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For all of our history there’ve always been people who are going out to find something
new, to understand something new and to bring those things back home to expand and share
culture. That’s what science is about. That’s what’s so exciting. I’m Dawn Sumner. I’m
a professor of geology at UC Davis and I’m in a virtual reality environment where we
can make things like a virtual globe that allows us to investigate things we can’t
see in the real world. We live in just an instant of time and the Earth is four and
a half billion years old. Looking at rocks and trying to understand how they form and
how they reflect Earth’s history is my job. For example climate change and sea level rise
and earthquake hazards. So each one of these little colored spots represents and earthquake
in California which we’re looking at right in here. Most of the earthquakes are pretty
close to the surface. We think about ourselves as being an earthquake country but it’s
really not as bad as somewhere like Japan. But there are a huge number of earthquakes.
This big red one here caused a tsunami. So if we look inside the Earth you can see that
a lot of those earthquakes are below the surface and that’s because part of earth’s ocean
crust is sinking down into the interior of the earth. When the solar system was first
forming, Mars and Earth were pretty similar and they’ve gone very different directions.
One of the reasons I’m really interested in going to Mars is to try and understand
what the early Earth was like. The nice thing about virtual data is you can put anything
you want in here and I’m interested in looking at data from Mars. So here we are. These are
images from orbiters and we have reconstructed the virtual surface. We’re looking at much
older rocks than we can typically find on Earth and if we read the history in those
rocks, it can tell us about what happened on early Mars and that will help us understand
what happened on early Earth. So we’re hoping that this ridge contains clues to ancient
water on Mars and in particular we’re interested in finding out if it was an environment that
could have hosted life. But just to be able to walk down the hall and step onto the surface
of Mars like this is a real treat. So we’re looking at colored pictures of Mars that the
Curiosity Rover took. The first color image I saw of the distance just so beautiful and
I just started crying. There is just something familiar about this landscape. So we look
at the layers, we look at the textures in those rocks and that tells us the history
of how they formed. This is a virtual model of the Rover Curiosity and it’s life-sized.
So the images in the background were taken by these two cameras. Those are the first
color cameras to take landscape images of Mars like this. It’s a photo album from
another planet and there’s this huge sense of adventure and excitement, seeing a new
place, a place where no human being has ever seen anything before until we get those pictures
down. When you reach out beyond Earth and try to understand things, it puts our own
lives in perspective nicely.
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