Tonight, Thursday, March 8, Dr. Lee Cooper will present “Potential Ecosystem Impacts: The decline of seasonal sea ice in the Arctic” at the public lecture series offered by The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute.

Doors open at the UTMSI Visitor’s Center Auditorium at 6:30 p.m. and the talk begins at 7 p.m.

The Visitor’s Center is located on Cotter Street on the way to the beach.

The public lecture series is free and open to the public.

Cooper is a professor at the Chesapeake Biological Lab at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. To learn more about Cooper’s work, go to http:// arctic.cbl.umces.edu.

The next talk, coming on Thursday, March 15, will be “Economy of Scale: The world’s largest fish closely manages its swimming costs,” by Dr. Lee Fuiman.