Community Corner

Nurture Nature Center Opens in Easton

Public gets a glimpse of "Sphere" program in a lesson about flooding and climate change.

Keith Strunk had the world at his fingertips Tuesday morning.

In this case, the world was a six-foot sphere hung from the ceiling on the third floor of , with four projectors  creating an image of the globe on the sphere's surface.

And Strunk could use a remote control to "turn" the globe, show the audience historic weather patterns, and what the Earth's temperature will be like in 89 years.

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This was coming out party, its first public event. And as such, it focused on something Easton knows about: .

"It always felt a little bit like Waiting for Godot," said Strunk, recalling the unease of preparing for a flood in Frenchtown, the New Jersey river community where he lives.

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Tuesday's program featured an interview -- shown on the Sphere -- with state climitologist Paul Knight, who said Pennsylvania is experiencing one more month of rain each year than it did a century ago.

The good part, Knight said, is that there's more water for us to use. "The bad part is it’s not happening evenly," he added.

The program also included information on climate change, with a model showing the earth getting increasingly warmer between now and the year 2100, when the world's population is expected to hit nine billion.

The Sphere program gets most of its information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Rachel Hogan-Carr, the center's director.

It allows the center to provide educational programs on current weather events.

"Within two days of the tsunami, they could show the path of that wave," she said. The center had planned to do a program about Hurricane Irene last week, but it was cancelled...due to flooding.

The Nurture Nature Center has scheduled four public forums for the next 12 months: Dec. 8 of this year, and then in 2012 on Feb. 9, May 10 and Aug. 9.


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