Voyages

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 honor of the Texas Memorial Museum's 83rd birthday, and on a less uplifting note, to draw attention to the dire financial situation it's currently experiencing, please enjoy this re-release combining my two episodes on Texan paleontology and reconstructing behavior from fossils. The stories featured here center on the museum and its invaluable collections, and if you're inspired to make your voice heard, there's a petition circulating on Change.org. If you're a Texas voter, you have an even better opportunity to make your voice heard by contacting your legislature and urging them to support one of the most important institutions for preserving and celebrating the natural heritage of the Lone Star State.

In this final installment of our journey through Victorian architecture, we travel the globe in the wake of the Royal Navy to see how the technologies that allowed the British Empire to grow also made Victorian architecture a global style. Then, we travel to the Wild West of the US to see how this backwards-looking school of design led to the radical new architecture of Modernism.

In the third installment of our journey through Victorian architecture, we travel to the north and west of England to explore how new technologies - especially iron casting and glass manufacturing - led Industrial Era engineers to build entirely new types of buildings for an entirely new - and rapidly expanding - market.

At the same time the first modern geologists and biologists were arguing about the meaning of the distant past, Victorian architects were engaging in their own debates about incorporating historical styles into their work. The two controversies collided when an increased interest in natural history led to the construction of several museums showcasing the wonders of the natural world. The results were some of the most spectacular exhibition spaces ever constructed, and we'll explore these and the implications they had for the understanding of the past in Industrial Britain in this second installment of our exploration of the weird world of Victorian architecture.

The Victorian Era was a chaotic period in which ideas and ideologies bounced off one another, with diverse and surprising results. Nowhere is this more clear than in architecture, where clashes over the meaning of the past and a present of incredible new technologies led to a style that had unexpected impacts on the future of design. This holiday season we'll be journeying through London, Great Britain, and the world to explore the gloriously weird union of art and science that is Victorian architecture. We begin with the most spectacular building of the age, the Crystal Palace. The building itself is long gone, leaving only a few relics, but these remnants tell us a lot about life in Industrial Britain, and you can see them all for yourself in a park in south London.

I'm giving myself a brief mid-season break as I catch up on a backlog of work and get ready for a seasonally-appropriate series in December that I'm really excited about. I'm re-airing this episode on Charles Darwin and London because it's a perfect prologue to that series, which will prominently feature one of the same destinations in a new context. We'll be back with new episodes in the days following Thanksgiving, but in the meantime, enjoy this re-airing of teh Voyage After the Beagle!

October 13th is National Fossil Day in the US, so on this episode of Voyages I'm joined by several of my friends and together we nerd out about some of our favorite fossils. Join us to travel from the forests and coastlines of the ancient Midwest to the oceans of British Columbia and Kansas and to the stomping grounds of some of the strangest horses that ever lived, as well as to the museums where you can visit these fossils for yourself.

In the final episode of our exploration of the Missoula Floods, we travel to the Columbia River Gorge and the Willamette Valley, where the human side of the floods' story becomes clear. Join me to discover how the floods shaped indigenous culture, how they instigated an economic cold war between Britain and the US, how they made the continent's largest overland migration possible, and how they changed the face of travel in America.

In this episode, we continue or exploration of sites in Texas' Hill Country that illustrate how fossils can reveal the behavior of extinct species. The geological setting of fossils can tell us a huge amount about how they interacted with their environemnts, as illustrated by a spectacular site in Waco. Then, we head up to the heart of the Hill Country to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs, one of the types of trace fossils that provide some of the most direct information about behavior.

The Hill Country of central Texas is rich in fossils from the age of dinosaurs to the Ice Ages, and these fossils have been especially valuable in reconstructing behavior in long-extinct animals. Why is this, and what tools are available to paleontologists to reconstruct long-dead animals as living, breathing organisms? Find out as we travel to Austin and the Hill Country on our Voyage Deep Into the Heart of Fossils!

Voyages is back for its second season! For our triumphant return, we're visiting a single destination: the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, home of the fossil that has occupied much of my time over the last few months. We'll explore the evolutionary story it tells, I'll pull back the curtain on how we undertsand that story, and we'll celebrate the role museums play in making sense of the world around us.

Ninteenth Century France was a political powderkeg, a landscape of radical revolutions and imperial power-grabs. Its art was no less volatile, and while we often think of modernism as beginning with the Impressionists late in the century, the seeds for this artistic revolution were sown decades earlier, when a generation of artists left Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau. In this episode, we visit this forest to find out how it inspired the painters who would upend centuries of landscape painting tradition, the palace that exemplifies everything they were rebelling against, and the town that would give this movement its name.

The identification and naming of new species may not be the most glamorous field of biology, but every species' name tells a story about that species itself and baout the person that named it. In this episode we head to New England to explore the stories behind dinosaur names and why they're important. We start with one of the most famous of all dinosaurs in Yale's Peabody Museum, then head upstream with paleontologist Tara Lepore where two smaller and lesser known dinosaurs that recently went head-to head to be named Massachusetts' state dinosaur.

In the final episode of this series, we journey to the most diverse of all Northwest forests, those of the Klamath & Siskiyou Mountains along the Oregon-California border. We explore how climate and geology combine to generate this richness, as well as how human activity has put it at risk. Despite how complex these forests are, we have tools at our disposal for predicting their future and for protecting them, for the good of both wildlife and us.

In the final episode of this series, we journey to the most diverse of all Northwest forests, those of the Klamath & Siskiyou Mountains along the Oregon-California border. We explore how climate and geology combine to generate this richness, as well as how human activity has put it at risk. Despite how complex these forests are, we have tools at our disposal for predicting their future and for protecting them, for the good of both wildlife and us.

The dense rainforests of the Oregon Coast Range, Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and British Columbia's Vancouver Island are an ideal habitat for western red cedar. The abundance of this conifer, along with its resistance to decay, softness, and ability to bend and fold, have made it one of the most important raw materials for Northwest Coast native art. In this episode, we explore the forests of the Pacific coast as well as the complex and evolving artistic style that grew up among them as we travel to the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.

On the far eastern edge of the Northwest, conifers encounter the region's most extreme conditions: biting cold and deep snow on the high peaks, enormous forest fires in the dry lowlands. Conifers are a group of plants with many fascinating evolutionary stories, and the ways in which their structure and physiology have adapted to ice and to fire shows is perhaps the most impressive of these biological sagas. In this episode, we travel to some of the best-known and best-loved national parks on both sides of the US-Canada border to explore how two species of conifer in particular cope with environmental extremes.

Heading up mountains throughout the Northwest is a great way of seeing how temperature and precipitation can determine which conifer species lives where, but in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, you can also track the relationship bewteen climate and conifers through time. In this episode, we follow the story of one especially important conifer over several million years using the fossils of the John Day Basin, and then embark on a road trip to the Wallowa Mountains further east to see how the same forces that drove the evolution of this species are still at work today.

From Crater Lake to Mt. Rainier, the forests of the central Cascades Range are alive with animals, plants, and fungi, all of which are connected in some way to conifers, the trees that dominate and define this diverse ecosystem. In this episode of the Voyages Holiday Special, we travel through the mountains of Oregon and Washington to explore the numerous, important, and often unexpected interactions between conifers and the organisms that rely on them.

The first forests we visit in this series are the lowland forests around the Salish Sea, home of Douglas firs, western hemlocks, and western red cedars - and the densest concentration of people in the Northwest. Conifer forests are a big part of what has drawn people to the area for millenia and are central to local art and culture. This episode explores just how these trees define a region and how we, in turn, define them.

Conifers - trees with cones and needles - are important to cultures across the globe. This time of year many of us are bringing them into our homes in the form of Christmas trees, but to those of us in the Pacific Northwest, conifers are an important part of life year-round. The connections between conifers, their ecosystems, and people in the Northwest are numerous and strong, and over the course of the next month a weekly series of short episodes will explore these connections and delve into the stories told by particular Northwest forests and the conifers that define them.

If you're interested in how grasslands and the animals that live in them have evolved together over millions of years, Nebraska is one of the best places in the world to visit. One of the reasons that we know as much as we do about this evolutionary epic are the many volcanoes upwind of Nebraska. Join me and Dr. Nick Famoso as we discuss how eruptions and the ash they emit help us understand the age of the Great Plains and, in one very remarkable case, captured and preserved a single moment in time.

We break from our usual format this episode to bring you several short stories told by paleontologists at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting, which has gone virtual this year. Some of these stories focus on a particular fossil or site and what it tells us about life through time, but several are more about how fossils inspire us and led us to careers in paleontology.

In this episode, we travel to London to follow the story of Charles Darwin in the years between his return to England following his trip around the world on the HMS Beagle and his publication, along with Alfred Russel Wallace, of the theory of natural selection. We'll see for ourselves some of the observations he made of fossil mammals, now on display in the Natural History Museum, that first got him thinking about evolution. We'll travel to the small village of Downe, where Darwin would spend decades testing and fine tuning his hypothesis into one of science's most important theories. We'll end with a visit to the Linnean Society, where Darwin and Wallace presented their findings and where we can see how the ideas they developed remain at the heart of biological research today.

In our first full-length episode we join Dr. Win McLaughlin of Pomona College and visit Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous Central Asian country that has been a cultural crossroads for millenia and a crossroads for animal life for much, much longer. We discuss how the Kyrgyz landscape formed, the fossils that are the focus of Win's research, and the important role that Kyrgyzstan has played in the story of mammal evolution in Asia, Europe, and even North America. We also talk about how the country's geography and wildlife have shaped its culture and about how you can experience Kyrgyzstan's natural and cultural heritage firsthand.

In our very first episode, I introduce some of the stories about the natural world and how we understand it told by my home town of Spokane. I also talk a bit about what this podcast will be all about and what to expect from future episodes.