A beam of Enlightenment in the IMAX of Charlotte, North Carolina

From Jim Hoffman, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, Discovery Place, NC:

Due to unexpected interest in the film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, Discovery Place will present the film during three special screenings on April 14 at The Charlotte Observer IMAX Dome Theater. Discovery Place will then work the film into its regular schedule beginning Aug. 12.

Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, narrated by Ed Harris (A Beautiful Mind, Pollack, The Right Stuff), takes viewers into the great abyss up to 12,000 feet below the water’s surface where sunlight is unable to penetrate. Audiences explore the sea cliffs of Spain, where they join paleontologist Dolf Seilacher, who searches for an elusive creature responsible for the fossil he found a half-century earlier. Then a team aboard the submersible research vessel Alvin explores deep-sea vents in the Eastern Pacific. Here they find life that manages to thrive in extreme heat, pressure and toxic water.

The audience descends to the ocean floor, making its way through the rugged volcanic landscape of the Mid Ocean Ridge. Here on the underwater mountain range, 40,000 miles long and 500 miles wide, lay smoking hydrothermal vent chimneys and colonies of life unlike anything else on Earth. In one area, red-hot lava boils up from the ocean floor leaving Volkswagen-sized rock formations and killing everything in its path.

In startling images, the audience sees the decimation and resurrection of the community witnessed by scientists: mysterious spaghetti worms, ghostly galatheid crabs and six-foot-tall tubeworms—creatures with no mouth and no stomach. The film, in colorful graphic style, launches the audience into space to witness the formation of the solar system to explain how this volcanic activity, decaying radiation of this long-ago event, provides a source of energy for life.

Admission to The Charlotte Observer IMAX Dome Theater is $7.50 for ages 14-59, $6 for ages 2-13 and 60+. For more information or to purchase tickets call (704) 372-6261, ext. 300.

Good one, Jim.

It's still pretty dark in Charleston. I guess that's why they call it South Carolina.