If you’re an ocean creature with a hard shell—like a sea urchin, a hermit crab, or a coral polyp—you prefer ocean water with a pH of about 8.2. This chemistry makes it easy to assemble your armor from carbon-based building blocks dissolved in the ocean. Since the beginning of the industrial age, though, the ocean has been absorbing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air.

You’re not the only ones pitching in with your thoughts on how climate change is affecting you and what we should do about it. The Climate Change exhibition concludes by asking visitors to write or draw their opinions on paper cards, and we present some of those cards here. As you’ll see, some are ingenious and some downright inspired. These aren’t the only ideas on display at the museum either: this blog, with excerpts from some of your posts, appears on a display in the Climate Change exhibition, next to the cards. (See the picture below.) It’s the last thing visitors see before heading home to reflect on what they’ve learned and how they’re going to act on it.

The rising temperatures of global climate change are melting the world’s ice. Most notable are the shrinking ice sheets of Greenland and west Antarctica, which have shown dramatic loss in recent years. Travel to the glaciers of Greenland and to fossilized coral reefs of the Florida Keys, where earth scientists are studying geologic records of past warming to predict future ice loss and associated sea level rise.