Sacred Sediments | Washington University @WashUSTL

Uploaded April 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

Climate scientist Bronwen Konecky travels to one of the largest high-altitude lakes in the world to unlock a climate mystery. Working with archaeologist Sarah Baitzel, she is looking for clues at the bottom of Lake Sibinacocha in Peru. Pre-Hispanic Andean cultures used this highlands area through the Inca and early colonial periods to about 500 years ago — despite dramatic fluctuations in local climate and lake levels. This film follows the scientists’ difficult mountain journey as they endure harsh conditions to learn about how a changing climate affects rainfall and life in the Earth’s tropical regions. To read the full story, visit: https://source.wustl.edu/2021/04/highlands-hunt-for-climate-answers/
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$Mary Jo Bang reads her poem “All Through the Night” | Washington University Mary Jo Bang, a nationally recognized author and professor of English, reads her poem “All Through the Night.” Originally published in The New Yorker, and later collected in Bang’s “The Last Two Seconds” (2015), the poem was inspired by Cyndi Lauper’s iconic song of the same title. This video was produced as part of a larger series that celebrates the contributions of poets and poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. All Through the Night (transcript) The rotational earth, the resting for seconds: hemisphere one meets hemisphere two, thoughts twist apart at the center seam. Everything inside is. Cyndi Lauper and I both fall into pure emptiness. That’s one way to think: I think I am right now. We have no past we won’t reach back— The clock ticks like the nails of a foiled dog chasing a faster rabbit across a glass expanse. A wheel of fortune spins on its side, stops and starts. The stopped time is no longer time, only an illusion that says, I can have this, and this, and this. Cyndi says nothing works like that. There is no all-purpose plastic totem that acts like a bouncer holding back the fact that at least once a day you look up: it’s the self you kept in a suitcase holding the key, coming to meet you, every cell a node in a network of ongoing doubling. Cyndi says the world expands but always keeps us in it. For every you, there’s a riot grrrl in prison in Putin’s Russia. You know the self dissolves and when it does—no figure, all ground, like a surface seen microscopically— you fill the frame and explode, a rubber-wound inside unravelling and becoming a measurement of whatever exits. It’s like sleep, if sleep were a film that didn’t include you, but no, whatever is happening, you are always in it, the indispensable point of view. Proof of that is that a lift force brings you back and you wake, back to your face, hands, mirror image in the bed next to you, Ketamine moment where kinesthesia is secondary to everything is possible: you and you and you and now and you and yes and you with the night-self singing backup. Onstage, the fractured future of a world which is the world with the scaffolding folded and laid on top of this night. All through it. Until it ends or else begins again. Meanwhile, that indefatigable wavering between what you want and what you get for wanting. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/02/all-through-the-night-2 https://artsci.wustl.edu/faculty-staff/mary-jo-bang →Subscribe: http://bit.ly/WashUSubscribe About Washington University in St. Louis: Washington University is a leader in research, scholarship and patient care. Through our world-class faculty, students, physicians, staff, alumni and friends, WashU brings us closer to the knowledge that matters and the stories that inspire us to change the world. Get more from Washington University: Official site: https://wustl.edu The Source: https://source.wustl.edu Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wustl/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wustl_official/?hl=en$