Did you know that water was once transported within Winnipeg in wooden pipes?
Join Learning and Engagement Producer Corinne in the Winnipeg Gallery to learn what else these wooden pipes brought to Winnipeggers in the late 1800s.
Exploring the Universe
By Scott Young, Planetarium Astronomer
Have you ever seen the stars? Like, really SEEN them, from a dark place, far away from the lights of the city. If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you are missing one of the great beauties of the natural world.
The night sky is magical. Take even the most jaded person and put them under the stars, and it gives them a sense of awe and wonder. We can’t help it – we are hard-wired to be amazed by the stars.
I’m sure there is some explanation for why that is. Probably, because our ancient ancestors who *didn’t* like the stars also didn’t figure out the cycles of the heavens and the progression of the seasons, and so didn’t make it through a winter that they couldn’t predict. The sky has given us clock, calendar, and a certainty about our understanding of the universe around us, and civilization was built upon that knowledge. The sky was one of humanity’s greatest discoveries, right up there with fire, the wheel, and chocolate.
Today, with satellite weather and pocket-sized supercomputers, we don’t need the sky for such basic purposes. (It still works, by the way, in case the zombie apocalypse or robot uprising sets us back to the dark ages.) We have telescopes in space and are flying drones on other planets. Yet more than ever, people are looking to the sky with interest. Even with all the things we know about the universe, there’s still a sense of mystery and wonder that makes us want to experience it ourselves.
And you can. You don’t need a telescope to start exploring the sky tonight. All you need is a clear sky, and a place even a little sheltered from nearby lights. Even from downtown Winnipeg you can see the Moon, the brighter planets, and many of the familiar star patterns like the Big Dipper or Summer Triangle. An ordinary pair of binoculars can give you a closer view and expand the number of objects you can track down. Books, apps, and online videos can teach you the sky one piece at a time, and each discovery you make will be yours. It doesn’t matter that Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter four centuries ago – when you discover them for the first time in a pair of binoculars, you will feel the same thrill of excitement he did, and your personal universe will have gotten a little bit larger.
Exploring the sky has another important benefit: it’s fun and relaxing, and it gives you a broader sense of perspective. When contemplating the three hundred billion suns that make up our own Milky Way or if any of their trillions of worlds are inhabited, our smaller earthly concerns fade into the background. The pale blue dot we live on is just a speck in the vast universe, and the things that divide us are outnumbered by the things that unite us. We all live under the same sky, and the stars belong to everyone. Get to know our sky, and you get to know yourself and your place in the grand scheme of things.
Explore Manitoba’s Skies!
Visit the Planetarium this summer to venture to far-off galaxies, witness spectacular solar systems, and get to know the stars in our very own skies.
Buy your tickets today to reserve your seat under the stars!
Scott Young
Planetarium Astronomer
Scott is the Planetarium Astronomer at the Manitoba Museum, developing astronomy and science programs. He has been an informal science educator for thirty years, working in the planetarium and science centre field both at The Manitoba Museum and also at the Alice G. Wallace Planetarium in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Scott is an active amateur astronomer and a past-President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
Did You Know that Churchill, Manitoba was once a tropical sea?
As seen in our Ancient Seas exhibit, 450 million years ago Churchill, Manitoba looked a little different! Learn about the ancient tropical sea in this video with Curator of Geology and Paleontology, Dr. Graham Young.
Do you know how roller coasters work?
Learn about the physics behind roller coasters while having fun with water in this experiment with Science Communicator Adriana! Try it yourself at home. Can you keep the water from spilling?
Did you know about the childhood of Sonia Eckhardt-Gramatté?
Learn about the fascinating childhood of musician and composer Sonia Eckhardt-Gramatté in this video with Collections Technician of Human History, Cortney.
Do you know how to identify bones?
Join Collections Technician of Natural History, Aro, as she tells us about the osteology collection and how it can help researchers identify bones!
Ancient Seas: The Tropic of Churchill
By Dr. Graham Young
Past Curator of Paleontology & Geology
Walking into the Manitoba Museum’s Earth History Gallery, you see an enticing undersea scene in the middle distance. Passing through an opening, you find yourself in a small room that feels like an underwater observatory.
Here in the Ancient Seas exhibit, a giant curved screen wraps around two walls, and on that screen you see projected a coral-lined boulder shore, with strange and wonderful sea creatures: large cephalopods similar to a “squid in a shell” swim in the water, flower-like crinoids wave in the dappled sunlight, and giant trilobites related to crabs and spiders plough through seafloor sediment. This submarine world represents our best understanding of what the Churchill area looked like about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period, long before polar bears or mosquitoes appeared on this planet.
Organisms depicted in the Ancient Seas exhibit include the swimming coiled nautiloids, flower-like sea lilies, sponges, corals, and seaweeds.
All of the Ancient Seas animations are based on fossils found in Manitoba, such as these coiled nautiloid cephalopods from Churchill and Garson.
In this beautiful exhibit, one of the things visitors find most remarkable is the statement that Churchill was tropical, that “Manitoba straddled the equator and had a warm climate.” How can Manitoba have moved so much? The simple answer is that Manitoba has moved as part of a much bigger land mass. In the Ordovician Period, the heart of North America was already a distinct continent, called Laurentia by geologists.
Just like continents do today, the ancient continents were moving by the process of plate tectonics. Land masses move toward or away from one another at about the same rate your toenails grow, an average of about 1.5 cm per year. If you move a continent at that speed over 450 million years, it can travel a very long way! Ordovician Laurentia was moving toward ancient parts of Europe and Africa, and more than 100 million years later this resulted in the formation of Pangaea (the “world supercontinent”) about 335 million years ago. After Pangaea pulled apart 200 million years ago, North America moved northwestward, eventually arriving where we are now!
During the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago, what is now the “heart of North America” formed the ancient continent of Laurentia (LA), and Manitoba was near the equator. As time passed, Laurentia would move toward the other ancient continents such as Baltica (BA) and Siberia (SI), closing the Iapetus Ocean (IA). These land masses would eventually join with Gondwana to form the “world supercontinent” called Pangaea.
Exhibits like Ancient Seas tell us about this place in very different past times. Many of the people in Manitoba came here from distant places, and now we also know that the land itself has travelled, and changed almost beyond recognition. At the Museum you can see some of that distant past, and appreciate our former worlds.
