American Museum of Natural History

Bringing science down to Earth

AMNH displays Science Bulletins, including HD data visualizations, in four of its exhibit halls, including the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth.

Every morning, Ned Gardiner is greeted by a man who changed the world – nearly 300 years ago. Sitting on Gardiner’s desk is a picture of 17th century Dutch scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek.

“Van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope,” says Gardiner, senior geographic and ecosystems specialist at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). “He allowed scientists to see things they never could see before.”

Gardiner knows the feeling. As part of an AMNH team that uses Apple computers, servers and storage to visualize satellite and other scientific data for high-definition (HD) video productions, he regularly witnesses the power of showing people something they’ve never seen – in this case, how the earth is changing over time.

Condensing decades into minutes

Lasting between two to five minutes, the visualizations zero in on topics related to astronomy and studies of the earth’s life forms, atmosphere, oceans and land. AMNH has illustrated the erosion and recovery of the ozone layer, the effects of habitat on fish species in the Congo, the consequence of urban sprawl, and the impact of changing seasons on plant growth worldwide.

The visualizations are part of the museum’s Science Bulletins, an award-winning program launched by the museum’s education department in 1997. Along with Snapshots – short graphical news stories updated every two weeks – and longer, live-action Features, the data visualizations transform esoteric scientific studies into stories that speak to everyone.

“We’re translators for the public,” says Vivian Trakinski, Science Bulletins executive producer. “We use the science to tell stories that people can understand and appreciate. Viewers are seeing the same data that researchers are gathering and looking at. It’s a direct interaction with the evidence.”

The segments are created on Mac solutions by a 12-member team of scientists, animators and producers. They typically start by “painting” the globe with Earth map data gleaned from satellites, and then zooming down to the area of interest. Brief text appears below the graphics to explain the visuals.

A visualization from 2006 highlights the work of scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. By measuring the passive microwave radiation that the planet emits, researchers have shown an overall retreat of the Arctic sea ice since 1978 that transcends seasonal freezes and thaws.

Notes Claire Parkinson, a renowned NASA climatologist who has been deeply involved in the research: “It’s powerful to see changes occur quickly, as made possible by the animations, rather than reviewing still images on a table, which is how we used to do it.'"

The visualization shows how sea ice dwindled considerably from 1978 to 2005, setting off a chain reaction that helped further warm the Arctic environment.

“It’s more than pretty pictures,” says Parkinson. “All this is valuable scientifically.”

AMNH presents its Science Bulletins content on 12-foot video screens located in four of its halls. The segments loop constantly between visualizations, news Snapshots and Features.

Like all AMNH productions, the HD segments also are uploaded as MPEG-2 files to servers accessed nightly by 41 other museums in North America and Australia. New pieces automatically replace old content, so programming remains fresh. Trakinski’s team also posts them on the AMNH Web site as QuickTime 7 movies.

Such broad distribution puts the Science Bulletins audience in the millions.

Before Mac, compromises in the pipeline

Mac systems and storage underpin the Science Bulletins production pipeline, but that wasn’t always the case. At first, the team output its HD graphics and animation content on an SGI Onyx workstation running Vizrt software.

“We had a mish-mash of systems – SGI workstations, Windows PCs and a few Mac computers among the artists,” recalls Benjy Bernhardt, director of Rose Center Engineering at AMNH. “All the output went to HD tape.”

Although the old solution worked, Bernhardt says the team worried about rising maintenance and upgrade costs, prompting them to “reimagine our entire production pipeline.”

“We needed an efficient, reliable environment,” adds Trakinski, “that would serve us all the way from visualizing satellite data to producing the MPEG-2 files that are our final product.”

In mid-2006, AMNH began transforming its environment with a Mac-centric pipeline. Today it consists of 18 Mac notebooks and desktop systems, three Xserve G5 servers, and six Xserve RAID arrays – a collaborative environment bound by a 23-terabyte Xsan Storage Area Network (SAN). The Macs interoperate with a legacy Linux server and a handful of PCs.

“With Mac, we took a six-year-old production pipeline and in one burst, strategically moved ourselves forward by five or six years,” says Trakinski. “This is an environment we can build on.”

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