Give Them What They Want: Exciting and educating the public about deep Earth research with the Deep Earth Explorers

Abstract:

Scientists creating museum exhibits and activities tend to focus on the information that they want to pass on to the public, what they think is exciting and will excite their audience. However, what interests us as scientists may not be the same as what interests the public. We are prone to over, or under, estimating the level of our audience, using jargon, and creating resources that do not engage the audience that we should be tailoring them to. We need to make our research accessible to museum public.

The ERC funded Deep Earth Explorers museum built around themes of Earth structure and global seismic imaging tied to current research ongoing within the University of Cambridge Deep Earth Seismology group. The exhibit was created with input from a public engagement coordinator and museum staff at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, experienced in science communication. Based on their recommendations, initial ideas were evaluated with museum visitors, collecting information on what they enjoyed, their level of understanding and what else they would like to see included.

The most surprising outcome was that the museum visitors wanted to know more about the scientists, our interests and the day-to-day processes of research. With that in mind we created a cartoon panel highlighting what we do and profiles about the scientists. This allowed us to de-mystify the day to day work of researchers, as well as highlighting the breadth of jobs, skills and people within geosciences. We also created 3 interactive exhibits to create a hands-on experience for visitors to the museum.

Unfortunately, with the closure of the museum in March due to COVID-19, very few visitors have been able to visit the exhibit since its creation. We worked to replicate the exhibit on an online platform (deepearth.esc.cam.ac.uk), which includes online versions of exhibits, interactive games, researcher profiles, try at home activities and teaching resources. The necessity of adapting to an online platform allowed us to create a lasting resource with a much wider scope and impact beyond those we initially hoped to reach through in person museum visits.