ports - Climate Change

Climate Change

Gallery Installation: Computer with Internet Access, video projection or flat panel display and loudspeaker; non-interactive

The Oceanography Institute in Southampton is the biggest of its kind in Europe. It participates in a number of international collaborations in climate change research. One project in particular, Animate, a EU funded project, uses moorings in the Atlantic to get live data from the location relayed via satellite to the Institute. Those data are made publicly available on the net. Oceanographic research plays an important role in efforts to understand the forces that shape climate change. There are natural and manmade causes for climate change and only over the past decade or so science starts to get a better understanding of how natural and anthropogenic climate change interrelate.

One major factor in climate change is the socalled carbon-cycle. CO2 is the most relevant of all greenhouse gases. An increase in CO2 in the atmosphere leads to an increase in the greenhouse effect and therefore contributes to global warming. The oceans and forrests are the main natural 'players' in the carbon cycle because they can both store and release CO2. In particular the oceans have the capacity to store a big proportion of the CO2 that is produced by human activity. However, this capacity is not infinite and it varies over different parts of the ocean. Whereas the Indian Ocean and the Pacific release more CO2 than they can store, the colder waters of the northern Atlantic have a huge capacity as carbon 'sinks'.

Picture by PMEL: Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory

The project Animate uses three moorings in the Atlantic where cables are anchored at the deep sea bed, at a depths of about 5000 meters. Each mooring has a number of different probes at different depths -- from very close to the water surface to a depths of about 800 meters. The probes measure a number of datasets that are all relevant for establishing how much CO2 the ocean absorbs -- from wind speed 10 meters above the surface to air and water temperature, water pressure, salinity and other factors. A relatively small part of CO2 absorbtion in the ocean is due to organic production. Like plants, Plankton uses sunlight and CO2 for energy production. Some of the probes can also measure how much dead Plankton is falling to the seabed. A number of animals who live close to the deep sea bed, the socalled Porcupine Abyssal Plane, feed on this dead organic matter, so that an unexpected growth in numbers of such animals is a further indicator for climate change. All the different data are fed into large computerized models of global physical simulations of weather systems that include movements in the atmosphere and the oceans. As an end result scientists can establish seasonal changes in CO2 absorbtion (and, if that happens, also CO2 release) and long term patterns which might give a clue about the mid and long term rate of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

The Oceanography Institute in Southampton takes care of the PAP mooring which is located about three hundred miles south-west of the south-western tip of Ireland. In mid July I met Dr.Richard Lampitt who is one of the two leading scientists working in Southampton on this particular project. He had only just returned from a journey with the research vessel Charles Darwin which replaced some of the older probes with more reliable and more accurate new ones. For four months the PAP mooring transmitted data from the mid-Atlantic reliably in half-hour intervalls. At the beginning of September the PAP mooring parted, probably due to heavy weather conditions, and its upper part is now adrift in the Atlantic. This physical aspect of oceanogrphy which involves a lot of skill and effort is often fairly invisible in a world concerned more with output in the form of data and research papers delivered at conferences.

The proposed gallery installation intends to use Pure Data to create audiovisual representations of Animate data. Pure Data is a graphical programming interface which is particularly well suited to work with live data inputs. Pure Data is Free Software and began as a project specifically developed for the needs of the experimental electro-acoustic musicians community. An international community of computer scientists and artists has since added new libraries which enhance Pure Data's abilities greatly to include video, computer generated images and physical modelling.

The project aims at creating associative links between scientific data and economic data. Southampton port is one of the major ports in Britain for vehicle import and export. It also has a terminal for bulk liquids (oil) and a refinery. The changing numbers in oil import/export and vehicle import/exports and the CO2 index can be directly related to each other. It is obvious that, while both data sources, the oceoanographic data and the port turnover data are 'objective', the link between them is not. However, this link is also not totally deliberate and making this link conscious in the minds of the audience might help to raise interest in the issues and contribute to the 'psychological' layer of dealing with climate change.

The Pure Data project is carried out in collaboration with Ales Zemene, an artist, programmer and Pure Data expert. The support and endorsement of the Oceanography Institute is being sought.

In addition to the live-data audio-visualisation a 'poster' will be produced. The poster will be similar to scientific 'posters' which are used to give an overview over one particular reserach project or issue, but this particular version will contain speculative and subjective (i.e. 'artistic) elements. The poster will be produced in collaboration with graphic designers yippieyeah, Gunnar Bauer and Tina Borkowski. The poster will help the audience to understand the live data visualisation better.