Explore any sphere in our solar system! |
Our OmniGlobe is the best way to view Earth, the moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or even the Sun without ever leaving the city. On this page you’ll find an overview of the content and features of our OmniGlobe. Don’t forget to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to find fun learning activity worksheets, in which you’ll explore the concept of geologic time and build your own paleogeographic puzzle!
OmniGlobe FAQs |
Located in the Globe and Gem Gallery, the OmniGlobe is one of the museum's most popular permanent exhibits and was Canada’s first OmniGlobe. This spherical interactive display projects images and animations of planets, real time weather, ocean currents, tsunami wave height data, forest fires, ancient ice coverage, plate tectonics, and much more.
We do! You can book a 30-minute show & tell with one of our museum interpreters. During this 30 minute program, your group will be introduced to several of the Globe’s most interesting features. Through a series of images and animations projected on the OmniGlobe, we’ll take you on a tour through the timescales of Earth and planetary processes – from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that happen over the course of seconds to minutes to plate tectonic cycles that take hundreds of millions of years.
Following the introduction, your group will have full access to the Globe so that everyone has a chance to operate the control kiosk.
There are roughly 300 individual static images and animated visualizations, organized for convenient viewer interactivity, into the following topics:
- Natural Earth (topography, geography, etc.)
- geophysical (tectonic plates, earthquakes & volcanoes, magnetic fields, etc.)
- world-human related
- oceans (currents, temperature, salinity, etc.)
- atmosphere
- IPCC climate models (IPPC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
- astronomy collection (solar system, planets and moons, pluto, exoplanets, heliophysical, cosmology)
- miscellaneous
- old world maps
- global statistics
- global agricultural monitoring
- Other NASA content
Here is a complete list of content (PDF) from ARC Science Simulations (creator of OmniGlobe), and their comprehensive descriptions of all OmniGlobe content (webpage).
The OmniGlobe is located in our Globe & Gem Gallery which is just off the main gallery within the Earth and Ocean Sciences Main building on UBC's Vancouver campus.
Google interior StreetView inside the PME gems and OmniGlobe gallery.
Use your mouse to navigate, and click the little broken square, top right, for full screen.
OmniGlobe with topography of Earth’s moon.
Downloadable learning activities |
We’ve created a series of learning activities for you to explore the concept of geologic time and build your own paleogeographic puzzle! Click, download (& print) the worksheets below.