Jenny E. Ross, lecture. "The Island of California: Is there a scientific explanation for the 17th-century myth?" Throughout the 1600s, European cartographers mistankenly decpicted California as an enormous island lying off the west coast of North America, despite the fact that during the 1500s it was widely known to be a peninsula and had been mapped correctly. Why did this infamous and persistent error occur? Ms. Ross describes how she developed an interdisciplinary explanation for this 400-year-old mystery using historic maps and first-person accounts written by 17th-century explorers, combined with recent scientific evidence from hydrology, climatology, and volcanology.

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