Natural History Museum in London, UK

The Natural History Museum is housed in a nineteenth-century building that could probably double as a cathedral. Its interior has beautiful arched passageways and a vaulted main gallery with spectacularly decorated ceilings.





















The museum itself is a study in contrasts: in some places the old, churchlike environment has been hidden by ultra-modern, high-tech neon-adorned façades, passageways, and galleries.





















For example, the museum’s new ecology area seemed oddly out of place, with ultra-modern lighting and harsh, almost disco-like design elements that seemed out of character with the exhibition’s environmental theme and seemed more in keeping with the Hard Rock Café not far away.












I was particularly interested in how the museum approached the topic of the environment and climate change, and I’ll limit most of my comments to that topic. I found it in three different areas of the museum:

1) “From the Beginning” gallery: In this permanent gallery, climate change was presented as due to natural cycles, represented by an exhibit with a large pendulum swinging back and forth between areas labeled “greenhouse climate” and “icehouse climate”. The time scale taken by the exhibition is geologic and indicates that the cause of these cycles is CO2 put into the atmosphere by volcanoes. At the end, the short-term issue of CO2 was addressed with one sign, stating that atmospheric CO2 has tripled in the past 200 years, that if this continues, areas of the earth will be come deserts and rising sea level will flood many low-lying parts of the world. The final statement: “Greenhouse gases may have devastating effect on climate. But we are due to enter another glacial phase in the next few thousand years, so natural and human-induced climate changes may cancel each other out, for a while at least.”

2) “Earth Today and Tomorrow” gallery. This permanent gallery covered a wide range of earth-science topics, such as mining, geology, and energy. The Energy section covered carbon-based resources such as oil, gas, and coal and showed several alternative sources such as solar, geothermal, wave and wind energy. The exhibition makes the point that carbon-based fuels are putting huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and that this appears to be causing climate changes. According to the exhibition, scientists are studying these changes with computer models and other techniques, and visitors are left with questions about the wisdom of continuing our build-up of atmospheric CO2.


3) “Ice Station Antarctica: Recruits Needed” This temporary exhibition on life in a polar research station was prepared by the Natural History Museum in cooperation with the British Antarctic Survey as part of International Polar Year 2007-8. The scientific content and many of the objects for this exhibition were provided by the Survey, while the museum developed the story line and physical exhibits. The exhibition targets the curiosity children with the line: “Do you have what it takes to be an Antarctic researcher?” and begins the experience with a 45-second immersion in a -10-deg (C) cold room.



Visitors have bar-coded tickets, which link them with various exhibits and provide continued contact and activities at home via the exhibition website. The exhibition showed visitors many aspects of polar research, from clothing antarctic researches need to sampling water, riding a snowmobile, eating, first aid, and even sampling penguin droppings. The environment was immersive, with inflatable igloos and plywood shacks, plus many of the trappings of polar research. A particular strength of the exhibition was the frequent use of stories of real researchers.



At the end of the exhibition, visitors had a fairly good idea of what life is like for researchers in Antarctica, and I almost felt as if I knew some of the people there because of the personal stories they provided to visitors. There was relatively little information about climate change (which has been magnified at the poles compared with temperate regions), except a few statements that the temperature is rising, and that it will threaten the existence of some animals adapted to the cold climate in Antarctica.



At the main entrance was a large desk with 2 staff and 6 sets of red backpacks, each filled with family-friendly activities related to specific galleries. These backpacks are well-used and obviously well-loved (about 30 uses per day, or 10,000 uses in the museum per year). Each backpack contains simple matching, discovery, or art-related educational activities, with concise instructions and support for adult caregivers in helping children. Backpacks are becoming more common in museums as a way to engage younger children with objects in the galleries, and the concept appears to have been implemented successfully at the Natural History Museum.