The Exploring Earth interactive, installed on a 55" Ideum Presenter touch display, provides visitors with a fun, hands-on way of learning about the changes in the Earth from ancient times up to the modern day. A 3D rotatable globe model, featuring scientifically accurate data, animations, and textures from Dr. Ronald Blakey of Deep Time Maps, shows the position of each land mass at the selected point in history. Six modern cities can be tracked across the moving continents: Albuquerque, Washington DC, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Nairobi, and Beijing. Beneath the globe is a timeline, spanning 600 million years up to the current day. When users scroll through it, the continents on the globe shift from our modern formations back to ancient land masses. Along the timeline are hotspots that when selected, detail significant geological events in the history of the Earth. The timeline and map invites visitors to visualize what life was like when each exhibit fossil was a living organism.
