Tectonics

 Aside from being interesting in and of their own right, meteorites can give us information about the composition of our own planet.

The Big Bang started it all, bringing the universe into being.

Earth in its early stages was a hot planet, not capable of supporting life until it could cool down.

Plate tectonics- the moving of continental crust over the interior mantle- explains much of how the world works today, and how it gradually changes. 

A central video display looks at plate tectonics and its most visible  feature- volcanoes.

Earthquakes tend to happen along the edges of plates, though not exclusively. At their worst, they are the most violent force of nature.

Earth Gallery

A reminder to members of City Daily Photo that the theme for February 1st is Motors. 

The Earth Gallery is the next space within the Museum of Nature. Three display cases at the entrance hold a sample of the three main types of rock. The first is sedimentary.

The second is metamorphic- rock that is changed by heat and pressure into a new kind of rock.

And the last is magmatic rock- rock that was magma and cools down into a solid shape.

Another thing by the entrance is very old, and has traveled further than anything else in the Museum. It's a piece of the Moon, brought back by the Apollo astronauts.

The process of the Earth formation- with the solar system and the universe before it- is explored here.

Part of that process has involved the presence of meteorites.

This is a piece of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which fell to Arizona some fifty thousand years ago and created Meteor Crater.

This is a piece of the Buzzard Coulee meteorite, which fell over the Canadian west in November 2008.

Creative Spaces

Made for photo ops- this large scale photograph of a polar bear.

More rotating photographs of life in the North.

Tattoos are a common aspect of life in the Inuit community, with meaning behind all of them.

I came out of the gallery and took another shot of Gaia below, and then the Moon out in the Queens Lantern.

This view up Metcalfe Street ends in the distance at Parliament Hill, glimpsed between the buildings.

A space I have never been in before. This salon's doors are usually closed, but were open on this visit. I stepped inside and took a couple of shots.

Gaia and the Moon, close together.

Gaia slowly spins, while its counterpart is stationary. We'll pick up here tomorrow.

Far North Mysteries

 I start today with the skull of a mammoth.

This depicts the Jefferson's ground sloth, a three meter long animal that died out after the last ice age.

Another animal that passed into history after the ice age- the short haired bear, even bigger than the polar bear.

This is a contemporary sculpture, Inuit style. The snowmobile has become an essential part of life in the Arctic.

A large three dimensional map of the top of the world is here, with various lines denoting things like the tree line, but the most important line is in white- the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian Arctic Expedition was an extensive scientific mission into the Arctic from 1913-18 to document the Far North. Some of its artifacts are seen here.

An earlier voyage into the North, and one that met with disaster- the Franklin Expedition. John Franklin was commissioned to take two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, in search of the Northwest Passage. These artifacts were found on King William Island in the 1990s, remnants of that expedition, one of the great mysteries of all times. The sunken wrecks of the ships were only found in the last decade in cold Arctic waters, with the assistance of Inuit people. While some graves of the Franklin Expedition were discovered during the many searches for them, John Franklin himself has never been found.

Here we have Nunami, by Taqralik Partridge. This is a traditional amautik, a woman's parka of the Inuit. It is paired with two sculptures below.

Photographs rotate through of life in the Far North.