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Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance
Locally sponsored by Dex MediaDecember 5, 2006 - June 4, 2007Deep in the dense rain forest, a lightning storm illuminates a magnificent black jaguar prowling along vine-covered walls, past stone masks and towering pyramids. These are the ruins of the lost city of Tikal : once the heart of the ancient Mayan civilization. Then, a thousand years ago, this teeming metropolis was mysteriously abandoned. What happened here? What keeps all cities alive, then and now?
Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance, narrated by Harrison Ford, is a scientific adventure from the Arctic to the Equator. The film opens on Tuesday, December 5 at the Lied Super Screen Theatre and is sponsored locally by Dex Media. Flying over the skyscrapers of New York City, we pass through the windows of a high-rise apartment where a family is finishing breakfast. Today's cities feel as if they will last forever. Everything we need is at our disposal. But do we ever stop to wonder where all this comes from? Before we realize what is happening, the camera moves towards the faucet where the father is filling a glass of water, follows the stream of water, and swims up into the faucet.
In a wild "special effects" ride, we drop down through the building's water pipes, twist through city mains and valves into the great aqueduct, and finally burst out of the subterranean system and up to the sunlit surface of the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskill Mountains. Because most of us live in cities, it's easy to forget how much we depend on nature. If New York had to build water-purification plants, it would cost billions. Here, in the Catskills, nature provides that service free of charge. We follow rainfall into the soil, past giant grubs and truck-sized mites. What we call "dirt" is actually a miniature metropolis far busier than New York -a living, breathing world where tiny organisms forage for food. These organisms break down leaves and organic matter in soil and water: they are the agents that purify our water, create the soil we grow our food in, and condition the air we breathe. We don't know exactly how they do this, but we do know that the answer lies in the number of different life forms present and the relationships between them. Scientists call this complex variety of life "biodiversity." The health of each ecosystem is determined by the diversity of life within it. Everywhere, life has found ways to thrive. Each place, each ecosystem, shapes its own community of plants and animals. In an aerial montage, we fly from the polar ice caps to the equator. The soundness of each ecosystem depends on the maintenance of the balance of the interrelationships of all the organisms within it.
In the beds of giant kelp along the California coast, this balance is vividly illustrated. Giant kelp is a nursery for thousands of species of fish and aquatic life. But 50 years ago it was in decline as a result of an imbalance between two key players: sea otters and sea urchins. Urchins have a voracious appetite for kelp, and because otters had been hunted to the brink of extinction for their fur, the urchin population exploded. Before long, much of the seafloor was bare, razed of its kelp. Then, conservation groups began reintroducing sea otters to coastal waters where their favorite food, the urchins, were in abundance. A sea otter bobs to the surface, rolls over, cracks an urchin shell and eats the contents within. With the return of the otter, the kelp forests flourished-along with all the species that depend on them. There are still places on Earth where we can see the natural world undisturbed by human beings, where life adapts and diversifies as it has since time began. A young botanist, Fabián Michelangeli of the American Museum of Natural History, is preparing to join a Rapid Assessment Program on an expedition to one of the most mysterious and unexplored places on Earth: the table mountains of southern Venezuela that have come to be known as the "Lost World." These mountains inspired Conan Doyle's famous novel of the same name, featuring intrepid explorers who discover a land of living dinosaurs. Landing at Canaima, the capital city of Venezuela, Fabián and two other scientists and their guide load into a jeep to travel across the vast grasslands of the Gran Sabana. The next morning, at first light, the team sets off with an Indian boatman in a dugout canoe. When the river becomes too shallow, they begin to hike through the rain forest, surveying the life they see: coatimundis, spider monkeys, guacamayos, even puma tracks, indications of a rich biodiversity. High above and in front of the team loom the table mountains, or tepuis : thousands of feet of vertical cliff wrapped at the base in dense rain forest. In a clearing, they meet the helicopter pilots who will carry them to their destination: the summit of Mount Roraima. As the helicopter lifts up out of the rain forest, they watch as huge rivers curl round this island stuck in time-geologically ancient, botanically unique. The helicopter threads its way between vertical columns of rock thousands of feet high-the Valley of 1000 Columns. At last it flies towards the magnificent plateau of Mount Roraima. Two miles' high, the mountain's ramparts push up above the clouds. The helicopter skims the jagged surface, searching for a landing spot on Roraima's rugged summit, which has eroded into a labyrinth of pillars and canyons. When the helicopter lands, the scientists find themselves in a landscape just as Conan Doyle imagined it: the Lost World of our imaginations. The biologists spread out and begin their observations among strange rock formations, wreathed in cloud, which seem, in their turn, to observe the newcomers. The scientists begin to examine the strange organisms that have found a way to make a living here from carnivorous plants to a frog that walks and rolls instead of hops. Fabián turns over a thin mat of endemic plants clinging to the infertile soil and takes a sample. Many plants here have adapted to poor soils by becoming carnivorous. An insect lands on the lip of a pitcher plant, lured in by smell and color. Before it can escape, the insect slips into dark water, where other organisms devour it. The plant itself survives on the excretions of its well-fed guests. Organisms are shaped by local conditions-by geology, soil, climate, and by other forms of life. How little we know of life's diversity, even though we're utterly dependent upon it. Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance can be seen several times daily at the Lied Super Screen Theatre from December 5 - June 4, 2007. Premiere members should make reservations as soon as possible for the premiere on Monday, December 4. Please call Visitor Services at 402-461-4629 or 1-800-508-4629 for reservations and showtimes. To learn more about the film, visit http://www.amnh.org/museum/imax/lost_worlds Showtimes
Schedule is subject to change. |
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