There's plenty of text for traditional museumgoers who like to read their way through, and enough trendy multimedia to please the Star Wars crowd. Even the most sophisticated digital demon will ooh and ahh at the shimmering Earth rotating above a granite, amphitheater-like well in the center of the hall. Press your finger to a monitor and see what happens to climate if atmospheric carbon dioxide skyrockets. Press another for the latest on how Earth's crust interacts with a viscous mantle to move continents. One way to do it is to highlight the people involved, so exhibit organizers showcased working scientists as curious, enthusiastic explorers of the natural world.
Key players explain their work in user-friendly language.
To really grab people's attention, especially kids', and tell the full story, HoPE needed lots of stuff that visitors can get close to and touch. Still to arrive is a precious Greenland ice core, stored in a special refrigerated case. Brilliantly polished slices through banded iron and fossil stromatolite make textbook accounts of early Earth come to life. When photosynthesis began cranking out molecular oxygen three billion years or so ago, the gas didn't accumulate in the atmosphere right away. Ancient stromatolites, lumps of successive microbial communities and sediment, contain some of the first bacteria.