Dark Skies Eryri Public Lecture
Bangor Science Festival
The Moon and life on Earth
The Moon in the night time sky is the driver of a range of important processes on Earth through the tide it generates. This includes regulating climate, changing the length of a day, and influencing our planet鈥檚 ability to host life.
Here, we will look at how the tides have changed over the past 2 billion years of Earth鈥檚 history, and how they have influenced life on Earth, through causing mass extinctions and aiding evolution. We will also look at how we can use the fossil record to improve our estimates of what the tides were doing in the deep past from fossil records, and why they may be important in the search for life on other planets.
This exciting lecture will be given by Professor Mattias Green, a physical oceanographer who uses models and observations to explore how the tides interact with other components of the Earth system and how these interactions change over long timescales. His research focusses on how tidally driven mixing influence large-scale ocean circulation and climate; effects of sea-level change (on short time scales) and continental drift (on geological time scales) on the tides; ice-ocean-climate interactions and how melting ice-sheets will affect the earth system; the influence of the tides to allow the ocean to evolve and host life, including tidal dynamics during extinction events.
Free Parking is available.