Our Dynamic Earth

Our Dynamic Earth is a 5 star visitor attraction situated at the heart of Edinburgh’s World Heritage Site. It sits within an award winning and iconic tented structure at the foot of Salisbury Crags in the Holyrood area of the city. This app, meant to be used on site, will guide you through 13.8 billion years of the Earth's history, from the Big Bang, to theemergence of life, through dinosaurs and homo sapians right up to the issues our planet faces today like global warming. The app helps guide visitors through the expansive Dynamic Earth experience and helps to demystify the life story of our planet. Highlights include:

Stop1: James Hutton and the landscape of Edinburgh

The beautiful and dramatic landscape of Edinburgh is an encyclopedia of geological history. Hidden beneath our feet are the sands of ancient river deltas, basalt rocks from long extinct volcanoes, plants from bygone forests,corals from former tropical seas, and evidence of ice-age glaciers. James Hutton, the father of modern geology, lived in Edinburgh over 200 years ago, as it happens, not 500 meters from where you’re now standing. One of Hutton’s famous maxims was “the present is the key to the past”. He meant that by studying the earth today we can unlock some of the secrets of its long history.

Stop 12: Green Gloop

It all began with this gloop. Three thousand five hundred million years ago bacteria emerged. They took their energy from a chemical that was abundant then – sulphur. These single-celled creatures lived happily for around a thousand million years until some began to turn green. These were early photo synthesising bacteria.

Stop 26: The Greenhouse Effect

So what’s this thing called the Greenhouse Effect?

Well, first we must be very grateful to it as it keeps the Earth warm. The greenhouse effect is an increase in the temperature of the planet as heat energy from sunlight is trapped by the gases in the atmosphere. The gases are mostly water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

So, how does this happen?