Field Trip!

October 20, 2024, National Museum of Natural History

For this field trip, I had to go alone. I had a frisbee tournament on Saturday and Sunday, but the important day to be there was Sunday. Instead of going with the class on Sunday and missing bracket play, I went solo at 12 on Saturday. This made the trip harder. Instead of being able to split up the work, I looked at every exhibit.

The first exhibit I looked at was the Cellphones: Unseen Connections display. This was full of different media for conveying information. Some of them, like the paragraphs on the wall and interactive exhibits, were successful ways of conveying information, as they allowed the patrons to browse at their own speed. Other methods were less successful, chief among them the video exhibit. It did not allow you to choose which video to watch or start the video over if you missed the beginning.

Some material covered in this exhibit was the environmental impact of cell phones. The materials used in cellphones are hard to recycle, and often they just get thrown out. These same materials are also hard to mine and often the mining process harms the environment. But cellphones are not all bad. The videos mentioned above talked about using cellphones for identifying mosquitoes to combat disease, aboriginal people using cellphones as a replacement for a traditional remembrance item, and Inuit people using a novel social media app to connect with their culture. these

The next exhibit I browsed was the Koch Climate Change. This talked about human impact on the environment. Some topics that were mentioned included the other species of humans that died out. It was implied that we had something to do with it, but nothing explicit in the timeline that the museum used to transmit the information. Humans also impact land when we deforest it or dam rivers or create huge mines. This information was presented in a video. The extinction rate for animals is now 48 times higher than before humans lived. This information was presented with a picture of a polar bear on a wall. This exhibit was not super explicit with the way that humans negatively affected the environment. The most clear things were in a pro-con list, which negated some of the impact that the cons had.

After visiting the Koch hall, I moved to the Climate Change exhibits in the Sant Ocean Hall. There, I watched two videos, one on methane seeps in the ocean and another on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Both could be understood by the general public. Methane seeps occur when dead things leak methane on the seafloor. Bacteria like that and some species build up rocky structures around the leaks, which then harbor other species. This leads to increased biodiversity around the methane seeps. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch video was more interesting. It turns out that it is not a big pile of garbage on the surface, it is a bunch of microplastics spread out over a large range of depths, which make it really hard to clean up. The best solution is prevention; picking up plastics before it breaks down and gets to the ocean. Another video was provided on a globe-shaped screen. I watched the entirety of the presentation, all about the interaction of climate and the ocean, and also climate change. It talked about ocean acidification and sea level rise. The exhibit’s topics were dire, but it ended with a positive, optimistic outlook.

The final exhibit I took a peek at was the Koch Hall of fossils. There were dioramas placed around the hall and I took notes on two of them. The first was from 125 thousand years ago in Big Bone Like, Kentucky. At this point, the climate was warm and the ice sheets were retreating. In the diorama was a mud pit with a mammoth stuck in it. There was a leopard and hoofed animals around. There was no information about the carbon levels. The second diorama I looked at was from roughly 22 thousand years ago, in the same place. There were large ice sheets in North America, and the land was covered in ice. The carbon content of the atmosphere was half of what it is today, and it was about 5 degrees celsius cooler on average. The sea was 125 meters lower than it is today. These dioramas were extremely effective in conveying information because it was really cool to see the little figurines.

Along a side wall, there were a couple of exhibits on past climate changes. One happened 56 million years ago, when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere doubled in a couple thousand years.This caused the temperatures to spike 6 degrees celsius and animals to get smaller. This was found out with fossils of leaves. When there is high carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere, plants contain less protein. This means that bugs have to eat more. The fossil record shows that leaves were eaten a lot more in this period. It was hard to get this information, as the video looped without a “restart” button, so you just had to wait for the beginning again.

This was the story of my excursion to the National Museum of Natural History.