Visitors are met by a looming subduction zone plunging under a volcanic island arc system. Quarries and private landowners contributed stone, while local stone working companies Sæthre Sten and Måkestad Byggservice sliced, reinforced and polished every last one. I think they enjoyed discovering the interiors of these fabulous stones as much as me and the geologists!
The floor is alive with a tailor made plate tectonics film made for us by Gagarin in Iceland, using data from Texas University. The Earth's plates dissolve to reveal a turbulent interior, a simulated model built by Fabio Cremeri at Oslo University. Sliding plates and lavalamping magma is an attraction for kids of all ages, they dance in the mantle and chase the place markers. Around the edge a timer highlights key events in our biological evolution, the entire display covering the last half a billion years.
Child friendly microscopes present thinslices of the key rocks in our story. We hand stiched 70 micro images together for each of the nine high resolution stained glass windows. I was very keen to show how some geological patterns repeat themselves on micro and macro levels.
Lars Holm's inspired idea to use slices was his solution to the fact the the floor would not tolerate the immense weight of large rocks and boulders. The 'slice' became the idea that carried the entire exhibition. It also gave our mountain an interior; a place of warmth, lava cushions and story telling. This wall shows a collapse process and is made predominantly of extraordinary conglomerates and breccias, stones made of stones, some of which are in turn made of stones. The mind boggles.
This plate shows a delightful bedding plane between one geological event and the next, earthquakes, flashfloods and much longer processes are recorded precisely in the rocks. Laila Landøy whose quarry produced these unique and extraordinary plates, has carefully selected stones that illustrate these transition phases, and literally sliced them out of the mountain.
Indescribably beautiful stones with a thousand stories to tell. You just have to go and see them up close!
This guy actually tells you a story! Along with his buddies inside the mountain. The public is invited to sit and listen to cultural objects tell their stories from their first creation as a mineral, through various metamorphisms over hundreds of millions of years, up to thier first meeting with us humans. Each read by a different actor with an accent local to the where the stone is quarried.
This cheeky lady is soapstone. The beautiful shelves and clever presentation of the stones was figured out by hungarian designer Hanna Kubiyani.
More data presentation by Gagarin. This time, a cross section of the tectonic processes. Basically the same as the walls show, but with sexy animated particle physics and a heavy metal wheel that spins time back and forth.
This crazy card game challenges visitors to figure out how geological fingerprinting can help us figure out how idyllic islands off the coast of Bergen where once places of vulcanism. But which kind?
These amazing things became a favourite the moment they went up. Moving sand pictures by swiss artist Klaus Bosch. They even use norwegian sand. The public can play with them and see a microcosmic version of the erosion processes that have destroyed the once mighty Caledonian mountain range and dumped it into the North Sea.
The cherries on the cake of the exhibition were of course some wonderful rocks presented as sculptural objects. This guy was the biggest I was allowed to put in, his big pedestal spreading his enormous weight!