Outreach
We are actively engaged in a number of outreach activities. We give interviews for newspapers or TV-productions, like the Bavarian Radio (BR) or ARTE (the joint French-German Arts-Station), as well as public lectures. We are also involved in the Hall of Planet Earth (HoPE) project of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, New York, one of the premier public science institutions world-wide.
HoPE
In 1999 the American Museum of Natural History opened the Hall of Planet Earth (HoPE), a state-of-the-art exhibit of modern Earth Sciences research ranging from climate change to the origin of life on our planet. More than 15 million dollars helped to fund this effort. The preparations for HoPE lasted more than 3 years. During this time period we served as an advisor for questions related to the internal dynamics of the Earth. We also produced three high-resolution computer simulations on convection in the Earth's mantle together with a video-interview, where we describe the impact of mantle convection on plate tectonics and continental drift. In the interview we explain the physical mechanisms of solid-state convection in the Earth's interior and we illustrate how advanced computational techniques help us to simulate complicated Earth processes on a computer. The demanding animations of flow inside the Earth's mantle (more than 100,000 image frames had to be rendered on a 128 processor SGI Origin 2000 were produced at the Advanced Computing Laboratory (ACL) of Los Alamos National Laboratory. HoPE is regarded as one of the most successful Earth Sciences displays world-wide. Recognizing this achievement under the stewartship of Dr. Ed Mathez, the chairman of the Earth Sciences Department at the American Museum of Natural History, the exhibit received the teaching excellence award of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). We continue to be closely associated with the HoPE project. For example, recently we contributed an article on the Earth's interior for a special HoPE volume that will be used for Earth Sciences teaching in High-Schools across the United States.
Learn more on HoPE from the link below:
Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth