladders. Lions don't like to climb things, and they haven't figured out yet that tents have yummy things inside."

With so many lions about, one thing you don't want to run short of is gasoline.

"Unleaded gas is not very common in that part of the world," he recalled, "and the rental company rented me a truck that ran only on unleaded gasoline. Boy, was that a pain! I had to take some empty 55-gallon drums from the airstrip [all the way] to a gas station 100 kilometres away, fill them all up, and bring them back so I could have my own fuel dump."

Far from home "you get into situations where one crucial thing that you need just isn't there, and you have to go way out of your way to make do with something else. So you've got to be clever."

On top of all the logistical challenges and the constant distraction of wildlife, Mark and the rest of the scientists still had to do their science -- itself a logistical nightmare.

The tricky part was that scientists wanted to measure the same aspects of the environment from the ground, from airplanes, and from space, all three at the same place and at the same time. Imagine all that complex technology coming together with perfect timing to pull off such a feat!