Kirk Johnson, PhD, chief curator and vice president, Research and Collections Division
Earth’s climate is driven by the interaction of solar energy with land, sky, and oceans. While this has always been the case, shifting positions of continents and the ever-changing chemistry and currents of oceans and air have created a world with a complex history. This history is written in stone and told by fossils. Fossil plants from 50 million years ago show that the polar regions were ice free and densely forested and that tropical rainforests reached middle latitudes. Johnson will take you from the Amazon Basin to the High Arctic and into Deep Time as he explains Earth history by visiting fossil sites on different continents and using them to reconstruct lost worlds, extinct biomes, and ancient climates.
Wednesday, May 14
7:00 p.m.
Phipps IMAX Theater
$12 member, $15 nonmember