Pursuit and Decay

Jennifer Kenyon, PhD, works for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in the U.S. Department of the Interior. She was part of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program while she was working towards her degree, during which her research involved tracing carbon and other elements in the ocean by using an unusual tool: radioactivity. By using radioactivity, she was able to learn more about how carbon particles move in the ocean. This sort of research can help answer important questions that aid in understanding how the ocean stores carbon in the face of climate change, such as: How much carbon enters the ocean? Where does it go? How long does carbon stay in the ocean? 

Laurie Kaplowitz is a painter and retired Chancellor Professor Emerita from UMass Dartmouth where she taught painting and drawing. Their decision to create a graphic story book arose from a mutual interest in narrative story-telling and graphic novels. Jennifer has written the text based on her research and geared to a young adult audience. Laurie has created imagery that literally embodies these somewhat abstract and non-visual concepts and natural forces. Together they tell a story of how carbon cycles through our oceans.

Both Laurie and Jennifer are committed to education and outreach, and as such wanted to create a digestible graphic story that could serve both as an art piece and a learning tool. Their project visually explores, through the eyes of an ocean scientist, the journey of carbon particles from the surface ocean to the deep ocean and the subsequent “chase” of radioactivity in pursuit of carbon.

Marine Heatwaves

Deb Ehrens is a lens-based artist creating contemplative and painterly imagery. Her award-winning work has been exhibited regionally and nationally. Deb lives in Dartmouth, MA and is a Juried Artist Member of the Cape Cod Art Center, Exhibiting Member of the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts and Elected Member of the Art League RI.

Svenja is a research associate in the Physical Oceanography department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She studied warm water transport toward ice shelves in Antarctica during her PhD but got interested in marine heatwaves due to their potential impacts and societal relevance. For her work Svenja utilizes many different tools and datasets depending on the research question; including ocean models, ship-based measurements, satellite data, data from marine mammals or floating robots that profile the subsurface ocean. Svenja always tries to keep the big picture in mind and to tell a story with her results. 

Caroline is an Associate Scientist in the Physical Oceanography department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She focuses on understanding the ocean's role in the global water cycle, in particular extreme events like droughts and floods. Her interdisciplinary research combines data from global observations, computer simulations with environmental archives around the world, such as tree-rings across Southeast Asia, stalagmites in Australia and Portugal, Indian Ocean corals, bivalve shells in the Gulf of Maine, and historical data from ship logbooks and church records. A key goal of Caroline's research has been to bridge the gap between ocean and climate science and its impacts on society: she aims to provide practical outcomes of use to stakeholders and translate the implications of her research findings to the broader public.

From Sea Salt to Rainfall

Hong Xu is an amateur photographer/digital artist. Caroline Ummenhofer is a research scientist and a faculty member at WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanography Institution). They collaborate to create an art project that will convey the ocean’s role in the global water cycle; more specifically to showcase new research findings how salinity levels at the ocean surface might help predict rainfall on land.

Turbulence

Larry Pratt is a physical oceanographer who carries out research on the physics of ocean circulation and climate. Over the past 30 years he has taught numerous courses at MIT on ocean dynamics and is co-author of a book on the ocean abyssal circulation.  Larry has pursued many collaborations on the art/science interface and has co-taught classes at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design, Boston Conservatory, and MIT on physics, dance, and the artistic representation of scientific data.  In addition to his work with Ellen on ocean mixing and turbulence, he is currently engaged in a project on the impact of sea level rise with Boston Dance Theater. 

Ellen Biegert is an Artist and Landscape Architect who focuses on combining creativity and design with the environment. Inspired by nature and its interwoven systems, she looks to strengthen the innate connection humans have with the natural world through both art and landscape. Working with Larry on the Synergy II project has created the opportunity to strengthen the bond between individuals and the ocean.

Visualizing the Unseen: Cellular Metabolites in Ocean Ecology

Noah Paul Germolus is a PhD candidate studying Chemical Oceanography. His research seeks to bridge the gap between two forces that compete for essential molecules in the upper ocean: the microbes that produce and consume these nutrients, and the ambivalent mechanisms of chemistry that alter or destroy them.

Heather Stivison is an award-winning artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in universities, galleries, and museums. Originally from New Jersey, Stivison is a former museum director who has also served as the president of both the New Jersey Association of Museums and the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. She is a published author and a recipient of an art history research grant from the Arts & Crafts Research Fund. She holds an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Arctica Islandica

Claire Marschak is an artist and designer who has teamed up with Nina Whitney, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow whose research focuses on understanding past ocean conditions. Their project tackles the topic of paleoceanographic reconstructions: that is interpreting changes in past ocean conditions using biogeochemical materials, in this case the chemistry in clam shells. This project presents a painted relief sculpture to showcase the elegance of these seemingly humble clams and all that they can teach us about our past world. The goal of Arctica Islandica is to increase understanding of how we know what we know about past ocean conditions as well as put the human experience into a much broader environmental history.

“Page 1, Birth,” “Page 2, Awakening,” “Page 3, Splitting,” & “Page 4, Blue Eye”

Laurie Kaplowitz – These paintings and text images represent the first 4 pages of Marine Snow, A Lyric Meditation, which will be a book of paintings accompanied by text that traces the journey of marine snow as it travels from the surface of the ocean to the sea floor. Karthauser’s scientific work combines biochemistry with microbiology to gain a deeper understanding of carbon cycling in the ocean and the processes that drive it.

We both liked the idea of envisioning marine snow as a woman and personifying the life cycle of organic matter as it travels from the ocean’s surface to the sea floor. Kaurthauser wrote the narrative and designed the text pages. The narrative, a meditation that is lyric and elegiac in tone, accompanies my paintings to evoke birth, growth, and eternal sleep. I have incorporated organic matter – dried flowers, leaves, and seaweed into the painted imagery and compositions  just as organic matter is blown onto the ocean’s surface and begins its journey to the sea floor, sequestering carbon and helping to keep the planet in balance.

cyclonic flux & argo floats

Betsy Ritz – Scientist Colette Kelly, Ph.D, and I have worked together to express artistically their work on the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) in the Southern Ocean. 

In the first piece I created, “Cyclonic Flux,” I tried to suggest the flux of nitrous oxide coming out of the low pressure center of a revolving Southern Ocean cyclone. I made a papier-mâché bowl from recycled newspaper and worked to make it resemble a storm or cyclone with ocean waves, and placed it on a revolving platform that viewers can gently push to simulate the cyclone’s swirl. Dr. Kelly provided me with a barometric pressure map that showed in different color bars the varied air pressures of a cyclonic storm, and I painted that on the bottom of the cyclone bowl.  The lowest pressure area, painted dark blue, is where Dr. Kelly’s current research found the most nitrous oxide emerged from, and in this piece, the molecules, made of one red oxygen atom bonded to two blue nitrogen atoms, spring out from that center.

In the second piece, “Argo Floats,” I tried to include three different concepts in one piece, based on information I learned from Dr. Kelly and their nitrous oxide research.  I created a large paper mache bowl that was painted in layers to suggest different depths of the ocean, with a large part of the ocean being without light, painted darker shades of blue. The yellow wood strips perched at different levels inside the bowl suggest the movement of Argo floats, the robotic floats that move up and down through different layers of the ocean to collect data, and then surface to radio that data to satellites. The top inner rim of the bowl contains data ocean scientists have collected showing how the amount of nitrous oxide has increased since it was first measured in 1977 until 2023—increasing approximately 10 percent.  The ocean itself is represented by the bowl, reminding us that though we think of the ocean as endless, it is in fact finite.

Dr. Kelly’s work and the work of other WHOI scientists help us understand how climate change affects the ocean, and vice versa. I used art materials like paper mache made from recycled newspapers and glue from flour and water in an attempt to be mindful of art’s impact on the environment and climate change.

Colette Kelly, Ph.D – Colette Kelly graduated in 2017 from Barnard College of Columbia University, where they double majored in Dance and Environmental Science. In 2023, they received their Ph.D from Stanford University in Earth System Science. They are now a GO-SHIP Postdoctoral Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The Southern Ocean is a vast, essentially uninterrupted ocean that encircles Antarctica. Because there are no continents to impede their motion, intense storms develop over these frigid waters, gathering energy from the winds, ocean currents, and temperature contrasts between warm and cold waters. The swirling motion of the winds diverts the air outwards from these storms, creating pockets of low atmospheric pressure in their centers. Sampling the ocean within such storms from a ship is impossible, due to the ferocious winds and towering waves. But what oceanographic phenomena are we missing in our inability to collect samples from within them?

Of all the greenhouse gasses, nitrous oxide is one of the most potent, yet the most poorly understood. Its capacity to warm the atmosphere, on a per-molecule basis, is 300 times that of carbon dioxide. This means that one molecule of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere has the global warming potential of 300 molecules of carbon dioxide. Scientists know that the ocean emits nitrous oxide to the atmosphere, but because the processes that affect nitrous oxide emissions are so complex, we still do not fully understand how much nitrous oxide comes out of the ocean and into the atmosphere. This is especially true in places where, and at times when, collecting samples to measure nitrous oxide is impossible — such as the middle of a Southern Ocean storm.

In this study, we used special robots called Argo Floats to simulate nitrous oxide fluxes in the Southern Ocean. Because the floats are fully autonomous — they do not require a human to direct them — they can collect data even in the most inhospitable environments, including cyclones and underneath the ice. By analyzing the simulated nitrous oxide data from these floats, we discovered that the Southern Ocean is a much larger source of nitrous oxide than we previously thought. This is because the low atmospheric pressure in the centers of these storms essentially sucks the nitrous oxide out of the ocean and into the atmosphere. Once it is in the atmosphere, the nitrous oxide can and will trap heat and contribute to global warming. This can offset some of the carbon dioxide that the Southern Ocean absorbs. In essence, by looking beyond what we can do with shipboard data, we found out that the oceans around Antarctica are both source and sink of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

sensual data

Cynthia Beth Rubin – Scientist Suzanne Menden-Deuer and I use a Techspressionist (Techspressionism is a 21st century artistic and social movement in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience) approach to blending oceanographic research with artistic interpretation, providing a new method for conveying environmental data. We constructed the imagery by analyzing data from Narragansett Bay, a marine estuary that is crucial to Rhode Island’s fishing, recreation, and local economy. Results were then graphed as curved lines, and the forms created by these data graphs treated as abstract forms in expressive layered artwork.

Microscopic plankton, both photographic and hand-drawn, are integrated into the artworks, giving context to an important reason for paying attention to the changing environment. Often overlooked due to their invisibility to the naked eye, plankton play a crucial role in sustaining life on Earth. Plankton are at the bottom of the food chain, and they produce a significant portion of the oxygen we breathe. Without plankton, we could not survive.

Our imagery, which is both sensual and informative, invites scientists, visual thinkers, and the general public to contemplate the changes in an environment over a year.

I. In this first Techspressionist image, combining the elements of chlorophyll, salinity, and temperature, the data is layered. In true expressionist fashion, the red cubes of salt in the lower front call to the reds at the peak of the temperature curve, and cube forms call to the salt in the salinity layer. The soft green ripples of chlorophyll clearly continue throughout the season. The vital marine life of plankton diatom chains hang above it all, as in the ocean they form the basis of all production and food webs.

II. In this iteration the frame from the original graph reveals the months of the year and points on the Y axis. More readable to scientists as data mapping, the frame and color choices put the chlorophyll in a more prominent position, asking the viewer to imagine that the temperature and salinity graphs continue behind the rising chlorophyll of winter. This is a true reflection of the environmental dynamics, where temperature and salinity constrain which organisms can survive at those conditions.

III. Mapping the elements of phosphate and nitrite + nitrate presented a new challenge. These nutrients had to be interwoven, each with distinct colors and textures, to reveal their curves rise and fall through the year, while being strikingly similar for much of winter. An abundance of playfully placed plankton, including some that are hand-drawn, reminds the viewer of the living organisms inhabiting this marine environment. The excretion product ammonium was added as a compositional component to provide visual space between the nutrients and temperature, while also showing important data differences. An abundance of playfully placed plankton, including some that are hand-drawn, reminds the viewer of the living organisms inhabiting this marine environment.

IV. In this image we see the fluctuation in how many plankton are in the water throughout the year from weekly measurements, from February 2022 to February 2023. The image includes an overlay of the data graph with temperature and the concentration of the essential nutrient silicate to add another dimension to the graph. To show fine detail of plankton structures, the image includes composites of photographs of plankton taken with a scanning electron microscope. Abundances changes substantially through the year, and in the final weeks the quantity of plankton was so great that the number continues above and beyond the extend of the graph.

mermaid in kelp

Sharon Cutts – “Mermaid in Kelp” is a painting in response to URI graduate student Justin Sankey’s research on the effects of PFAS in marine organisms.  PFAS (short for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are chemicals created to enhance consumer products, such as Teflon coatings and for treatments for stain resistance and fire retardance.  These chemicals are extremely long lasting, and rather than breaking down in the environment, they persist and find their way into our water and food supply.  

Justin’s research has shown that PFAS in the ocean are particularly absorbed by kelp, which is in turn fed upon by a wide spectrum of marine life.  Some of these PFAS have been linked to cancer and the EPA has said that there is no safe level of exposure to them.

In my painting, the kelp is speckled and pocked with the PFAS that it has absorbed from the ocean which has been polluted by runoff and sewage.  The mermaid is also speckled with these pollutants. And when we eat animals that have eaten kelp, we too end up with PFAS in our bodies.

Justin Sankey – Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a man-made class of persistent organic pollutants, so called “forever chemicals” that are ubiquitous in the environment. Common sources of PFAS include, but are not limited to, fire suppressant foams, non-stick coatings, water/grease/stain resistant coatings for textiles, food packaging, and cosmetics. Several types of PFAS have been found to be carcinogenic and/or endocrine disruptors that have a negative impact on public health around the world. 

Graduate researcher, Justin Sankey, is a Ph.D student at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography and a National Institute of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS) Trainee at URI’s Sources, Transport, Exposure, and Effects of PFAS (STEEP) Superfund Research Center. Justin’s research focuses on the potential impact of PFAS on the emerging kelp farms of Rhode Island. Their research focuses on characterizing the bioaccumulation potential of PFAS in kelp through a mix of laboratory and field-based studies. Preliminary results suggest that kelp has higher than expected potential to accumulate PFAS in its tissues (i.e. kelp possesses a high bioaccumulation potential); however, further analysis and validation is needed to verify these results. The results of these studies may show that kelp can be used as a co-crop with other aquaculture, such as oysters, to help reduce PFAS concentrations in the more profitable crop. Additionally, if kelp is to be used for consumption or as biosolid applications to farm fields, this data may aid in establishing water quality standards to mitigate potentially high concentrations of PFAS in the kelp crop and inform the locations of future water leases in Rhode Island.

underwater

Sharon Cutts – Life is complicated, especially the closer you look, and the inspiration for my painting UNDERWATER was the intricate research by University of Rhode Island biology professor and researcher Christopher Lane.  His research has broken new ground in the examination of the single-celled organisms that help to break down waste in the guts of filter-feeding sea squirts—tunicates that live along the eastern seaboard.  Their water-filled sac-like bodies with two tubular openings draw water in and out to extract plankton.  

Professor Lane’s research has shown that the microscopic organisms in the renal systems of tunicates likely began as one of a large family of one-celled parasites.  The interesting question is: how did it transition from a parasite, which harms its host, to something that helps eliminate the host’s waste? This question is still being examined.

As an artist, I was inspired by Professor Lane’s research to paint an inter-tidal swirl in shades of blue.  Various tunicates are depicted as brown, blue and gray bagpipe-like structures scattered here and there.  All these organisms live in a rich and chaotic churning of the inter and sub-tidal ocean.  

The black rectangle in the center continues the swirling patterns and takes my artistic expression outside of Professor Lane’s research to connect to a potential future of an ocean going black.

Christopher Lane – Like a lot of kids, Chris grew up wanting to be a marine biologist and turned out to be just stubborn enough to make it happen. After doing a Ph.D using DNA to determine how different algae were related to one another, he did a postdoc on the topic of ancient symbiosis, which fuels his research approach today at URI. His lab currently works to identify changes in the genomes of organisms as they transition from free living to parasitic life cycles, or become free living from parasitic ancestors.

The work depicted in the painting is a project involving many biological partners. Tunicates, or sea squirts, are the hosts in this system to an unusual lineage of apicomplexans. Better known as the causative agents of human diseases like Malaria and Babesiosis, the apicomplexans in these tunicates appear to have no effect on the tunicate host. Rather than scavenge vitamins and metabolites from their host, these apicomplexans have instead taken in bacterial endosymbionts as internal factories for important biological building blocks. In doing so, they only need their tunicate host for a place to live and waste product to use as food, changing the dynamic of the relationship from parasitic, to commensal.

Antarctic Bottom Water at Two Scales

Victoria Guerina – There are many factors which influence the behavior of ocean currents. Steep slopes and troughs on the ocean floor near Antarctica are dominated by a cascade of salty, cold, and dense water formed as a byproduct of sea ice freezing at the surface. This gravity-driven flow is also affected by surface winds and the rotation of the Earth, and occurs over scales of hundreds of kilometers, moving massive amounts of water. The energy involved is almost incomprehensible, and it feels like such an awe-inspiring process should be immune to the influence of human activity.

But as our planet warms, the physical factors which control these powerful Antarctic coastal flows are changing, and scientists are working to understand how the ocean will respond. The dense outflow of water from coastal Antarctica may be compensated by warm water from offshore that accelerates the melting of ice shelves. In this project we would like to demonstrate how complex bathymetry (the shape of the ocean floor) guides the flow of dense water, and explore the broader concepts of inevitability and change. We seek a balance between these educational and artistic goals.

We constructed a regional model with representations of the ocean floor in coastal Antarctica from paper relief, and used alcohol ink to track the flow of dense water through troughs, down slopes, and around seamounts. The flows in our regional model are both controlled and uncontrollable, governed by gravity but also chaotic and hard to predict. Small variations in the placement and quality of ink can lead to dramatically different results, or not much change at all. Our box model is a three dimensional, zoomed-in view of ocean circulation in coastal Antarctica made from paper and alcohol ink. The box model illustrates sinking cold plumes from the formation of sea ice, horizontal flow of warm water at greater depths, and the whorls of turbulent mixing between these water masses.

Antarctic Bottom Water at two scales came from looking at Wilcox’s work from two approaches. I was intrigued by the creation of cold, dense water by ice forming on the ocean surface. This “heavy” water falls to the bottom and creates ocean currents. As oceans become warmer, warm circumpolar water can flow in under the plumes of cold dense water disrupting the currents and possibly causing ice melting. I made a box model of this idea with a cast paper ice shelf and paper sides using alcohol inks to represent the different water temperatures and their movement. Galen was also interested in exploring the currents at a larger scale and so we created an ocean bottom (bathymetry) map and by applying alcohol inks we hope to see how water might flow based on the shape of the ocean floor and gravity. It has taken a good bit of time to find the best way to make this work so that the idea comes across as well as making an interesting piece of artwork. The work displayed here is still in progress as we continue to refine our methods for applying ink and color.