BadGeoMovies: Ice Age 2: The Meltdown

Amy is a paleontology student, so it's no wonder that she wanted to target Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. From wooly mammoths convinced that they are opossums to cryogenically frozen dinosaurs and bizarre geometry of glacial melt, there's plenty to focus on. On the plus side, the film did a surprising job of selecting animals that would have coexisted in space and time. Amy has a wicked sense of humor; if you know her, you can hear her struggling to completely let loose here.

BadGeoMovies: The Core

In this video, Shiloh points out some of her issues with the movie The Core. In it, a military science experiment gone awry has stopped the rotation of the Earth's core, resulting in the end of the magnetic field. Disasters ensue on the surface of the Earth as a team of scientists embark on a journey to the core in a ship made of "unobtainium," intent on using nukes to restart the rotation. Bad Geo Movies theme: nukes are the fastest way to both create and prevent natural disasters. (Not so much in real life.) This video uses text instead of sound, so don't try to increase the volume.

BadGeoMovies: The Day After Tomorrow

In this video, MS student Clarissa Enslin takes a look at the movie The Day After Tomorrow. She loves this movie, guys. Like, really loves it. Even so, she dives right in to discuss some of the problematic science and geography involved in the film. Also, she's from South Africa so she takes a particular pleasure in the fact that the southern hemisphere appears to be untouched by the nearly world-ending disaster.

BadGeoMovies: Volcanic Potpourri

This video was created by Chris Mudge, one of the students in our Bad Geo Movies class this term. (It's more properly known as "GEOL 1199/5599: Geology in the Movies/Media," but that just sounds far too formal for our 1 credit seminar.) Each week throughout the semester, we had a short lecture to orient students and community members to some aspect of relevant geology, then watched/heckled/discussed a bad geology film. Afterwards, students wrote short essays explaining good and bad science presented in the movie, with grad students expected to also make a short (~5 min) video about a movie of their choice. This is one of those videos. Not content to focus on just one film, Chris addresses geologic problems in 4 of them: Dante's Peak, Volcano, Pompeii, and Miami Magma. Volcanoes, man. They make good (bad) movies.