Meet the User - Pete Mouginis-Mark
Our ‘meet the user’ segments give you the chance to meet one of our YourArchive customers and to understand why they chose the platform to store and share their precious memories.
Pete Mouginis-Mark is an Emeritus Researcher at Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii. He’s also Director at the Pacific Regional Planetary Data Center and an Affiliate Faculty Member of Hawaii Sea Grant.
Pete at the summit of Fernandina volcano in the Galapagos
His research in recent years has focused on the volcanoes on the planet Mars, but during the 1990s and 2000s he led an international team of scientists for NASA, developing ways that satellites can be employed to study active volcanoes on Earth. Pete is also infamous (in scientific circles) for his naming of a crater on Mars after his hometown of Tooting, London, UK.
Pete’s research has led him to numerous volcanoes all over the world, in addition to being an avid traveller in his own time. A camping trip to the ice sheets of Antarctica to search for meteorites, and a dive to 10,000 ft in the submarine Alvin are two of his “work related” trips that were also distractions from his volcano studies.
With an enormous collection of material collected over the course of his professional career, accompanied by a vast number of supporting photos taken over years of expeditions, Pete was initially looking for a platform which would allow him to not only safely and securely store everything for access anywhere in the world:
"As a volcanologist, I have always found it hard to keep my field photos in order and readily accessible even when I am on the road -- YourArchive provides the ideal medium to achieve this! Storing boxes and boxes of old slides, or organizing digital images on external discs, is a thing of the past thanks to YourArchive's easy to use archiving structure."
With such large amounts of content, the ability to easily organise and catalogue photos, videos, and documents, in order to quickly find specific content was also critical:
"YourArchive provides the ideal way for making my images easily accessible, whenever I want to search by date, location, subject material, or a host of other criteria.”
Thanks to its complete user control YourArchive offered Pete the major benefit of being one place to store all his material, not just professional, but personal as well. Having family on the other side of the world, being able to save and share history so that it’s saved for posterity and available to all the family was a big benefit on the platform (see more on this in Pete’s galleries below):
"YourArchive provides the ideal method for reviewing decades worth of research and family slides -- I don't know how I managed before YourArchive!"
YourArchive gives users like Pete the ability to save all their history in one place but then use galleries (publicised subsets of content) to share them in a controlled manner. No need for replication of content, files can be saved once and shared out infinitely. Galleries can be made public (like the examples below) or private so they are only visible to those you specifically designate, perfect for more personal family content or even sensitive research.
You can even invite family, friends, or colleagues to contribute their own photos, videos, and documents to a specific archive.
Pete has very kindly offered to share some of his best public galleries with our users. You can visit these galleries via the links below to see some of his best personal, professional, and family photos:
Volcano Tour
As an internationally respected expert in satellite investigations of active volcanoes, Pete has travelled the world for over forty years to better understand the way volcanoes work. This field work has taken him all over the planet, working on volcanoes in Hawaii, the Galapagos islands, the Andes, Kamchatka, Java, Central America, the Philippines, Reunion Island, and Iceland. This gallery exhibits some of the highlights from those field trips.
WW2 Travels from Normandy to Berlin
Cliff Mark (Pete’s father) was a Lance corporal in the 21st Army Group, Second Army Signals. Much against orders, he carried a camera with him on his route from Normandy through to Berlin having landed on Gold Beach, Normandy, on 15th June 1944 and reaching Berlin in late May 1945. Pete continues to use his Dad’s original negatives to print more images of this journey taken more than 70 years ago, and will continue to add new images to this gallery.
Poles Apart
Pete has travelled to both Antarctica and Iceland as part of his studies. This gallery shows some fascinating images from his research in the coldest environments where he was searching for meteorites (in Antarctica) and investigating lava flows (in Iceland).
Deep Dive
In 1987 Pete’s expertise meant he was called upon to undertake a dive in the submarine Alvin (the same submarine that found the wreck of the Titanic just two years earlier) in the Western Pacific. His gallery here shows some amazing photos from above and below the surface on that project.
South West USA
This gallery is some of Pete’s photos from his personal travel, specifically around the Southwest United States and its wonderful scenery. Northern Arizona, Southern Utah, the Californian desert, and the wilds of northern New Mexico are all included here.
Great Race Cars
In addition to his fascinating photos from WWII, Pete’s father was also a keen motor racing enthusiast attending races from the late 1940s and taking photos when he could. In the 1960s he was able to get a press pass to allow him into the paddock. In mid-1970s he went one step further and could roam the pits too.
Southeast Asia
Between 2004 and 2014, Pete was lucky enough to travel to China, Hong Kong and Singapore on several occasions, sometimes for work and sometimes for pleasure. Every visit revealed some amazing scenes, which he has captured here. Most impressive were the terracotta statues in Xi'an China, Guilin China, and New Year's in Hong Kong.
Pete continues to build upon his galleries with YourArchive and is currently working on collections from his trips to Israel, Botswana, and (of course) Hawaii. So come back soon to see some of his new additions!
If you’d like to learn more about Pete’s work:
BBC article about the naming of Tooting crater
Part one of Pete's YouTube educational class for ThinkTech Hawaii
Geologic Map of Olympus Mons Caldera, Mars
A list of Pete’s published works
We would like to thank Pete for generously sharing his thoughts and content with us.
Don’t forget that if you’d like to see your own public galleries featured on our explore page, or to feature in your own ‘Meet the User’ then please email our team at info@yourarchive.com.
YourArchive is completely free to try, so why not sign up today to store, organise and socialise your content all at your complete control, click here to register.