It’s one thing to study how the relief and albedo of the ice sheets affected weather patterns during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. And it’s a whole other thing to develop an interactive, engaging museum exhibit on the subject for general audiences. But that’s just what teams from CIRES, NOAA, the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute managed to do.

"It's often hard for the average person to comprehend how drastically different the climate was in the past," said Dillon Amaya, a former CIRES postdoctoral researcher and lead on the exhibit collaboration. "It's my hope that this exhibit can help illustrate some of these exotic climate interactions so that visitors can leave with a better physical intuition for how and why things were so wildly different."

Twenty-thousand years ago, ice sheets that were nearly as tall as some of our continent’s highest mountains loomed over huge swaths of North America. Researchers long hypothesized that the massive scale of ice during the Last Glacial Maximum was enough to block the jet stream and change weather patterns sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean — for example, the area around what is today Southern California was much wetter while the Pacific Northwest was drier. Today that pattern is reversed.

Dillon Amaya, now a researcher at NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory, and his colleagues, including Kris Karnauskas, CIRES fellow and associate professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, used a climate model to study these differences.

The CIRES-led team discovered that albedo creates a cooling effect that alters atmospheric circulation in ways that cannot be explained solely by the sheer size of ice sheets. Albedo is a measure of the amount of light reflected off a surface — and ice sheets reflect a lot of sunlight. The team found that this process changed the pattern of temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which altered the atmosphere’s circulation and shifted precipitation south.

In spring 2022, ATLAS offered a class called "Design a Science Exhibit for ATLAS and Computer Science students." It centered on designing approachable museum exhibits that translate hard science for everyday people. Led by ATLAS Director Mark Gross and adjunct faculty member Wayne Seltzer in collaboration with Eddie Goldstein from the Denver Nature and Science Museum, student teams partnered with researchers and museum specialists to prototype exhibitions that incorporated coding, materials selection, fabrication, and storytelling.

“We should be teaching our engineers to communicate with broad audiences, particularly around climate change," Gross said. "We might do good science and engineering, but we’re not always good at communicating it to the public.”

A team of CU Boulder students formed a group to translate the CIRES-led research into an exhibit prototype, including ATLAS PhD student David Hunter, Environmental Policy MS student Natasha Smith; and ATLAS undergraduate students Caileigh Hudson, Logan Turner, and Julia Tung.

“The research paper that inspired this exhibit is not all that accessible to readers who are not climate scientists," Seltzer said. "The students focused on what they decided was essential knowledge — the factors that result in an ice age and how computer models can help us predict climate change.”

The team originally conceived of a sandbox as the project medium. As you moved the sand around to build different topographies, visual projections overlaid from above would show how weather patterns change. The idea made sense in theory, but practical stipulations (sand can be challenging to manage in a museum space) pushed the team in a different direction.

“We made little blocks that represent [topographic features], and then you could put the blocks on top of each other so you could sculpt [a landscape]," Hunter said. "As a team, we went about designing and building the whole rig and had a prototype by the end of the semester, and we got to show it alongside everyone else's work at [NSF] NCAR.”

NSF NCAR science educators were so impressed with the prototype that they invited the team to work on a permanent installation.

The biggest challenge then became orchestrating all the different people and components involved in developing a functional exhibit that could live for the long term with as little ongoing maintenance as possible. 

“There’s the digital prototype building, but then there’s the physical make-this-real part as well as the education part and ensuring visitors would get the right message," Hunter said.

After two years of iterative collaboration with scientists, curators, coders, fabricators, and educators, the exhibit is now officially on permanent display at the Mesa Lab Visitor’s Center. Thousands of guests each year will be able to explore how massive ice sheets can alter the climate in surprising ways.

“This was probably one of the most gratifying experiences of my scientific career," Amaya said. "It's not often that a piece of research like this leads to such tangible educational outcomes, so I'm super proud of our team for seeing it through! It's my hope that this exhibit can help illustrate some of these exotic climate interactions so that visitors can leave with a better physical intuition for how and why things were so wildly different.”

This story was adapted from an ATLAS story written by Michael Kwolek.

Visit the Winds Through Time: Ice Age Impacts on Climate exhibit

• Where: NCAR Mesa Lab Visitor’s Center, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO
• Admission: Free 
• Hours:
  • Monday - Friday: 8:00 am – 5:00 pm MT
  • Saturday, Sunday, and Holidays: 9:00 am – 4:00 pm MT