History
Mystic Aquarium was first opened in 1973 as a privately owned corporation. Kelvin Smith, the industrialist and philanthropist who was the primary shareholder, chose Mystic, Connecticut as the site because of the area's scenic shoreline and rich maritime history. In 1999, the aquarium and Ballard's Institute for Exploration combined to form a $52 million dollar expansion. The expansion features the Arctic Coast, a 1-acre (4,000 m2) outdoor beluga whale display, containing 750,000 US gallons (2,800 m3) of water.
The Challenge of the Deep exhibit includes new content on the explorations of Dr. Robert Ballard. The XD Theater operates year-round, featuring four different 3-D movies and a moving theater. The movies include Deep Sea 3-D, Sea Scare, and a roller coaster movie.
Read more about this topic: Mystic Aquarium & Institute For Exploration
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)