Profs & Pints Nashville: Antarctica 101

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Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Antarctica 101,” a look at life and research on the Earth’s frozen continent, with Dan Morgan, geologist, scholar of glaciers, and principal senior lecturer in Earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University.

Antarctica is the coldest, driest, highest, windiest, brightest, loneliest, most peaceful, and least explored continent on Earth. Come to a decidedly cozier and more comfortable environment—Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom—to gain a deep understanding of Antarctica and our efforts to explore it.

Your guide on this scholarly journey, Dan Morgan of Vanderbilt University, has been to Antarctica for six seasons of field research on the ice.

He’ll talk about the geologic history of Antarctica, its status as the world’s largest wildlife refuge, and why it’s central to our understanding of the global climate and ecosystem.

You’ll learn how Antarctica’s discovery more than 200 years ago helped motivate a golden age of its exploration and a race for the South Pole, with the key figures involved including the doomed Robert Falcon Scott and the death-escaping Ernest Shackleton. Dr. Morgan will talk about the treaty governing Antarctica and why it was the site of the first arms-control treaty signed during the Cold War.

You’ll get brought up to speed on current explorations and what it’s like to be living and camping there today. Motivating researchers who head there is a conviction that what happens in Antarctica affects all of us—Earth’s southernmost continent truly is at the heart of it all. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)