Acts of god

Amanda Stephen, Centretown News

Amanda Stephen, Centretown News

The shattered remains of a Kansas street highlight a new exhibition at the Museum of Nature depicting the fallout from natural disasters.

The first thing visitors hear when they walk into the room is a monstrous popping and bubbling noise. Imagine Satan burping.

The first thing visitors hear when they walk into the room is a monstrous popping and bubbling noise. Imagine Satan burping.

These are the sounds of the Earth, recorded at a station that measures subterranean vibrations and played at 10,000 times their actual speed.

The Canadian Museum of Nature opened its new exhibit “Nature Unleashed” last week. It puts a spotlight on the science behind natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.

The exhibit was borrowed from the Field Museum in Chicago, says Caroline Lanthier, one of the curators of the exhibit, but enhanced with Canadian content such as information about the 1998 ice storm that Centretown and much of Eastern Canada experienced.

She says the exhibit offers scientific explanations for the causes of natural disasters, but also shows how communities are affected by them, by including testimonies from tornado survivors.

This balance between the two is a “real eye-opener,” she says.

Lanthier’s adapted the American exhibit for a Canadian audience, hiring translators to convert the English text and audio into French.

 The Ottawa curators added a list of this country’s most famous disasters, such as the tornado that ravaged Edmonton in 1987 and the flood that forced 10,000 residents of Winnipeg to evacuate the city in 1950.

A panel is devoted to the ice storm that paralyzed Ottawa for five days in January 1998.

The storm left 1.5 million people without power for several days. Twenty-eight people died and more than 900 were injured from falling ice, hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning following the misuse of emergency generators.

As people drive up O’Connor Street to visit the museum they can see a car, flipped on its side and crushed by an uprooted tree, all on the museum’s front lawn. This is an installment to generate excitement about the new exhibit.

The first portion of the exhibit is dedicated to earthquakes. A television monitor shows a map of the world with colourful little dots to demonstrate where earthquakes are happening.

There is a tiny yellow dot right over Ottawa because there was an earthquake last Tuesday, says Paula Piilonen, a mineralogist and a research representative for the exhibit.

“We are in the St. Laurence rift so we get them on a regular basis, but we usually don’t even notice,” she says.

Last week’s earthquake registered 2.7 on the Richter scale, Piilonen says. Any seismic activity under 3.0 goes unnoticed.

The next section of the exhibit is about volcanoes and displays artifacts such as magma from Mount Vesuvius, and a jar of ashes from Mount St. Helens, in Washington state.

However, what really makes the exhibit special is its more “hands-on” segments, Piilonen says.

Madeleine Cole, a visitor from Iqaluit, took her three children to the exhibit. She said they all enjoyed the “make your own volcano” activity, an interactive video where children use buttons to adjust the amount of gas and magma they want in their volcano.

“I also thought the hurricane part was really well done, she says. “I thought the quotes they used from the survivors really added to it.”

Lanthier says one of her favourite sections of the exhibit was a series of testimonies from people who evacuated New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

“We had to hire actors to read the translated material, so I ended up listening to it over and over again,” she says. “It’s very moving, it really grabs you.”