9 Awesome Exhibits from the 2018 Lamont Open House
This annual celebration consists of talks by Lamont’s world-renowned experts as well as dozens of hands-on activities and experiments for kids to learn about how our planet works.
For decades, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has been opening its doors to the general public during Open House. This annual celebration consists of talks by Lamont’s world-renowned experts, opportunities to connect with scientists one-on-one, and dozens of hands-on activities and experiments for kids to learn about how our planet works.
Click through the slideshow below to see some highlights from the this year’s Open House, which took place on October 13.
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Slide 1: Inside this 45-foot-long inflatable model of the JOIDES Resolution, visitors learned about the International Ocean Discovery Program. Lamont is a collaborator on this international effort, which drills into the sea floor. The cores they extract contain secrets of meteoroid impacts, ice sheet movements, and environmental hazards from Earth’s deep history. Photo: Sarah Fecht
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Slide 2: Assistant research professor Nicolas Young explores an Antarctic ice sheet in augmented reality. Photo: Sarah Fecht
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Slide 3: Nearly 40 households brought in soil samples for testing. Research professor Lex van Geen and his lab tested the samples on-the-spot. Of the 63 samples brought in, 9 contained potentially unsafe levels of lead. With this knowledge, those families will be better able to protect themselves from lead poisoning. Photo: Sarah Fecht
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Slide 4: Each coral gives a detailed estimate of the climate over a period of hundreds of years. With grad student Jonathan Lambert’s assistance, kids used straws to take cores from dough with multi-colored layers. The kids counted the layers to determine how old each “coral” would be in real life, and learned about how important corals are in reconstructing the ancient history of Earth’s climate. Photo: Kyu Lee
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Slide 5: The Office of Development offered a fun, science-themed photo booth, and the opportunity to make a commitment to the planet by supporting the world-changing science that comes out of Lamont by joining the Lamont-Doherty Family. Photo: Stacey Vassallo
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Slide 6: This seltzer bottle “Plinian eruption” demonstrates how dissolved gases can make volcanic eruptions explosive. For Open House visitors, the exciting part comes when “we have them hit the bottle on the table and it shoots a stream of water up to 10 feet into the air,” explains grad student Henry Towbin. Photo: Kyu Lee
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Slide 7: Professor Heather Savage and postdoc Rob Skarbek show visitors how friction controls earthquakes. Normally the team uses this machine to do experiments with rocks and ice that help them to understand earthquakes and how glaciers and ice sheets slide around. Photo: Phebe Pierson
Amazing open house at #LamontRocks today! Many more kids now know that ice flows! Thanks all 3400 people who came ! @Martin_Wearing @elizabeth_case @JulianSpergel @goodnesglaciers pic.twitter.com/FKMgp4nFGm
— Jonathan Kingslake (@JKingslake) October 13, 2018
It may be raining but Open House goes on! Oobleck for bathtub science is getting prepped. See you soon! #LamontRocks pic.twitter.com/n9Uh5fwW4S
— Earth Institute (@earthinstitute) October 13, 2018
A version of this post originally appeared on the Earth Institute State of the Planet blog.