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I would be very interested in knowing how visitors responded to the Trail of
Time - whether they got any real sense of the depth of deep time or the
stratigraphic sequence. There are scads of activities available that involve
creating a scaled geologic timeline.  The most common one is to create one
out of a cash-register tape, but the basic idea is always the same - take
some linear distance and scale it to 4.5 Ga.  I'm not at all sure that these
activities yield real insight into the depth of time, but I'm not at all
sure how to get that insight, either - I've been a practicing geologist for
27 years and I can operate quite comfortably and effectively in the realm of
deep time with good conceptual understanding of rates of various processes,
but I cannot say that I have any real understanding of just how long a
million years is in comparison to everyday time, just that it is an
extraordinarily long time.

One thing I think can be productive is to think about generations.  Ask a
child living now to think of when their oldest living relative was born.
That's likely to be somewhere between 60 and 100 years ago and is usually
two generations, sometimes thee.  Now imagine that person as a child and
think about their oldest relative at that time, now imagine that relative as
a child and think about their oldest living relative.  By now, you are back
to the Revolutionary War, which is a long time ago in most peoples minds,
but you've only gone through 6-8 ancestors.  To get bck to early humans, you
need to keep going until you have a town full of ancestors, several 10's of
thousands of them.  To get back to the dinosaurs, you need a good sized city
of ancestors, ~2 million of them.  And to get back to the beginning of
Earth's history, you'd need a country like France of Germany worth of
ancestors.

I'd also be curious about how well the horizontal strat column works as a
teaching tool when the real column is vertical.  People have enough trouble
working in the vertical dimension when learning earth science that I would
expect that it might produce some confusion or misconceptions.  I would
prefer to keep stratigraphic columns vertical.  The Franklin Institute did
this with big slabs of local rock mounted on a wall in their stratigraphic
order.  Whatever you do needs to be anchored to the rocks that people see
around them everyday.

As I write this, I am also recalling that there is a timeline exhibit at the
visitor's center at the Sideling Hill roadcut in Maryland that goes up the
middle of a stairway.  I remember being reasonably impressed by it when I
went a few years ago.  There's a picture of it here:
http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/western/sidelinghill.html

Dave Smith, geologist and geology professor before coming to the Da Vinci
Science Center.

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Rebecca Mathews <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
>
> *****************************************************************************
>
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I am looking for exhibits that use a walking trail to teach about geologic
> time.  More specifically, I am looking for an exhibit that teaches geologic
> time with a horizontal and vertical component...similar to the Trail of
> Time
> on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  The Trail of Time has visitors walk
> a
> 2.2km trail that horizontally represents the time found in the vertical
> stratigraphic column.  I am mostly interested in outdoor exhibits.
>
> If you know of an exhibit that might work, please let me know.
> I appreciate any help
> thanks
> becky
>
> --
> Rebecca Mathews Frus
> Graduate Student
> School of Space and Earth Exploration
> Arizona State University
> POB 871404, Tempe AZ 85287 USA
> [log in to unmask]
>
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-- 
David L. Smith
Da Vinci Science Center
Allentown, PA
http://www.davinci-center.org

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was
listening, everything must be said again.  -- Andre Gide

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