Antarctica: a Chromatic Paradox

When I first gave thought to what might live under the sea in Antarctica, I imagined that the fish and other animals would be the same grey-blue hue of the landscape above. Never did I expect the vibrant colours and fantastical shapes that have appeared before my eyes on the back deck of this US Antarctic research vessel—or appreciate the disruption that climate change has already begun to impose on the vitality of such a delicate ecosystem.

For three to four months each year I sail around Antarctica as a marine science technician for the US Antarctic Program, where my job is to facilitate science: to help researchers on seagoing and island expeditions sample and study an ecosystem that few have explored. When I’m not at sea I create visualizations to tell data-driven narratives. I use programming, illustrative techniques, photography, and participatory research to explore new and visual forms of storytelling in the context of complex environmental issues such as climate change.

In my visualization from this trip, to capture the diversity of life above and below the sea surface, I compared colour pixels from 100 photographs taken here on the Antarctic Peninsula. For each image, I systematically subsampled pixels and sorted them by RGB colour values to create a vertical pixel bar. Fifty upper vertical bars represent images captured of the land and seascape above the sea surface, while fifty lower bars exemplify the vibrant and varied world beneath the waves. The end result is a juxtaposition of colour and intensity that exposes our assumptions of a “colourless” Antarctica and reveals a surprising realm below, one that tends to be neglected in popular dialogue about a quickly warming Antarctic Peninsula. But first, a bit more context from these weeks at sea…

I’ve been sailing along the continent since mid-May. Our singular goal on this voyage: to skim the sea bottom and collect fish, which we will keep alive to bring back to a research station within a day’s steam. In order to get there, we had to cross the notoriously formidable Drake Passage, where the entire Southern Ocean squeezes between South America and Antarctica. It’s now gusting up to sixty knots and the ten-foot swells are consistently flooding the back deck with water—not ideal weather for putting expensive trawl nets over the side.

Our big steel ship, the Laurence M. Gould, seeks refuge between two islands on the Western Antarctic Peninsula to ride out the strong gale. Our work will start early the next day, and before heading to bed I take anti-nausea meds—a rare step for an experienced sailor, but quite necessary given the large rolls we are experiencing. Periodically throughout the night we poke our bow out into the weather to see if the seas have sufficiently calmed so we can head north for science.

Sure enough, by 0400, in the military parlance of seafaring expeditions, the winds have laid down. We head for the shallow waters of Low Island, with its self-descriptive silhouette, and deploy our net into the sub-zero waters. It takes about forty-five minutes for the net to reach the bottom, fifteen minutes to trawl for creatures, and another forty-five minutes to haul them up to the surface. By the time the bulging end of the net, called the “cod end” for where cod collect when fishing for them, is finally hauled up and over the stern, we are eager to open it and transfer the fish to tanks. Once the net is hauled into a safe area, we quickly untie the fancy slipknots on the cod end and expose the net’s bright, wriggling contents.

At first glance, the diversity of both shape and texture defies expectation: hairy sponges, rigid fish, spiny urchins, feathery hydroids. But as all of the fish are whisked away, the animals accidentally caught in the net remain the true spectacle.

I see bright yellow sea stars the size of throw pillows, spindly sea spiders as large as my hand, toddler-sized sponges, and pink sea cucumbers with white bumps like a garden cucumber. As everyone grabs shovels to quickly return these creatures to the sea, my gloved hands touch skates with three-foot wingspans and thick worms with inch-long gold spines that look like fine jewelry. Everything is vibrant and colourful in contrast to the frosty grey world above the surface. I gently pick up peach-coloured soft corals the shape of cattails and bulbous tunicates that look like wrinkled, white potatoes and return them back to the briny deep.

This little glimpse of what lives at the murky bottom is truly awe-inspiring. A completely different universe below that may host undescribed species and new habitats—a seascape that most humans will never regard.

I return to Antarctica as both a scientist and information designer because it is extraordinary; rife with stunning scenery and scientific discovery. It is the last unexploited continent on the planet.

Though I have mixed feelings about fishing in such a vulnerable area, even for science, I never grow tired of seeing what we pull up from the Antarctic depths. It’s like looking through a keyhole at a secret garden of colourful undersea creatures at the bottom of the Earth. Their stark juxtaposition to the white, blue, and brown hues that dominate the scape above motivates my need to show this dichotomy of Antarctic colours through my work: a portrait of above the sea surface versus below. As a data-driven artist I want to evoke curiosity, awe, and awareness of the vibrant, diverse, and abundant life beneath the surface at these latitudes.

Unfortunately, the Antarctic Peninsula persistently experiences the greatest temperature anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere. The average annual temperature here has been warming 1.1°F (0.6°C) per decade. That’s more than 7.4°F (4.1°C) since 1947, when air temperature was first consistently recorded in the region.

South, beyond the latitudinal thresholds of our cultural consciousness, these colourful creatures are incredibly vulnerable and are now the true test subjects in our outcome-uncertain, human-induced experiment called climate change.