Our Changing Planet

Humans have been changing our oceans for centuries. We are overfishing them, polluting them and heating them up. However, it is hard to know how much damage we have done if we don't know what our planet looked like before our impacts. Here, we look at how ancient marine turtle bones, and the proteins still preserved within them, can help unlock the secrets of our past oceans to help us better protect them today.

We tend to think of climate change as a modern, human induced problem. However geologists have been uncovering evidence concerning drastic changes in the Earth surface environment stretching back to the very oldest rocks on Earth. Knowledge of such changes in environment helped to establish Darwin's theory of evolution because such changes provide easily understood evolutionary pressures. This talk will discuss the important changes in Earth's surface environment over geological time, how these changes have shaped life in the past, and what we might expect in the future.

Humans have been farming for the last 10 millenia, but the way we farm has been transformed in only the last half century. A series of innovations, led by the crop scientist Norman Borlaug, changed agriculture in the second half of the 20th century, averting a global famine. As we move into the 21st century, however, we face what has been described as a "perfect storm" of global population growth and climate change. We must grow more food to feed more mouths at a time when growing that food is becoming harder. This talk will discuss the ideas scientists are developing to meet this challenge.