Anthropocene sound walk with Max Ritts

Max Ritts, UMN Post-Doctoral Fellow in Geography and Sonic Geographer, took John Kim took his students on an Anthropocene sound walk in the Ordway field station and set up an automated sound recorder along the banks of the Mississippi River. We will analyze these sounds in order to prompt ideas about the human impact on and along the river.

A discovery along the way were piles of sand that likely fell off of train cars headed northwest to the Dakotas (and eventually the Alberta Tar Sands). An educated guess about the sand’s destination is the Bakken oil fields for use in fracking.