Rock Garden
Step outside to our rooftop garden, full of ferns, moss, rocks and fossils – where we reveal that there's more to rock than meets the eye. It's at the heart of the Core building, part of our permanent exhibition that uncovers Invisible Worlds.
Rock's ebb and flow, however slow, drives life itself. Climate, weather and life, mainly microbial, turn rock into bodies – and rocks into bodies – in an ancient dance of time. Rocks form the graves for plants and plankton that turn to coal and oil, fuelling our fires and warming our skies.
The Earth’s first pioneer land plants made rock their foundations and created the first soils. Microbes that live on and within it, with their strange chemistry, may produce solutions for some of today’s environmental problems.
Lead scientific advisors:
- Professor Karen Hudson-Edwards, Professor in Sustainable Mining, University of Exeter
- Dr Joanne M. Santini, Dept. of Structural & Molecular Biology, University College London (UCL)
