Travel around the world and experience the Earth's climate zones: From the Swiss mountains through the desert of the Sahel and the pack ice of Antarctica, along the South Sea beach of Samoa and back to the North Sea coast. At the Klimahaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost, visitors embark on an extraordinary tour that takes them around the globe along longitude 8 degrees and 34 minutes east. Along the way, they meet people who talk about their everyday lives and report on how their lives and the prevailing climate influence each other.
Visitors follow in the footsteps of Axel Werner, who traveled to all nine stations with a camera team for the Klimahaus. In the exhibition, the Klimahaus traveler appears again and again in film sequences documenting his encounters with the local people. The journey begins with a family of mountain farmers in Isenthal in "Switzerland", where cowbells ring and a mountain massif with a glacier towers up. Tropical warmth welcomes visitors to the "Cameroon" travel stop, where the particularly brave can roam the West African rainforest at night with smells and sounds of fascinating exoticism. The pack ice of the Antarctic offers a little cooling before heading past lush green gorges to the warm sandy beach of "Samoa". Here, visitors can immerse themselves in the colorful diversity of a fringing reef. "This journey makes it impressively clear how people's lives on our planet are influenced by the climate, but also shows what changes we are facing," explains Arne Dunker, Managing Director of the Bremerhaven visitor attraction.
In addition to the "Journey", other exhibition areas await visitors to the Klimahaus: the "Perspectives" illustrate the interaction between humans, the earth and the climate, and also provide information about the effects of climate change on the future. In the latest exhibition area, the "World Future Lab", the world literally takes center stage. At several play stations, visitors can change the world, learn about their personal strengths and find out how others are protecting the climate. In the "FRoSTA Cooking School in the Climate House", young and old learn how to handle food and the connections between climate and nutrition.
While the Klimahaus is a leisure facility, it also aims to raise awareness of the fact that climate change is currently one of the biggest political and social challenges worldwide. It is no coincidence that this topic is at the center of a new category of leisure attraction in Bremerhaven of all places. "The city is home to the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, one of the leading institutions in international climate science," says Klimahaus Managing Director Arne Dunker. What's more: "Here on the North Sea coast, climate phenomena can be experienced in a particularly impressive way; in addition, weather from all climate zones of the earth can be felt here."
The Klimahaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost is the first world of knowledge and experience dedicated to such a complex topic as the climate. The exhibition area of the facility, which opened in June 2009, covers 11,500 square meters. In addition to the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the German Weather Service are among the partners of the visitor attraction.
