Window to offer wide view of aquarium life

[fish_doc]

In the hush-hush world of Georgia Aquarium secrets, benefactor Bernie Marcus is getting ready to unveil a transparent whopper.

No one at the still-under-construction downtown Atlanta fish tank, including Marcus, will talk about it, but the facility apparently will boast the biggest aquarium window in the United States and one of the biggest in the world.
The main window, considered the dominant, eye-popping feature of most public aquariums, will approach the size of the massive window at the Churaumi Aquarium in Okinawa, Japan, which measures about 74 feet long and is nearly three stories tall. That 2-foot-thick acrylic marvel weighs more than a quarter of a million pounds and can withstand 1.9 million pounds of pressure.

Currently, the biggest aquarium window in the United States is at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. It is 54 feet long, 15 feet tall and about 13 inches thick.

"The technology of acrylic windows has advanced so much since we opened in the 1980s that you can create a bigger expanse of unobstructed window," said Monterey spokesman Ken Peterson. "That can be a dramatic effect for people when you're trying to create a sense of what the ocean looks like."

The Nippura company, which constructed the Georgia Aquarium's window, has been sworn to secrecy by Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder who is footing the $200 million construction cost of the fish tank as a "thank you" to the people of Georgia. Marcus has tried to keep many of the aquarium's key features under wraps prior to its Nov. 23 opening.

Nippura, which is based in Japan, also built the Okinawa window and is now building an even larger window for an aquarium to be located in the Dubai Mall in the United Arab Emirates. The Dubai window will measure 108 feet by 27.5 feet and will be 30 inches thick. It will weigh 544,000 pounds and be able to withstand 4 million pounds of pressure, according to Nippura.

Nippura moves the giant windows to construction sites as smaller panels. Those panels are then bonded together to form the much larger main windows, which to the average aquarium visitor appear to be seamless.

"They [Dubai project managers] said, 'Which is the biggest in the world? We want ours to be bigger,' " recalled Anthony P. Vandenberg, who heads up Nippura's U.S. Operations. Vandenberg said Georgia Aquarium officials have forbidden him from talking specifically about the Atlanta window.

Bob Adams, who is overseeing the design and construction of the Dubai fish tank, identified the Okinawa window as currently the largest in the world and described the Georgia Aquarium as having a "slightly smaller window."

Georgia Aquarium officials declined to comment on their window, but they dismissed the idea that Dubai will have the biggest "aquarium window" on the planet.

"They're not an aquarium," said Georgia Aquarium spokeswoman Donna Fleishman. "They're a water park."

Marcus last month revealed one of the aquarium's smaller windows. That window, 28 feet long by 10 feet tall, is located in the 17,000-square-foot ballroom and peers into the huge tank that holds Ralph and Norton, the facility's two whale sharks.

Whale sharks, which are the largest fish on earth, are the likely motivation behind the Georgia Aquarium's massive main window. The Atlanta fish tank will be the only aquarium outside Asia — the Okinawa facility also has whale sharks — to house the gentle, filter-feeding giants, which can grow to the size of a bus. If you have big fish, you need a big window.

"You want something that truly conveys the size of the animal," said Roger Germann, a spokesman with the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. "With a whale shark, you wouldn't want to look through some little pie-shaped thing."

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metr...bigwindow.html

[malawi4me2]

Once again... I can't wait til it opens!

[mlefev]

That's pretty cool. It's a bit sad, I've lived within 5 hours or so of monterrey all of my life, and never got to go to the aquarium. Lol, maybe this is a good excuse for a field trip to the other side of the country

[TheOldSalt]

WOW.
This I've got to see.

By the way, Dubai just doesn't get it, does it? It doesn't matter how many waterparks themeparks, megamalls, horseracing tracks, and casinos it builds, the tourists aren't going to go there if they think they'll just get beheaded for their trouble.