Announcing: on February 14, at Batsto Village
Mark Demitroff speaking on “Earth, Wind, and Ice: Ancient Climate Change and Periglacial Landscapes”
It will take place at the visitor center auditorium on Saturday February 14 at 1:00pm. Admission is $2.00 per person.
We will explore New Jersey’s remarkable ice-age legacy. The cold, dry, and windy conditions that existed here during the last cold period have few modern terrestrial equivalents. Climate-driven movement of frozen and thawing ground, along with strong winds from the nearby Laurentide Ice Sheet, have helped to fashion South Jersey’s terrain into the unique landscape that we value today as the Pine Barrens. Many of these periglacial (cold, non-glacial) features today provide critical habitat for rare, threatened, and endangered plants and animals. Spungs, savannahs, cripples, blue holes, and dunes have played an important role in human history as well. Learn how these landforms were woven together in a geographic tapestry of interactions between nature and society.
Mark Demitroff grew up on a Pinelands poultry farm, and gained a deep respect for the Pinelands National Reserve’s physical and cultural landscapes. He internationally lectures and publishes on regional land surface processes, raising serious questions about the health of South Jersey’s shallow aquifer and has changed older interpretations of past climate change.
