Ellen Morris Bishop – ‘Hell Unleashed’ Presentation
Hell Unleashed: How Flood Basalts Have Shaped Life and Landscapes from Snowball Earth to the Columbia Plateau
This talk will describe the massive flood basalts which have occurred around the world over hundreds of million years and their effects on the entire planet compared to the relatively recent and smaller Columbia basalts that we see in the Gorge. Flood basalts are implicated in everything from saving the planet from perpetual entombment in ice, and the blossoming of the first complex life, to the most massive extinction known, when 95 percent of life on Earth perished. They are a sort of Vishnu character in the geologic record– both creator and destroyer.
Ellen Morris Bishop is an author, an educator, a photographer, a researcher. As we become a more urban, urbane, and technologically-driven society, she thinks it is essential to re-establish our ties to landscape and place. She tries to accomplish this through both images and words, as well as interpretive work.
With a Ph.D. in geology, and specialization in the exotic terranes of the Northwest, it’s natural that Pacific Northwest landscapes–their geologic history and ecosystems–are her specialty. Her photographs try to reveal the landscape’s changing forms through time, and human’s changing relationship with nature. Her images and interpretive work are used by the Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, National Park Service, Oregon State Parks, Condon Museum, High Desert Museum and many others. When not shooting assignments or stock images, she teaches geology at Whitman College.