On a Monday morning in late October, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C., was just opening its doors to the day’s visitors, including several groups of school children. The stately halls soon echoed with awed exclamations of young voices eager to see ocean creatures, fossils, mummies, or Henry, the life-sized African bush elephant.
Past the Hope Diamond and other well-known exhibits sits the museum’s new Earth Information Center, a partnership with NASA that brings to life stories of the interconnected Earth system and humanity’s place within it.
“Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” The iconic quote from Carl Sagan is prominently featured in the exhibit, which appeals to tourists—including visiting students—as well as scientists.
In the soon-to-be-bustling space, Eos spoke with two of the creative minds who led the exhibit’s design team: Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History, and Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division.
“Most people are not scientists, and most people don’t know a scientist. So most people are not used to seeing the products of science,” Johnson said. With 4.5 million visitors each year, NMNH has a unique opportunity to reach a broad swath of people who might not otherwise ever interact with scientific data, he said.
Maybe for the first time in their lives, he added, “they’re in the room.”
Bringing Satellite Data Down to Earth
The exhibit, which opened in October, connects museum goers with data from a fleet of Earth observing satellites and on-the-ground research happening around the world. It took several years to go from concept to reality and was created by an interdisciplinary team of scientists, artists, and science communicators from both institutions.
The exhibit’s central feature is a 32-foot-long by 12-foot-high (9.8-meter-long by 3.7-meter-high) high-resolution video display that takes up the entire back wall. That hyperwall, a scaled-up version of one at NASA Headquarters, cycles through semi-real-time visualizations of wildfires, greenhouse gas levels, lightning strikes, and more.
When we first walked into the exhibit, the hyperwall displayed a swirling rainbow-colored map of ocean currents that showcases how the ocean traps heat at low latitudes and redistributes it around the world.
“That’s the warehouse for energy in the world, and it’s what makes the planet livable,” St. Germain explained. “That one visual tells an enormous part of the story of life on Earth.”
“It’s my favorite visualization,” she added.
Breaking up the deluge of visual data are video stories narrated by Smithsonian and NASA scientists: one about changes in Panamanian forests and another about wildlife conservation. The researchers talk about how their field and archival work helps them understand how ecosystems are changing and enables local communities to make informed decisions about environmental conservation.
“The common thread through both of those stories is we are connecting the big picture, which you can only see from space, all the way to the details of science on the ground,” St. Germain said.
NASA has more than two dozen Earth observing satellites in orbit, and visitors can explore data from each satellite in an interactive kiosk. St. Germain walked Eos through data from the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite on Hurricanes Helene and Milton, two recent storms that devastated towns in the U.S. Southeast. Ocean temperature data from PACE informed hurricane forecasts.
“With the museum, we often want to be careful that we’re not just writing the obituary of the planet,” Johnson said. Instead, they try to focus on what Johnson called “Earth optimism.”
“We really want to say, ‘Here’s the problem, but here are solutions, and here are solutions that are working,’” he said.
Another interactive display allows museum goers to zoom in on a region of interest, say, their hometown, to learn about local environmental changes, including temperature and precipitation. In a third interactive experience, visitors stand below a scale model of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite and “step into” the satellite’s data. People can use hand gestures and full-body movements to select, zoom, and change the data on a screen.
Awe, Understanding, and Stewardship
The exhibit is a work in progress, Johnson and St. Germain said, and they anticipate using visitor feedback to refine the data displayed on the hyperwall or craft new narrative stories. They acknowledged that Earth observing data can, at times, be visually overwhelming and that most people probably haven’t even seen these types of information-dense graphics before. The exhibit will be on display through 2028, and the creative team is working to fine-tune both the amount and types of data on display.
“People learn in a variety of ways,” St. Germain said. “Some people are data people. They just love staring at data and thinking. Some people learn by stories, and some people get pulled in through visuals. Right now, you see a mix of techniques as we experiment.”
As our conversation wrapped up, the exhibit had filled with visitors of all ages, including several young toddlers wheeled in museum-issued strollers. Children sat enthralled by the hyperwall’s larger-than-life chimpanzee conservation story, complete with an appearance by conservationist Jane Goodall. People traced the orbits of NASA satellites, jumped and waved their arms beneath the SWOT model, and explored the predicted temperature changes in Chicago, Santa Fe, and Nashville.
“My hope is that when people walk in this room, that they leave with a sense of awe about our home planet,” St. Germain said. “If nothing else, a sense of awe about how it works. Maybe some will leave with a sense of stewardship. And I also hope that they have a sense of how this science, how this understanding, touches their lives.”
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer
Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2024), Smithsonian exhibit connects sky-high views with down-home impacts, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240510. Published on 13 November 2024.
Text © 2024. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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