KEYNOTE 21st ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF THE CRANES November 18-23, 2008 Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge Festival Art - "The Gang's All Here" by Elli Sorensen

Thursday night KEYNOTE Speaker
Dr. Penelope Boston
Mysteries of the Ft. Stanton Cave and Snowy River

8:00 pm to 9:30 pm Th45 - $5
Macey Center, Auditorium

The birds that visit New Mexico every year fly over a wondrous hidden wilderness beneath the ground that few people (or birds!) ever see. This wilderness exists in the numerous and extensive cave systems that underlay many parts of New Mexico. A mere hour and a half drive from Socorro to the east is the Ft. Stanton Cave system, a cave that has been known and used by Native Americans, white settlers, and is used today for recreational cave trips. In 2001, Ft. Stanton yielded up a new glorious secret buried at her heart ... a gleaming "frozen" river of crystalline calcite in a previously unknown passage, Snowy River.

Professor Boston will present the amazing animals and geomicroorganisms that inhabit or visit cave systems including those that live in Ft. Stanton Cave and Snowy River. She will discuss the critical nutrient and water connections between surface and subsurface ecosystems and the vital role that caves play in the natural world.

Dr. Penelope Boston is Director of the Cave and Karst Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, NM. Boston is also Associate Director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, NM. A fellow of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, she does research in geomicrobiology and astrobiology in extreme environments; human life support issues in space and planetary environments; and use of robotics to assist exploration and science in extreme Earth and extraterrestrial environments. Boston is the author of over 100 technical and popular publications, editor of 4, and has two upcoming popular books. Her work has been featured in about 150 print and broadcast media outlets.

 

Saturday night KEYNOTE Speaker
Dr. Peter Raven
How Many Species Will Survive the 21st Century?

8:00 pm to 9:30 pm Sa110 - $5
Macey Center, Auditorium

Calculations from the longevity of species in the fossil record indicate an extinction rate of approximately 1 species per million per year over the past 65 million years. Written accounts from the past 500 years indicate that this rate has increased perhaps two orders of magnitude, so that we may be losing as many as 100 species per million per year now, and the rate is increasing. Habitat destruction, climate change, selective gathering of individual species, and the spread of alien invasive species are important in driving the accelerating rates of extinction. With extraordinary effort that we are likely to apply only to groups such as birds, extinction in this century might be limited to as little as 15% of all species; for many groups, it could approach or exceed 50%. The choice is ours, and depends on many different kinds of actions that Dr. Raven will discuss.