Fourth of July weekend is the public’s last chance to taste, touch, and take in the Exploratorium’s temporary exhibits at Fort Mason. Grab a map and take a walk around the area to check out all the exhibits emphasizing noticing and deeply observing the natural world.

The final weekend of the exhibits are July 3-5, 2015

Known as the “Outdoor Exploratorium,” the eight exhibits displayed at Fort Mason are what remain of a 20-exhibit collection that opened in 2009.

The interactive exhibits range from “Tasting the Tides,” a drinking fountain that lets visitors experience the surprising range of salt content in local waters, to “Pier Piling Pivot,” a movable piling that unveils the extraordinary range of plant and animal life making an aquatic home at Fort Mason’s piers.

Outdoor Exploratorium Exhibits

Lift (1)

A series of airfoils that rise and fall on vertical cables in response to varying wind speeds graph the flow of moving air between Building A and Pier 1 in Lower Fort Mason. By tracking the airfoils, visitors can observe the diversity in rates of flow within a horizontal transect of moving air and gain insights into the biomechanics of bird flight in a shoreline environment

Ship Constellations (2)

At night, the color-coded patterns of marine navigation lights help mariners determine the size, type, and direction of marine craft. This exhibit, looking out to the Bay between Pier 1 and the Herbst Pavilion, helps visitors decode these light patterns by using a half-silvered mirror to superimpose images of common ships and boats on the water to clarify their identifying

Speed of Sound (3)

Using a light and bell positioned at the end of the Festival Pavilion, this exhibit enables visitors to investigate how sound perception outdoors can be affected by distance, wind, and temperature. Another aspect of the exhibit allows visitors to use their cell phones to measure the time it takes the sound of a Golden Gate Bridge foghorn to reach them in different parts of the City.

Corrosion Zones (4)

The marine environment, with its omnipresent salt and moisture, is powerfully corrosive. But rather than being an all-or-nothing phenomenon, corrosion depends on context, with local microenvironments producing a range of effects. These chain links rust very differently depending on how deeply they are suspended in the Bay. Copper patinas vary from brown to orange and red to green; in the most corrosive zones, the heavy links actually swell and crack apart.

Rust Wedge (5)

A major issue in the preservation of historically significant waterfront buildings, spalling occurs when water enters cracks on a masonry structure and oxidizes underlying steel reinforcing material. Rust Wedge illustrates the expansive force of rusting steel by placing a piece of iron in the cleft of a block of concrete near the foot of the Festival Pavilion, allowing the ensuing rust to slowly fracture the block over time.

Pier Piling Pivot (6)

This exhibit uses a geared motor to swing a specially designed piling on the Festival Pavilion out of the water so that visitors on the adjacent pier apron can examine it in detail. An accompanying legend identifies the intertidal zones on the piling and the species of plant and animal life occupying this unique shoreline environment.

Tasting the Tides (7)

Using a special low-flow drinking fountain just east of the Festival Pavilion, Tasting the Tides allows visitors to gain an appreciation of the dynamic complexity of the San Francisco Bay Estuary by tasting representations of the varied salt concentrations typical of water flowing from the Delta to the Pacific Ocean.

Fracture Mapping (8)

Fracture Mapping uses cracks on the surface of an everyday asphalt parking lot in Fort Mason Center as a point of departure for understanding how engineered structures respond to a range of environmental forces, including seismic movements, temperature fluctuations, traffic patterns, and architectural loads

Explore the exhibits by clicking around the circles on the panorama photo, or check out a PDF Map of Exhibits.