Marine life and glass making is an interesting combination, and was not something I was expecting to learn about at Cornell. However, watching the Fragile Legacy with Dr. Drew Harvell was a great learning experience about both of the topics. First, the glass making. I’ve been to the Corning Museum of Glass and did a glass making tutorial where we made a small bowl of glass. It was extremely difficult and lengthy to make this bowl, and it had no intricate details or colors or separate components. The amount of skill that the Blaschka family had to have to create their glass sea creatures amazes me. In addition, they most likely dedicated a huge amount of time to each glass figure. It is great that Cornell is working towards restoring these pieces for display and teaching and that the Blaschka’s hard work did not go to waste.

The marine life featured in Dr. Drew Harvell’s talk as well as the film was fascinating. There is so much life under the sea that we know very little about, so we also know very little about how their disappearance would affect our ecosystem. With global warming and all the other harm humans are doing to our natural environment, species are disappearing from certain areas and even disappearing altogether. If we don’t work towards improving our ecological footprint, marine life as we know it will begin to disappear, bringing unknown effects to the rest of the world.