Impressive Model

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31215, 12 November 1966, Page 13

Impressive Model

MUSEUM OF / NATURE

(Contributed

by

the Canterbury Museum)

'T'HOUGH it is only one seven-millionth of the earth’s size, A Canterbury’ Museum’s magnificent terrestrial globe, almost six feet in diameter, slowly rotating on its ceiling spindle in the Von Haast Hall of Geology is most impressive.

It is not an accurate scale model of our planet however: if it was. Mount Everest would only rise l/20th of an inch above sea level, and all lesser mountains would be barely discernible. The vertical scale has been exaggerated 20 times, and this enables almost all mountain ranges to stand out in clear relief.

The globe was modelled by Edinburgh sculptor, C. d’O. Pilkington Jackson, in the 19305, and the Museum globe

was cast from the original moulds in the London workshops of George Phillip and Son, the well-known mapmakers.

The seas are coloured in shades of blue to represent the varying depths of the ocean; low land is green, and increasing altitudes grade

through yellow and orange to

brown on the highest peaks. The globe was installed in 1957 under the supervision of Mr Arthur Lush, a retired engineer and a good friend of the museum. Although the globe seems to rotate slowly, taking two minutes to revolve once, this is actually a very high speed, fo- the earth rotates only

once a day, one sevenhundredth of the speed of the model. A special lighting system

has been installed to simulate sunlight falling on the earth. The lights, together with the rotation of the globe,

are used regularly by the museum’s education officers to demonstrate to school children the effects of night and

day, and the changing seasons

in the northern and southern hemispheres. To man, still largely bound to the earth, its size seems stupendous; but our planet is dwarfed when the vastness of the solar system is considered. If the moon was modelled to the same scale as the globe it would be a sphere 19 inches in diameter and would be at a scale distance of 58 yards, in the middle of Rolleston avenue.

The sun would be a tremendous ball 630 feet across, situated 13 miles away, between Kaiapoi and Woodend.

The nearest stars would be at a scale distance of over 3,000,000 miles and these are only our very near neighbours in the vastness of the Milky Way—D.R.G.