Immerse yourself water: H2O = Life

Anyone who's ever watched kids running through sprinklers or splashing around with toys in a tub knows the mesmerizing hold water has on children. So when the American Museum of Natural History set about designing the exhibition Water: H2O = Life, awareness of this fascination helped transform compelling yet complex science into a family affair.

From hands-on water works to interactive computer stations to evocative walk-throughs, visitors young and old are treated to a host of viscerally engaging experiences as they explore a virtual "flood" of information about the essential nature of water and the current and future water-related challenges facing the world.

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"This eye-opening exhibition brings visitors closer to water in more ways than they ever imagined possible and hopefully leaves them with a deep sense of responsibility towards conservation of this remarkable ingredient for life," said Eleanor Sterling, Director of the Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation and curator of Water, which opened this month.

Setting an interactive tone from the start is a veil of mist through which visitors pass at the entrance, a reminder of the abundance of a substance that covers more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface. Striking a paradoxical note, the next display evokes potable water's rarity--less than I percent of the planet's water is readily available for human use--with water droplets falling from the ceiling to a table so that people can run their hands beneath the drops.

And this is just the beginning.

An interactive feature on the three states of water allows visitors to touch water as a liquid, ice, or vapor, while a display nearby explains the water cycle, the series of stages by which our finite water supply endlessly moves from underground and bodies of water into the atmosphere and back again. (Part of the inspiration for this exhibition was the finding in a 2006 AMNH survey that 41 percent of U. S. residents could not name a single component of the water cycle, such as evaporation or rain.)

Other hands-on exhibits permit visitors to block and release the flow of water, akin to building and removing a dam, to study the respective effects on a river bed; pump water from an artesian well to mark the decrease of water pressure in another well drawing from the same underground source; and lift a container filled with water to get a sense of its weight and the literal burden that carrying water still is for many populations around the globe. This last is accompanied by a beautiful and telling display of water receptacles from ancient vessels to plastic cans used today. Of related and special interest to children, a working tabletop model of a PlayPump water system shows how children playing on a merry-go-round are actually pumping water from the ground into a tank, an ingenious method that has greatly increased access to clean drinking water in rural communities of Africa.

A microscope station allows visitors to see the world of microbes in a single drop of untreated water, while what is seen through the eyepiece is projected on a large screen. One drop of water from a lake, river, or ocean can contain thousands of tiny organisms, like algae, protozoans, bacteria and viruses. (Most are harmless--fewer than z percent of bacteria cause disease.)

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Throughout the exhibition, live animals, models, fossils, and taxidermy specimens embody the varied and surprising adaptations animals have evolved to survive in extremes of wet and arid conditions. Visitors will learn, for example, how wood frogs freeze to hibernate in winter; Pompeii worms survive plumes of near-boiling water on the Pacific floor; and albatrosses, which spend months flying or floating on the ocean, drink water too salty for most birds and land animals. A vivarium of live mudskippers offers a look at curious "fin-footed" fish that can live for extended periods out of water. Beneath a model polar bear on a faux ice floe, younger children are drawn to a matching game in which blocks, when properly aligned, trigger videos about life where ice is the norm.

Also making dry statistics real is an interactive quiz testing visitors' "H2O IQ" with such questions as how much water it takes to make a T-shirt or a hamburger, an exercise that's fun, informative, and surprising. In fact, anyone visiting Water isn't likely to soon forget that nearly 900 gallons of water are needed to produce just 2.2 pounds of rice!

Early in the exhibition, visitors pass through a re-creation of a water-sculpted slot canyon, a graphic portrayal of the power of water to shape the contours of the planet. The human effect on the landscape is starkly represented near the end of the exhibition with a haunting, life-size, walk-through diorama of Mono Lake and its once-submerged tufa (or limestone) towers, exposed when the water level dropped some 45 feet over decades of diverting fresh water to Los Angeles. On" the brink of collapse in the late 1970s, Mono Lake's ecosystem is now on the mend through efforts by the state of California, spurred on by graduate students and concerned citizens--a message of hope that human action can also act as a healing force.