On Thursday, in between attending the Museums and Heritage Show and some training sessions at the Natural History Museum, I took the chance to see the current temporary exhibition, Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea. It was a beautiful, tranquil place to stop and spend some quiet moments before moving on to my next session of the day.
The exhibition is so packed with striking objects, I am ashamed to say I barely took the time to read and learn about the corals before moving on to check out the next beautiful specimen, so I definitely plan on going back to find out more. In the mean time for a highly visual exhibition, I thought it was fitting to make a visual post. The thing these pictures can’t convey though is the scale of some of these monsters, which are well worth seeing in the flesh. This post from NHM gives you some idea of their mighty size.
As well as the encased specimens large and small, there is a live coral aquarium, which was mesmerizing and so alive with colour, texture and movement. There are also some fun interactives such as immersive screens which allow you to navigate panoramic views of coral reefs on the seabed, and films which detail projects to educate people and protect the world’s endangered reefs. The one place NHM seems to have missed a trick here is the shop…I was gearing myself up to part with some hard-earned cash for the right coral themed souvenirs, but nothing in the range really caught my eye, or could match the beauty of the real thing.
