Collaboration with American Museum of Natural History -- LMU geophysicists provide new exhibit

A new exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the largest museums of its kind in the world, draws on the expertise of geophysicists at LMU. A research team led by Hans-Peter Bunge, who holds a Chair in Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, has developed a computer model simulating processes that take place in Earth’s deep interior and illustrating their impact on the planet’s surface. The new exhibit, displayed in the museum’s “David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman-Hall of Planet Earth” (HOPE), is a 3-D printed physical model based on a snapshot from such a computer simulation, which depicts the convection in Earth’s mantle. The simulation itself was carried out on SuperMUC, the high-performance computing system of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich and was visualized at their Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation (V2C) afterwords.
The new permanent exhibit in the Hall of Planet Earth in the American Museum of Natural History opened on July 7, 2018.