The Natural History of Earth's Atmosphere

“To air is normal. To breathe? Divine!”

Perhaps nothing is more essential to our lives than air — we can’t go more than a few seconds without it. The air we have now is not just necessary for life on Earth, it was created by life on Earth. Other planets have air, but none have air that we can safely breathe. At least, not that we know so far. And Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t always been breathable. Tim Livengood will present on the natural history or earth’s atmosphere – what it is, where it came from, how it has changed – and where it is going.

Tim Livengood measures composition, temperature, and wind velocity in planetary atmospheres, using ground- and space-based techniques. He is the Principal Investigator for the Submillimeter Solar Observation Lunar Volatiles Experiment (SSOLVE), an instrument to measure water vapor in the Moon’s extremely tenuous atmosphere from the lunar surface, and he is the instrument scientist for the Heterodyne Instrument for Planetary Winds and Composition (HIPWAC). He is a co-investigator on several instruments and instrument-development projects. He was a co-investigator of NASA’s EPOXI mission, for which he was the education and public outreach team leader on the EPOCh component (Extrasolar Planets Observation and Characterization). In his copious free time, he is a storyteller.