The ocean is a sensorium: it records the transformations of the Earth in its complex dynamics, and it inscribes back into the forms of life its own cycles. Today, the global ocean is rapidly changing its circulations, energies, interactions, and ecologies. It is the most dynamic and sensitive component of our living planet, yet the most unknown. The ocean is in a new phase of its non-linear history, shaped by the intensification of the impact of human activities on the Earth System—the Anthropocene.

TBA21–Academy and Territorial Agency are collaborating to connect new forms of visibility and understanding of the ocean brought by science, culture, and art. Linking scientists, artists, policy makers, and conservationists by way of shared images, data sets, and narratives, the projects is structured as an instigation for new cognitive modes of encountering the ocean and a line towards attainable solutions.

OCEAN ARCHIVEThe world ocean is enveloped in a millenary shift following a long period of relative climatic stability. The transformations are plural: they traverse a multiplicity of elements, circulations, life forms, and environments and operate across a gradient of dimensions, energies, and rhythms.

The research project assembles a variety of scientific datasets stemming from multiple research institutions to depict the magnitude of human impact on marine life. What emerges is a series of dynamic compositions that are disquieting and disorienting: the image of an empty ocean lingers on in many of us.
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TRAJECTORIESA series of trajectories explore the complex knowledge intersections of the transformation processes shaping the World-system and the Earth system. They are the basis for an extensive online public program that asks how we can sense and make sensible the multiple transformations of the oceans, strengthen our understanding of the oceans, form new collaborations, and move together to safeguard the oceans’ many life forms.

DATA SETSThe ocean is largely unknown: today, it is sounded and measured by a growing number of scientist, institutions, and research centers deploying a vast apparatus of remote sensing satellites, buoys, fixed stations, high-resolution bathymetric measurements, radar beams, lidar scan, GPSes, automatic identification systems for vessels, complex mathematical models, and direct observations.
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The data they collect is often local and partial, and complex operations are being taken around the world to synchronize and normalize data, make it interoperative, and increase availability to growing communities of researchers. The vast machine of climate change science is improving at enormous speed. Yet, data is often unavailable on a global scale; it is not continuous and difficult to access: even when it is available as part of scientific publications, it is often published in sites known only to experts and the data collections themselves are often incomplete.
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Open data, that is, data that is available without restrictions on access and use, is a largely aspired goal in science, yet the institutions of the instrumented, objective, and corrected knowledge of climate change involve economies that are contradictory with those aspirations. In the research presented in “Oceans in Transformation,” we have opted for open-access data sets with global coverage. Open access still requires registration and complex protocols for the use of public information.

The data sets are multi-temporal and span different depths. They stem from the archives of earth observation systems, which go back to the early 1970s, with a rapid increase in coverage from the 1990s onward.

Today, multiple sensors from a variety of programs are available. They form part of the global efforts to increase the percentage of the mapped seafloor from the current 17 percent to 100 percent by 2030. The ESA Sentinel program, for example, has substantially increased the open-access availability of the global remote sensing data the European Space Agency collects. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US has shared data sets that are among the wider ranging and accurate measurements. Japanese programs help cover large parts of the earth. And multiple data sets are from individual researchers.

Data set sources are organized in Ocean Archive along a vertical axis, from the deep seas to the atmosphere. The coverage is beyond the water column and the sky and ranges across large swaths of space and across multiple times. The data sets used in the project are made available here with links to the custodians of the data.

The observation of the Earth is a vast, unprecedented effort. It is rapidly moving, yet still in its early stages, with technologies changing rapidly, new focal points being developed alongside the developments of science.“Oceans in Transformation” is an attempt to bring these efforts together and intersect them with the complex world-views of the multiple populations of the oceans, both living within and beneath its waves, along its shores, and far from its waters.

In this sense, there is no remoteness when thinking through the importance of the ocean in regulating and sustaining our living planet.