For Immediate Release Contact: Nancy O'Shea (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) Papua New Guinea: Living in the Ring of Fire In The Field Museum's upcoming exhibition, Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters, rare artifacts and photographs from the museum's A.B. Lewis Collection connect visitors to the geologically violent region of the South Pacific. Supplemented with objects and images gathered in the 1990s by John Terrell, The Field Museum's current Regenstein Curator of Anthropology, the collection illustrates the resilience of the people and cultures of the deceivingly tranquil island of Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea lies in a part of the world known as the Pacific Ring of Fire where the plates of the Earth's surface meet from seemingly all directions, creating a complex network of fault systems. The jagged highland mountains, lowland swamps, lagoons, and plains that characterize the landscape of Papua New Guinea have been shaped by countless earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, droughts, landslides, and floods. The forces generated at faults that affect Papua New Guinea place unforgiving demands on human survival. People living on the island today rely on survival methods developed thousands of years ago by their ancestors. These survival methods have been handed down through generations in oral histories and learned techniques of sustainable plant cultivation. The influence of natural disasters on Papua New Guineans is revealed not only in these survival methods that transcend generational boundaries but also in unique combinations of modern and traditional methods used to prepare for and respond to disasters. Continue >>