Mar 19
Martha's Vineyard Film Society Tisbury, MA
TicketsBaylor Fox-Kemper
Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Brown University
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou— Sea level, heating, and acidification (and what you can do)
Program Description
Professor Fox-Kemper examines the increasing effects of climate change on marine ecosystems and highlights several danger areas, before focusing on everyday solutions we can employ.
Film Synopsis
With a plan to exact revenge on a mythical shark that killed his partner, oceanographer Steve Zissou rallies a crew that includes his estranged wife, a journalist, and a man who may or may not be his son.
Internationally famous oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his crew — Team Zissou — set sail on an expedition to hunt down the mysterious, elusive, possibly non-existent Jaguar Shark that killed Zissou's partner during the documentary filming of their latest adventure. A young airline co-pilot who may or may not be Zissou's son (Owen Wilson), a beautiful journalist assigned to write a profile of Zissou (Cate Blanchett), and Zissou's estranged wife and co-producer, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), joins them on their voyage. They face overwhelming complications including pirates, kidnapping, and bankruptcy.
About the Speaker
Baylor studies the physics of the ocean and how the ocean fits into the Earth's climate system, using climate models, satellites, and autonomous observations. In 2013, Baylor joined the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, after working in other roles at the University of Colorado, Princeton, NOAA, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and MIT. He co-led the Ocean, Cryosphere, and Sea Level Change chapter of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Physical Science Basis (WGI) Report, and he is presently co-chair of a World Climate Research Program Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations.
At Brown, Baylor works mainly within the Oceans, Ice, and Atmospheres Research Group. He is the STEM faculty director of the Equitable Climate Futures initiative, an elected fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES), an affiliated faculty member of the Brown Theoretical Physics Center, the Brown Center for Fluid Mechanics, and the Initiative for Sustainable Energy, and he supports the SciToons and Vis-A-Thon programs. He is also an associate editor of Science Advances and a JASON.
His Ph.D. is from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography working with Joe Pedlosky (at WHOI) and Paola Rizzoli (at MIT). In his pre-oceanographic career, I trained in physics at Reed with Nick Wheeler and at Brandeis with Stanley Deser and X.-J. Wang.