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Interactive exhibits at the Buffalo Museum of Science

Soil erosion (above) and wind effects (below right) - just two subjects assayed by the Science Museum's new exhibits.

Our Marvelous Earth

There are several very cool new exhibits in the just-opened, hands-on interactive zone entitled Our Marvelous Earth at the Buffalo Museum of Science. As well as some old holdings—rocks, mostly, but particularly interesting and instructive ones—that used to be stuck in display cases are now out in the open and better explained as to how they came to be. And a few exhibit items that could be better thought through.

There are several very cool new exhibits in the just-opened, hands-on interactive zone entitled Our Marvelous Earth at the Buffalo Museum of Science. As well as some old holdings—rocks, mostly, but particularly interesting and instructive ones—that used to be stuck in display cases are now out in the open and better explained as to how they came to be. And a few exhibit items that could be better thought through.

And what about the crucial matter that many marvelous aspects of the earth are disappearing due to climate change? Like habitat and species diversity. That polar bears have a place to live on earth. That large temperate zones with adequate rainfall produce the food the people of the earth need to live on. That could be a more prominent message of the exhibits.

Among the cool new items: a soil erosion exhibit in the form of a very watery flow channel, with renewable supply of beady sediment equivalent, that you can dam up in various ways or un-dam to see the effects of different dam and flow conditions on sediment movement; a wind turbine on which you can change the blade types and angles to see what blade configurations produce the most power; and a kind of wind tunnel—really wind booth—you stand in and push buttons to select wind effects ranging in intensity from cold front (only 40-mile-per-hour winds, but shivery cold), through thunderstorm, tropical storm, hurricane, and tornado (winds up to 80 miles per hour). You don’t stand in it long.

Also, a kiosk featuring a dozen or so films or videos that you run at your own speed—speeding up, slowing down, stopping, going backwards—of nature spectacles including an avalanche, the collapse of a volcano crater floor, a glacier break dumping a few hundred tons of ice and snow into the ocean in an instant, and a sunset over a mountain lake. So not all violent events.

The most interesting and educational of the new items, I thought, was an earthquake shaker table—two of them, actually—on which you build a structure of some sort—with Lincoln Logs in the one case, little broad flat planks in the other—on a kind of sandy soil base, then order up an earthquake of mild, medium, or severe intensity, and see how your construction fares.

An exhibit item on the Niagara Power Project, how that works, supposedly, has running water over a simplified model of the power generating station, but doesn’t explain how the water flow is converted into electricity. But I couldn’t even understand what it was saying about how the water flows, how it is controlled, where it goes.

And a display on solar energy, particularly with reference to the museum’s rooftop solar panel array and savings benefits, doesn’t explain how solar power is turned into electricity, that I could see, or what percentage of the museum’s electricity is supplied by its solar array.

Some fun weather technology that’s more about fun than weather. A duplicate of a television weather report module that lets you pretend you’re the weather report person, on camera, and even record your performance. But also some of snowflake maven Wilson Bentley’s original glass plate photo negatives of individual snowflakes, along with one of his handwritten data record books, with a paragraph or several of information on each snowflake he photographed. The museum owns some 10,000 of the negatives and related materials.

The most elaborate (and expensive-looking) exhibit item is a large electronic world globe with numerous control buttons mapping a large variety of data onto the globe, from standard land and sea configurations to tree cover by deciduous or evergreen to human suffering quotient to Facebook friendship numbers. Again, supposedly. After some reasonable effort trying to get it to show me what it seemed to be saying it would show me—particularly regarding my climate change obsession—I couldn’t really see it. I could see the Facebook friendship numbers. Stuff like that.

The most direct statement on climate change is in some text on the back of one of the exhibit panels. It says “presently 10% of the Earth’s land area is covered in glacial ice, which stores 75% of the world’s freshwater. Due to change in climate this number is decreasing at an unprecedented rate. Scientists attribute this glacial retreat to the Industrial Revolution and the increase in carbon dioxide and other gases released to the atmosphere. Will glaciers be here for the next generation? Only time will tell…” Sounds like what caused this problem happened a long time ago. So not much we can do about it. And how’s it all going to work out? Just gotta wait and see. An attitude and approach a Republican could sign onto.

Among the museum’s old stuff, the ancient but always fascinating huge—the size of two or three ping-pong tables—relief map of Erie and Niagara counties. A chip out of one of the mountains down in the southeast sector, but otherwise good as ever. And some terrific old mainly brass earth measurement instruments. A sextant, several handsome sundial and compass combinations, a transit.

Our Marvelous Earth is a permanent but changeable museum area, billed as a science studio. The museum intends to install others on other topics over the next few years. Topics include motion, culture, biodiversity, extinction, insects, and space.

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