Voyages

Join me for my first new episode in years as we travel to the Driftless Area at the border of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois where a great architect was inspired by an unexpected landscape shaped not by ice like much of the Midwest, but by the movement of liquid water.

The Voyages Podcast is (almost) back! I'm most of the way through making a new episode that I had hoped to share this month, but I didn't quite make my self-imposed deadline. It'll share a key theme with my earlier series on the Missoula Floods, which I've packaged into a single episode here that I hope will pique your ineterest in the new episode I'll be sharing in February!

In this long-delayed conclusion of Voyages' hourney down the California Current, we visit Santa Barbara, Morro Bay, and the Big Sur to explore the many ways in which the seas here have impacted our species - and how, in the last century and a half, we've impacted them in return.

In the third leg of our journey along the California Coast, we visit Monterey Bay. An undersea canyon, sunlit shallows, and nutrients dredged up from the depths by the California Current make the bay a great place to wrap your head around the complex interactions between organisms and their environment that shape ecosystems and give these waters their staggering diversity of life. We'll explore those interactions this episode, meet the pioneering ecologist who was among the first to study them, and travel to the monumental aquarium that was built to celebrate both.

In the second part of Voyages' journey along the California Current, we explore the Golden State's North Coast, where the line between land and sea is a very blurry one. You can see that blurriness amidst the gargantuan forests of the Redwood Coast, which wouldn't exist if not for ties for the cold Pacific Ocean. You can see it even more clearly in the intertidal zone, where sea becomes land twice a day, and there are few finer places to experience this transition zone than the dramatic Mendocino and Sonoma County shores.

In this first of a multi-episode series exporing the California Current and the diverse ecosystems and cultures it supports, we're heading to San Francisco to explore how Earth systems - the huge forces that shape the face of our planet - converge on this most beautiful of cities and what this can tell us about how they operate.

In the long-delayed Season 2 finale, we're traveling to the Bay Area to explore islands. In human history, the remoteness of islands has long been attractive to those interested in imprisoning others, as the dark pasts of Alactraz and Angel Island so effectively demonstrate. But the very fact that islands are cut off from the rest of the world means that evolution often follows unique paths on them, making them crucibles of biodiversity. From endemic moles to unwilling poets, we'll delve into the way islands shape and are shaped by the species that occupy them.

In this delayed episode (sorry; neither scheduling nor technology were playing well with me this week) I'm joined by fellow GU faculty member Emily Loeffler to talk about Switzerland, Victorian tourists in the Alps, and the incredibly diverse music that was performed for them.

In the second part of our trip through Mexico City and the link between science and art in Mexican history, we travel back through time to meet some of the country's many artist-scientists. We start with one of the biggest names of all - Frida Kahlo - and delve into how she was an heir to an ancient tradition of blending culture and nature that very literally goes back to the beginning of Mexican history.

In this first part of a two-episode series, we're headed to the Valley of Mexico to explore one of the world's greatest - and most underrated - cities and the stories it tells about the connection between art and science. In this episode, we begin at the beginning to see how the unique natural history of the valley has shaped human culture in the cities that have grown up here, from ancient Cuicuilco, to Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish Conquest, the modern-day Mexico City.