Talk about timely.
Workers a couple of weeks ago were busily putting up the Field Museum’s new temporary exhibit, “Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters,” when a killer cyclone hit the coast of Myanmar, and a few days later a major earthquake devastated central China.
Still, the four types of disasters covered in the exhibit — earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes and tornadoes — occur so often that it likely will be equally timely when it travels to at least five other museums around the country through 2012.
More Top Picks Best Shop Vac
“These events have been happening for hundreds of millions of years,” said Tom Skwerski, the Field’s project manager for the exhibit, which opens Friday. “They are normal to our planet, but they are disasters for humans that get in the way of them.”
In the section devoted to earthquakes, for example, a telling interactive display shows there are at least 100,000 earthquakes a year and lets viewers see where they occurred in the last 24 hours, or month or century.
“Part of the point of the exhibit is to say that we can’t stop these events from happening, so we have to find ways to live with them,” Skwerski said.
The artifacts, video and photographs in the exhibit, created by the Field, leave little to the imagination on the disasters’ power to destroy.
On display are items excavated from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, two Roman cities entombed in lava and ash when the volcano Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., and belongings of Papua New Guineans whose coastal villages were crushed by a tidal wave in 1998.
A large section displays commonplace items bizarrely bent and battered by natural forces. For example, the museum collected a tree denuded of bark and impaled by a flying metal post in Greensburg, Kan., last year just after an enormous, 200-m.p.h. tornado flattened the town of 1,500 people, killing 10.
The exhibit also uses interactive displays to engage the 10-year-old in everybody, providing a place to stomp to create seismographic waves like an earthquake’s, and a station where visitors can put together a volcano that spectacularly and noisily erupts on a large video screen.
“Nature Unleashed” begins with displays on earthquakes, introducing viewers to their violence and their mechanisms by recounting one of the most famous, the San Francisco quake of April 18, 1906. That quake and subsequent fires destroyed 28,000 buildings in the city and killed 3,000 people.
The disaster was so traumatizing to the nation that it launched history’s first systematic studies of earthquakes and plate tectonics.
“We know an awful lot about how earthquakes happen, now,” Skwerski said, “but there is still no reliable way of predicting when they are going to occur.”
Because tidal waves, known in Pacific regions as tsunamis, mainly are caused by undersea earthquakes, they too are hard to predict.
Field Museum anthropologist John Terrell built a display around a 1998 tsunami that killed 2,000 people and destroyed the homes of 10,000 more on Papua New Guinea’s Sepik Coast. It shows how traditional people through the millenniums have learned how to survive such disasters.
“This is one of the most dangerous places in the world,” said Terrell, citing the earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods and mudslides that plague the area.
“People have found ways to live with it for the past 30,000 to 40,000 years,” he said.
One way they have done so is closely maintaining “inherited friendships” among tribal peoples up and down the coast, even when they don’t speak the same language, so that when one area is hit, residents can flee and be taken care of for months, if needed, by others.
The second is what he calls “transgenerational management of resources.” Coastal villagers maintain gardens for day-to-day foodstuffs, but they also methodically plant nut trees, which are far hardier than garden fruits and vegetables, in forests beyond the coast. Because it takes more than a human lifetime for the trees to bear fruit, he said, “each generation lives off trees planted by earlier generations, but plants for future generations.”
The exhibit discusses human culpability in the disasters in two ways. One points out how humans from time immemorial have knowingly put down roots in areas where hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and tidal waves occur. Humans build homes and businesses on the sides of active volcanoes, not to mention areas below sea level behind fragile man-made levees and berms.
Second, it points out that human consumption, particularly of fossil fuels, may be changing climates and may make violent weather like hurricanes and tornadoes more frequent and more intense, though it treads carefully with those assertions.
“There is a raging debate about whether atmospheric warming has increased the number and severity of hurricanes in recent years,” said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee meteorologist Jonathan Kahl, who was a consultant on the exhibit.
The exhibit also shows how science has become quite good at monitoring early stages of hurricanes, tornadoes and volcanic eruptions, saving countless lives by giving people adequate warning time to flee to safer areas.
– – –
If you go
What: “Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters” exhibit
Where: Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago
More Top Picks Best Air Purifiers For Dorm Rooms
When: Opens Friday, runs to Jan. 4
How much: Admission to the exhibit is $22 for adults, $19 for students and $12 for children age 4 to 11, which includes the museum’s regular admission fee
For information: Call 312-922-9410 or visit www.fieldmuseum.org
———-