AMNH

I've visited the Museum of Natural History before but this was the first time I went in which I actually read allot of the exhibits. Its a bit shallow on my part but my other visits were mainly visual...the non-reading visual type, I rarely read or interactive with the exhibits. This last visit was a combination of research work and fun, and it did balance out nicely in the end.

First off let me point this out, if you paid attention to the film (An Inconvenient Truth) and read the book you didn't really find out anything that you didn't already know. Most of the info was basic knowledge such as more fossil fuel burning = more Co2 in the atmosphere. But the museum is needed to cap the the global warming lesson, the book can be accessed by any student at any time, the movie is shown to the class, and the actual touchable exhibits are the group work hands-on section. With only one form of media we would learn all we would need to know about climate change, but when you combine all three you really get the full benefit of learning.

Seeing the ice core was probably my favorite part of the visit. The core, like tree rings, visually shows which years were "clean" and which were "dirty". At a more in depth level it reveals the Co2 content of a certain year if traced back correctly, this gives scientists a clear view on how man has sped up the global warming process. As a side note, the ice core container was not cold which leads me to believe that it is a fake...but then again so are the dinosaur bones on the 4th floor(they are molds of the real thing).

On the atmosphere I learned that greenhouse gases are: water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane and nitron oxide. All of these gases are natural, global climate change is natural, but humanity has squeezed itself into the equation and dumped these gases into the atmosphere at a record number.

It is hard to describe which I felt more believable. I am a very visual person and movies tend to be real for me to an extent, but then again actually seeing a ice core with my own eyes was extremely interesting. Frankly I find both believable. If I must choose it would be the exhibits, simply because they lack the sometimes annoying Al Gore.

The museum is defiantly a sort of media, it allows humanity to use its original investigation methods, our five senses. It lets us touch, hear, smell, sight and in some exhibits maybe even taste in a clean, contained environment. Most of us wouldn't go to the Grand Canyon to see first hand on how rock layers are form (I know I would!) so the museums brings it to us, to experience what many of us wouldn't normally experience while living in or around Manhattan.