NCED - The Big Back Yard

The Big Back Yard is NCED's most public face; an interactive outdoor Earth-surface Dynamics experience. Its centerpiece is a miniature golf course, taking Golfers from Source to Sink. The golf course is surrounded by a series of related interactive exhibits, all placed within a carefully planned landscape, which reinforce NCED concepts. The Big Back Yard is part of a comprehensive Earthscapes Education program which includes the park, an annual summer Teacher Institute, a School Contact Program of assemblies, resources and classroom visits, and Youth Science Center after school and summer activities for teens (see Education section for full details of programs).

The Big Back Yard involves Science Museum of Minnesota visitors with NCED content in active, auditory and visual ways. Visitors choose to be Golfers, Players, and/or Observers. Golfers are issued clubs and golf balls, putting their way from Source to Sink. Players choose their own exploration through fairways, interactive exhibits, and interpreted landscape features. Viewing the park as a whole, Observers see global connections between groupings of exhibit activities from Source erosion occurring in mountain streams to sediment being transported and deposited in short and long term Sinks.

At individual exhibits and golf holes, visual graphic panels explain processes demonstrated there. Golfers and Players immerse themselves in processes such as river braiding and meandering, sediment transport, runoff over permeable and impermeable surfaces and deltaic deposition. Running water and moving sediment throughout the BBY make erosion, transport and deposition tangible to multiple senses, while free verse introductions to golf holes encourage visitors to read aloud words describing these processes; the very language of NCED research comes alive in the BBY!

Goals:

1. Raise public awareness and understanding of Earths changing and evolving surface;

2. Foster an appreciation among visitors of the complex interaction between humans and landscapes; and

3. Introduce audiences to the science of modeling the systems and processes that shape the Earths surface.

Development

Development of the BBY was a major focus of NCED Research-Education Integration in Year 2. The intra-institutional design group included:

NCED/FDLTCC: Andrew Wold;

NCED/SMM: Patrick Hamilton, , Ken Kornack, Jim Roe, Peder Thompson;

NCED/University of California, Berkeley: William Dietrich, Mary Power;

NCED/SAFL: Karen Campbell, Jacques Finlay, Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Sara Johnson, Michael Kelberer, Jeff Marr, Paul Morin, Chris Paola, Gary Parker, Vaughan Voller.

Exhibit developer Jim Roe took the group from high level brainstorming to detailed attention to images and text for interpretive graphics panels, while an infrastructure team, headed by Jeff Marr (NCED/SAFL) and Ken Kornak (NCED/SMM) led a parallel effort to conceive, prototype, and test golf holes and exhibits, including infrastructure details such as pump design and specification, appropriate sediment/water mixes, and flume design, one by one. This design work, along with prototype testing with children and adults, took place throughout the year, at NCED/SAFL and NCED/SMM. Having progressed together from ideas to sketches to models to outdoor construction and final proofing, we all look forward to celebrating when the Big Back Yard opens, June 26, 2004!

Individual exhibits and holes in the 9-hole regulation miniature golf course and the specific contributions of NCED researchers are described below in the order they appear to a visitor entering the Big Back Yard.

BBY Components

1. Entrance Lobby Mural

In a large lobby mural, cartoon characters Calvin and Hobbes welcome visitors to the park. The cartoon shows the two best friends staring at a small rivulet of water and exclaiming, Look, some water running through the dirt. . . . Id say our afternoon just got booked solid.

NCED research: This cartoon became a key inspiration for NCED scientists, staff, students and exhibit developers designing the park. SMM has purchased the rights to use it to engage the public with the dynamic roles of water and dirt in shaping Earths surface.

2. Exhibit: 3-D Map of the World

This seven foot high 3-D image depicts Earths continental and ocean floor surfaces, using data derived from satellite imagery. Nearby graphics panels feature enlarged images of specific surface features also visible at a smaller scale on the map, encouraging visitors to ask questions about the immense scale range of Earths surface features and the visual record of surficial dynamics apparent in the distinctive patterns visible on the map. The key message is that erosive landscapes appear rough, while depositional ones are smooth.

NCED research: This map is one of many images developed within NCED for use in Education, Knowledge Transfer and Research.

3. Golf Hole 1: Source to Sink

Here, Golfers are introduced to the overarching concept that ties together all experiences in the Big Back Yard Source-to-Sink. Near the tee, water flows down a model mountain range toward the pin at the other end of the fairway. Following the source-to-sink, Golfers tee off in the mountains (Source) and follow the flow of water and sediment down to the ocean (Sink), represented by a pool of water and a modeled delta.

NCED research: Golfers physically immerse themselves in the environment whose processes it is NCED's vision to more fully quantify and predict. The contrast between this whole system experience and the rest of the course reflects NCED's interplay of system-reach and unit-process research.

4. Golf Hole 2: Erosional Landscapes

This hole requires golfers to putt up a hill and around a corner in order to send their ball down, unpredictably, into a modeled drainage basin. Graphics for this hole point out that as water and sediment move downhill, they organize into bigger and fewer channels and that these erosional patterns can be found all over the world in very small and very large examples.

NCED research:: The design and experience of this hole were directly informed by modeling done in Focus Area 1: Channel Network Dynamics and Scaling.

5. Exhibit: Erosion Fast Forward

This stand-alone model demonstrates processes that create erosional networks. A fine mist of water sprayed on a bed of sand reveals evolving patterns of erosion, transport, and deposition. Three identical models operate side-by-side; as networks emerge in one, another may be ending its cycle, assuring that visitors always see a variety of stages of this dynamic process.

NCED research: This exhibit is derived from physical and computational model studies conducted as part of Focus Area 1: Channel Network Dynamics and Scaling, in particular physical models developed at NCED/SAFL and NCED/Berkeley.

6. Exhibit: Erosion Recorder

This free-standing model shows erosion, transportation, and deposition of sediment. It is a clear-sided flume, filled with about four inches of black and white sediment, which may be lifted on one end or the other to provide a slope. A water source at the high end sprays onto the sediment, initiating erosion. When the eroding water and sediment mix enters an ocean-like pool of water at the low end of the flume, the water slows, depositing the sediment in visible layers. By manipulating the water level at the low ocean end of the flume, visitors can change the patterns of deposition into the ocean pool within seconds. When erosion is complete, the model automatically tilts to reverse the flow of water and sediment and begin the process over again.

NCED research: This exhibit actively engages visitors in the modeling process used in Focus Area: Long Term Dynamics. It is based primarily on NCED's unique eXperimental EarthScapes facility.

7. Exhibit: Braided River

A water and sediment mixture flows continuously from a single source at the top of a slight incline. As the mixture flows down the incline it creates a pattern of braided channels, constantly changing and migrating, from one side of the tank to the other. Visitors playing in this activity are encouraged to dig their own riverbeds, mound up levees, and construct dams to see what happens to obstructed sediment as water keeps flowing.

NCED research: This exhibit was prototyped and intensively tested at SAFL in Year 2. Braided rivers are a major research interest in NCED, involving PIs in all five Focus Areas. Example projects include scaling in braided rivers, autogenic variability, and vegetation effects.

8: Golf Hole 3: Hydraulic Jump

Water flowing across a natural or dammed spillway forms a thin sheet across the breadth of the spillway as it descends. When the shallow, rapidly moving water enters a deep pool and narrowing channel, the flow suddenly jumps in depth forming a visible ridge of turbulent water called a hydraulic jump. Golfers try to golf across the thin, fast-moving water. If they putt too softly, the ball will be washed into a gutter by the stream. If they hit it too hard, the ball will splash through the stream and overshoot the hole. Putting into the jump can even return the ball to the golfer!

NCED research: This hole actively involves the Golfer in a classic aspect of river mechanics and dam design that can have important implications for aquatic habitats and human river use. The design is based in part on numerous hydraulic jump experiments at SAFL.

9. Golf Hole 4: Local Watershed

Golfers tee-off through a large storm-sewer grate as if they were at the point where a city's drainage system empties into a river. The challenge is to track the source of pollutants back through a surprising complex of tunnels and gutters to a front yard. Storm-sewer design is a classic topic in hydraulic engineering. Golfers experience the ways in which an engineered runoff system can affect water delivery to river channels.

NCED research: Golfers experience a key human aspect of flux into a channel system, a developing focus of NCED research.

10. Golf Hole 5: Draining the Fields

This fairway is a small-scale farm field. From the tee, golfers are asked to aim for a set of drains installed in low areas of the miniature farm field. Any one of the drains will carry the golf ball a short distance underground, delivering it into an open choice point. On the second putt, Golfers will assess two options (pins) and choose to golf either to the river or to an upland pond. Golfers will attempt to improve their score by choosing the upland pond.

NCED research: This hole involves the Golfer in a common local land use practice and its impact on channel systems; previous projects by NCED researchers provided background information.

11. Golf Hole 6: Hard Surface Runoff

In urban landscapes, rainwater runoff quickly makes it way to lakes and rivers because so much of the landscape has been covered with impervious surfaces, such as pavement and shingled roofs. This fairway has a split personality, one part representing a wetland, the other a street and gutter. Golfers aim for a matrix of closely spaced holes representing a pervious surface, like a lawn or wooded area. If the golfer putts over the matrix slowly, the ball passes through one of the holes and slowly meanders its way through a green, stylized swamp to a green near the hole. If the golfer overshoots the matrix, then the ball speeds down a gutter and away from the pin.

NCED research: Previous projects by NCED researchers provided background on runoff in urban landscapes. The Golfer experiences the basic effect of impervious cover on speeding the runoff of water to stream channels.

12. Landscape feature: Rain Garden

At the lowest points in the Big Back Yard are a series of rain gardens designed to catch drainage from the entire park and allow it to seep slowly into the ground. The main rain garden provides the key component in an exhibit about nonpoint-source pollution. Visitors are asked to consider the Big Back Yard as a microcosm of the city in which they live, with areas of impervious surfaces including the roof of Science House and potential pollutants such as organic matter. And, as happens in cities and suburbs, rainwater washes across every surface of the park into drains. In this exhibit, those drains are part of a watershed that drains into the rain gardens.

NCED research: Visitors are introduced to a landscape management practice, closely related to one of NCED's goals: landscape sustainability. Over time, food webs will emerge in the areas; these will be used in Earthscapes Education programs to teach concepts related to Focus Area 4: Ecogeomorphology.

13. Golf Hole 7: Meandering River

Golfers approaching this hole have two options before them one wet, one dry. Either way, they navigate the hazards of a meandering river. In the channel, water and sediment flow through a shallow channel (about 18 inches wide) that loops and bends down the length of the fairway. Golfers choosing not to risk the hazards of the water can golf across the flood-plain topography next to the meander.

NCED research: NCED PIs have developed much of the basic theory of river meandering. River meandering continues to be a major NCED Research focus, especially in Focus Area 2.

14. Golf Hole 8: River Engineering

This fairway is loosely modeled on a section of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls. To the Golfer, it looks like an emptied river showing many of the ways that the river has been engineered. The Golfers challenge is to putt upstream, engaging in several of the hazards created by the lock-and-dam complex and the concrete apron of the falls. The object is to reach the pin located in the pool above the dam.

NCED research: The Golfer experiences a highly engineered river channel and gains an appreciation for human impacts on channel systems, a major focus of NCED's River Restoration Initiative.

15. Exhibit: Dam Removal

This is a closed-system, free-standing flume, in which visitors see how sediment fills a reservoir behind a dam. By releasing water either through the dam or through an underground pipe, visitors flush the reservoir.

NCED research: Visitors experience engineered impacts on river channels, especially those related to dams. The exhibit was informed by NCED's ongoing dam removal research.

16. Golf Hole 9: Gulf of Mexico

The last hole of the golf course consists of a putt into the Gulf of Mexico. Golfers take a simple shot in the direction of a pool of water representing the Mississippi delta complex and the Gulf of Mexico.

NCED research: Delta processes are a key component of Focus Areas 1, 2 and 5. This hole also reinforces the overall BBY message (and NCED concept) of a Source to Sink understanding of Earth-surface dynamics.

17: Exhibit: Turbidity current

In a glass-sided flume, visitors recreate the submarine process known as turbidity current. Choosing between two different sediment charges (one small, one large) they release a sediment flow into the flume. The action of the sediment and water is clearly visible, as this process creates similar patterns regardless of scale. At regular intervals (every 10 releases or so) the tank automatically flushes the sediment into a holding tank, preparing it for another round of experiments.

NCED research: Visitors experience submarine expressions of erosion, transport and deposition, gaining an understanding that these processes shape Earths surface below the oceans surface, as well as on continents. The exhibit is closely modeled on flume studies conducted by NCED PIs in Focus Areas 2 and 5.

18. Science House

This 1,000 square-foot building is designed to model alternative strategies for energy production and use. It also provides a facility in which to develop and implement programs around the themes and content of the Big Back Yard. NCED/SMM Graduate Museum Assistants are developing interpretive materials, activities, and specifications for instrumentation to use in exploring the BBY. NCED/SMM Earthscapes programming (especially Youth Science Center and Teacher Institutes) will make intense and regular use of this educational laboratory and meeting space facility.