On 14-16 November 2008, ECORD/IODP held an exhibition booth at the “Ville Européenne des Sciences”, a major public event for scientific outreach at the Grand Palais in Paris. The booth was put together by France’s ECORD member, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and manned by representatives and scientists from CNRS, various French universities and ECORD (Laurie Tainturier, Béatrice Tofoni, Adélie Delacour, Frédérique Eynaud, Julie Carlut, Eva Moreno, Marie-Madeleine Blanc-Valleron, Javier Escartin, Benoît Ildefonse, Johanna Lofi, Simon Barry, Gilbert Camoin, Nicolas Durand, Catherine Mével, Christine Laverne, Joelle Gastambide, Rosa Bernal-Carrera, Priscilla Dacher, Jean-Louis Buscaylet, Laurent Louis, Marianne Conin, Marguerite Godard, Daniel Le Méhauté, Siegfried Lallemant, Christiane Grappin and Patricia Maruéjol).
Among the many exhibits in the booth, the highlights were the new, specially designed posters about the deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu and the IODP research themes; a jigsaw puzzle made up of the tectonic plates; computer animations of riser drilling created by CDEX, demos of optical image logs; 3 core replicas as well as samples of oceanic crust and corals and microfossils observations. The younger visitors were invited to take part in a quiz about IODP and left the booth with a paper model of the Chikyu to build. Over the course of the three days, the booth attracted large numbers of visitors as well as magazine and radio reporters, who were interested in learning about the scientific challenges of ocean drilling. Past climate changes and the technological challenges of ocean drilling were two of the main topics of questions and discussions, but visitors were also eager to know about geodynamic processes of the Earth and the deep biosphere.
>> Contact: Patricia Maruéjol – ema@ipgp.fr
>> “La Ville Européenne des Sciences”
