National Museum of Natural History

10/20/2024:


Hope Diamond located at the National Museum of Natural History

While at the National Museum of Natural History, I explored many different exhibits that included very descriptive and interactive models.

The first exhibit I looked at was the new hall of cell phones. In this space, the museum used three techniques to inform the audience. There were posters, electronic slides, and interactive screens. I believe that the interactive screens were the most effective of the three because they were fun and interactive, whereas the posters were the least effective since most of the posters had too many blocks of text, which felt hard to read. The electronic slides were somewhat effective due to the fact that they were organized neatly but still lacked the interactive aspect of the screens. Through these different methods, the museum explains that materials used in our phones are finite and are mostly conflict minerals. The extraction and sale of these minerals may contribute to human rights and environmental abuse. The exhibit also highlights the environmental impact of cell phones through personal narratives and statistics. The creation of a singular cellphone creates about 123 pounds of carbon emissions, and the disposal of cellphones leads to smelting, which leads to more carbon emissions, and e-waste with materials that could have been recycled. Additionally, the exhibit displayed multiple technological and social impacts phones have on day-to-day life. A technical impact shown was the fact that now we have the use of phones people don’t have to carry a lot of things around like wallets because the phone will have electronic versions of nearly so many things. Some social impacts that were shown were that young people from indigenous groups have the ability to learn their mother’s tongue with the use of language visualization apps. This allows for better lifestyles so families can connect with each other and their heritage. Also, the exhibit described the conflicts of images of violence. With cell phones violence can be spread to nearly everyone in just one simple video, showing the world all the horrible actions people take. This can help stop those who are doing the crimes but also many people become dramatized to the hatred being represented.

Next, I traveled to the Hall of Human Origins to explore all the things humans have affected or changed. The first example is agriculture. Humans originally would gather and hunt food, evolving in ways that would help benefit and respond to their own environments. Over time, humans realized they could control and breed certain plants and animals which led to farming, and herding. Next, humans have majorly changed CO2 levels. During the period of human evolution, Earth’s temperature and CO2 levels would rise. This resulted in the planet being warmer overall, climate changing, and the Earth’s ice caps melting. Finally, population growth has had a huge change for the world by the modern humans growing significantly in numbers resulting in the settlement across the world. Due to human settlement they have altered the way other species have to live and operate. When looking around I had to agree with most critics about the exhibit de-emphasizing human impacts on the environment and climate There seemed to be a significant emphasis on human evolution and our newly attained habits, such as growing and settling down, however, they appear to briefly touch the costs environmentally due to us settling down.

Next, I explored the ocean hall where I got to use their interactive videos to understand more about the climate. Under the “changing ocean” display there were videos that allowed for people to understand the disasters that occur in the environment. The first video was titled “When Lighting Strikes” which explained how lightning is a shock of electricity that will flow in the sky which can travel to the ground or ocean. Then it gets into how deadly the strikes can become by describing and showing all the destruction it can cause. Finally, it gives recommendations on how to avoid harm such as not using electronics and staying away from any water source. The other video “Hurricane Storm Surge” helped to inform people about another natural disaster of hurricanes. This described how hurricane winds are not the deadliest thing in the storm it is the storm surge afterwards. This is the water being steard up from high winds causes massive destruction and flooding. I describes how systems are in place like SLOSH to predict and let people prepare for a projected surge. In the video it gave one big piece of advice to people which is to “run from water and hide from wind.” These videos were very helpful as they were dumbed down so anyone could really understand. It used great images to help influence the projection of destruction cause by these natural events. Another room held a big globe which projected a video onto it for viewers to see effects happening on the Earth. The video went over the changes in the ocean, what phytoplankton are and how they are important, and the the different aspects of oceans. Some information portrayed were “4.6 billion years ago the planet was full of volcanoes”, “phytoplankton provides half the oxygen humans breath”, there are trenches and ridges in the oceans bigger than any on land”, “tectonic plates have constantly been changing”, and “plate movements create earthquakes which can then produce tsunamis.” The video uses the globe to show the effects on a global scale by moving and shifting maps on the globe. I personally think it was somewhat useful as it gives an ok representation of shifts of land and water based on the globe. It was just a little difficult to understand the images but other than that I think its a good platform of visualization.

Finally, I entered the hall of fossils where it showed the many changes our atmosphere and climate has had. Throughout the hall there were pylons which held little dioramas of past ecosystems to show the changes over time. I noticed two which described the changes in the Harrison Formation Nebraska. The first was a depiction of a rainforest 56-53 million years ago which had carbon levels five times higher, temperatures 14-25 degrees higher, and sea levels 660-720ft higher than now. Another pylon showed a grassland 19 million years ago which had carbon levels 50% higher, temperatures 5-12 degrees higher, and sea levels 330ft higher than now. I think these exhibits were effective because they gave a great visual representation of how life was like. It used scaling methods to show actual differences from now. The information was also very easy to read and take in for anyone to visualize. Along a wall there was depictions of how climate change occurred. The time it represented was 56 million year ago where a global heatwave doubled atmospheric carbon and led temperatures to rise about 6 degrees globally. Data used to figure out past climate are fossils that showed trends in animal development to better suit changing climate and that showed more evidence of insect feeding during this period in time.

Overall this museum helped to fully represent global changes on Earth in different aspects of the environment.