Excursion to the Museum of Natural History:
October 20th, 2024:
Below are the exhibits in the museum that I visited. In each section I describe what I saw in each exhibit and how effective the exhibit was at explaining.
CELLPHONES: UNSEEN CONNECTIONS (2nd Floor):
The cellphone exhibit in the natural history museum was a very intriguing scene. One technique the exhibit used is cartoons to relay information about new technologies. I think this is a great technique because it engages the audience and catches your eye. Another presentation technique is a screen with stats and pie charts talking about different ways in which we are using our technology and how it affects us. It includes easy to read stats which lets the audience know the information in an interesting way. Lastly, another presentation technique is a touch screen game that shares information in an interesting and fun way. The materials of the phone include plastic, glass, palladium, and cobalt. The plastic part is the only part that has a certain amount of times it can be recycled, but the rest of the materials can be recycled on and on. It is just a very time consuming process. There are other very valuable materials in phones such as gold, silver, and platinum. Almost 80% of the carbon footprint of your phone is done in the manufacturing and distribution part before you even have the phone. Making a phone has a huge carbon footprint. After use, electronics become E-waste which is very harmful to the environment. That’s why it’s important to recycle your phone to reuse the materials. The exhibit uses visual aids and easily readable walls to relay this information. One technological impact is the introduction of 5G which connects all technologies together which can be good for fast speed and connection but bad in which more energy is needed and it makes us rely on technology. They showed this on a wall talking about all the G’s eras. One social impact of technology is to allow people to witness violence through a screen and not care about the issues actually happening with the violence and laughing at it. This was shared on a wall in a cartoon format. Another social impact is the sharing of misinformation because someone can just create something online that isn’t true and people will believe it. This was shared on a wall cartoon which was very intriguing and engaging.
CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE DAVID H. KOCH HALL OF HUMAN ORIGINS (1st Floor):
In the exhibit humans change the world, it shows how the world has changed through the anthropocene era. One topic discussed in the section is agriculture and also how it relates to the human population. There is a graph with pictures of food that humans would eat starting from 12,000 years ago. It shows how agriculture grew with humans and the more we learned how to grow food the more our population grew on earth. It portrays food areas such as wheat, corn, chicken, bananas, coffee, and how big our population was when we figured out how to farm these things. Another topic discussed is CO2 levels on earth, temperature levels on earth, and sea levels on earth. It shows a graph starting 400,000 years ago to today and shows the fluctuations of all those levels. It shares how in the past century CO2 levels have risen farther than humans have ever witnessed and it relates to when humans started doing activities that caused greenhouse gasses. Lastly another topic shared is human evolution and how we traveled around the earth. This is shared through a bar timeline with pictures of our evolution. It starts with a picture of Africa where humans originated from and then shares the continents we went to in a timeline. Some critics of the hall state that this exhibit de-emphasizes the human impact on the environment and climate. I would agree with them because the part in this exhibit that talks about climate change and CO2 levels and such doesn’t specifically state that humans caused this environmental change but it points out human eras such as the Industrial Revolution which hints to us that humans influenced the CO2 levels without actually stating it.
CLIMATE CHANGE & HUMAN IMPACT IN THE SANT OCEAN HALL (1st Floor):
In this exhibit, there were many screens with different videos playing on them. In the video “Active, ever changing, complex” it explains how water is always changing but it is key to life on earth. The video also shares how 71% of earth is ocean and how the amount of water on earth helped life to form on the planet. This information is something that a general visitor could understand. In another video, “Hurricane storm surge” it talks about natural disasters like hurricanes and how they form due to changing temperatures in the air and the water in the oceans by the equators. It also mentions how dangerous storm surges can be with rising water levels by coastal areas which can lead to flooding and drowning victims. The video mentions how as the climate changes, it gets incredibly harder to track natural disasters and to tell how bad they might be. In an additional video called “Our blue planet” it mentions how the ocean has absorbed 25% of CO2 emissions since 1800. In the video you learn that less than 5% of the ocean is protected and the NOAA is working to protect marine life and explore the oceans. Lastly, in the “Global Ocean video” it shared how 4.6 billion years ago volcanoes and icy comets brought water to earth's surface. Through rain, oceans were then formed. As life formed, phytoplankton provide oxygen to the earth which is what humans breathe today. The video also talked about plate tectonics and how continents were formed and how earthquakes happen. This information is useful because it shares the history of our earth and how we are where we are today.
CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE DAVID H. KOCH HALL OF FOSSILS – DEEP TIME:
In the climate change exhibit there were pylons with different information on each pylon. On one of them it talked about Wyoming 56-53 million years ago. There were “Lush rainforests” and the CO2 levels were 5 times higher than today. The temperature was 14-25 degrees higher than today. The sea level was 200-330m higher than today. This was peculiar because today's environment in Wyoming is nothing like a rainforest. This part of the exhibit was effective because you can see how the world has changed and the effect humans have on that change. Another pylon talked about the Hell Creek formation in Montana, 67-66 million years ago. The CO2 was 4 times higher than today, the temperature was 16-17 degrees hotter than today, and the sea level was 200-225 m higher than today. It was a hot humid environment where floodplains allowed a lot of life to form. This pylon was also interesting because the climate back then is very different from the one now. The Climate change exhibit also featured touch screen areas that would share CO2, temperature, and water levels from different periods. It also shows the continents and how they moved. By scrolling back, I could look at the Triassic era where levels were much higher and the continents were joined together forming Pangea. The screen also shared how fossils and other information could inform us about our world today and climate change. Data of CO2 levels could inform us what the environment was like back then because CO2, temperature, and water levels are all related. This exhibit did a great job of sharing information about the past and how our world has changed since. It also gives us a reason to be worried about how fast our climate is changing because it has always been a slow process in the past.