Event Location: National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington
Event Date: October 20th, 2024
This was a great excursion which provided a series of questions to be answered based on various exhibits.
CELLPHONES: UNSEEN CONNECTIONS
When you stood in front of the giant phone it started to record you with texts displayed above your head. There was an exhibit with different parts of a phone. There were also videos and sounds playing throughout the section. Cellphones are connection tools and they help people learn and connect around the world. Things have been innovated and inventeddue to cellphones from emojis to the different shapes and types of pockets on clothing. The artists who developed the exhibits used graohics to present how cellphones can be biased due to the same type of people making them. They also used comics to illustrate how cellohones can cause trauma due to its contents. Another thing to note is that electrical waster is very much a problem but phones can be refurbished to save the environment. The artists conveyed this idea by displaying a tower of old phones conpiled together visually showing the large impact of phones on our world.
Fun Fact: The average cellphone contains 65 elements proving our technology is connected to the natural world.
CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE DAVID H. KOCH HALL OF HUMAN ORIGINS
Human bodies have successfully adapted to diverse climates and diets; as humans spread to different areas their bones/skeletons have changed. The artists in this exhibit used a skeleton of a homo erectus adapted to hot temperatures which was much smaller than the neanderthal skeleton displayed next to it that was adapted to cold temperatures. Another aspect of humans that have changed are their brains. From the times of 6 to 2 million years ago, brains have increased only slightly. More recently at 800,000 to 200,000 years ago, brains have evolved more rapidly. Over time humans became more and more social allowing for greater advancements, As their brains grew their social network grew. They used interactive displays with buttons and diagrams. Some critics of the hall state that the social life exhibit de-emphasizes the human impact on the environment and climate and I agree because I when I was there I saw little about the negative affects of humans became greater.
CLIMATE CHANGE & HUMAN IMPACT IN THE SANT OCEAN HALL
I watched the "Fuel for the Storm" video and the data within the video explained that for a hurricane to occur there needs to be warm water at least 80℉, moist air, converging winds, cluster of thunderstorms on ocean surfaces, and heat energy. Another video I watched was "When Lightning Strikes" and I learned that lightning is a rapid discharge of electrical energy, 100 million volts of electricity, and it can be within clouds, between clouds, and cloud to ground. It doesn't really hit the ocean as much as land, but at times it does happen. When looking at the "Global Ocean Video" with the floating globe I learned about Ocean Motion and the Ocean Conveyer Belt which begins near the North Pole in the Atlantic. The journey can take as long as 1000 years. Its a global system connected by currents. The globe has a simulation of ducks being placed in the ocean and how they would move through the Ocean Conveyer Belt. I also learned more about Pangea and continental plate movement. The sphere was a visual representation of what the narrator was describing so you understand more how ocean movement and plate movement occured. I think it is very useful because people are more likely to be intrigued by the information as well as understand what is going on.
CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE DAVID H. KOCH HALL OF FOSSILS – DEEP TIME
In this section there were multiple paleoenvironmental dioramas that I looked at including the Grasslands Far and Wide diorama. This one was of Harrison Formation, Nebraska 19 million years ago. At this point global climates cooled and grew more seasonal so the grasslands flourished. Mammals learned how to live in open spaces, CO₂ was up to 50% higher than today, the average global temperature was 5 to 12℉ higher, and global sea levels were 330 feet higher than today. I also looked at the Lush Rainforests diorama. This depicted Willwood Formation, Wyoming 56 to 53 million years ago. With the extinction of dinosaurs dense forests flourished since they would no longer be trampled, CO₂ levels were 5 times higher than today, the average global temperature was 14 to 25℉ higher, and global sea levels were 720 feet higher. For the climate change exhibits in this area one of the exhibits was about "A Global Heat Wave" which was from 56 million years ago. They used fossils to determine that different animal types changed with climate, plants became less nutritious, and animals got smaller. The exhibit explains the process well because it explains what they used to determine these changes and scientific knowledge to back up why they are making their claims, even providing fossil evidence.
