Last week I had the marvelous opportunity to visit two very different museums with Wooster Geologists. This is the first of two posts with short vignettes of the memorable sights and sounds.
The first museum was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Greg Wiles and his Climate Change class invited me to accompany them to see the visiting climate change exhibit. It was an excellent display of the latest ideas about changing climates, including accurate accounts of the evidence, controversies and possible solutions to the problem of anthropogenic global warming and its associated troubles. It was a pleasure to see this presentation with Greg because of his deep and very current knowledge of the science and politics.
Since the above links give plenty of information about the museum and climate change exhibit, I’ll just highlight two features in front of the museum I found very interesting:
The large sundial above represents the history of life by geological periods. Note the beautiful ammonite fossil model as part of the gnomon (the portion that casts the shadow).
Each segment of the horizontal portion of the sundial is a geological period. Can you tell which periods are shown here?
Finally, I think this sculpture in the front garden entitled “Venus From The Ice Field” by Charles Herndon is ingenious. It is carved from a granite boulder found in the local glacial till.
My next post will be about the second museum — a very different place!
