Museum gets hooked on Christmas Corals
On Saturday the 6th December the Sedgwick Museum invited visitors to join in with an ambitious craft project and crochet a model coral reef. The day included a range of hands-on coral-related activities and a temporary display of corals from the Museum’s stores. The colourful woolen reef has been on display in the Museum ever since.
Project coordinator, Katherine Antoniw explains why the Sedgwick Museum staff began work on this unusual construction, ‘We wanted to usher in 2009 by celebrating one of Charles Darwin’s less well known theories - the formation of coral reefs around ocean islands. What better way than by making a reef of our own?’
Years before he wrote about the origin of species, Charles Darwin wrote about how reefs form around volcanic islands and eventually turn into atolls as the volcanoes sink below the sea. If you think this was a less controversial subject, you might be surprised to learn that this theory was debated for years after Darwin’s death. Darwin’s detractors were eventually silenced over a century after the theory was published. In 1952 scientists took rock samples from deep under the coral reef of Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and came up with the volcanic rock that finally proved Darwin right.
The Sedgwick reef rests at the foot of a volcanic island constructed by Simon Crowhurst, a member of the Department of Earth Sciences and long-time supporter of the Museum. The reef itself has been crocheted by Museum staff, visitors and staff and student volunteers from across the University. Conservator Sarah Finney thinks that this is one of the key ways the crochet project has mirrored nature, ‘Reefs are formed by communities of animals, our reef has been made by a community too.’
If you want to find out how to contribute your own coral or make your own reef, just print out the information sheet below and contact kant06@esc.cam.ac.uk
