News

Lee de Mora
Plymouth Marine Laboratory

Science and art are often presented in the media as though they are in opposition, but science and art are great partners. Through provoking an emotional response, art can make scientific results and data more visceral, tangible, and memorable. Art can allow research to become more visible, more engaging, enabling it to travel much further and reach new audiences.

Sonification is the musical representation of data. Marine Heat Waves is a sonification video of projections of the future of the Ascension Island Marine Protected Area’s (AIMPA) marine environment.

 In Marine Heat Waves, four AIMPA datasets are represented as music: 

• Sea surface temperature relative to the mean of the years 1976-1985 is shown in red, and performed by the piano.
• Ocean acidity, pH, is shown as a blue line and is performed by a higher pitched synthesizer with a long note duration. 
• Phytoplankton biomass concentration is shown in green and is performed by a gritty bass synthesizer.
• Zooplankton biomass concentration is shown in purple and is performed by an analogue mid-range synthesizer with a short note duration.

The value of the data is linked with musical pitch. This means that, for instance, if the temperature rises, the piano pitch gets higher. The musical note, the original data, and the climatology of 1976-1985 are visualised on the left side of the video. On the right-hand side of the video, the globe shows the sea surface temperature in a purple-yellow colour scale or the temperature anomaly against 1976-1985 in a blue-red colour scale. The AIMPA is always shown on the globe as a white circle on the map.

A marine heatwave is a period of abnormally high ocean temperature compared to the typical seasonal temperature. On the globe, the onset of the marine heatwave is represented by a circle rippling outward from the AIMPA. In the audio, the piano note becomes distorted at the onset of a heatwave, with distortion linked to the heatwave intensity.

Ascension Island is a small remote island in the Equatorial Atlantic, which is inhabited by a significant diversity of marine life, including sharks, rays, cetaceans, turtles, and sea birds. The waters around the Ascension Island were protected from commercial fishing in 2019. However, the island is still vulnerable to external impacts of the changing climate, notably the impact of warming oceans and ocean acidification.

This piece highlights Ascension Island MPA’s exposure to heatwaves, ocean acidification and their subsequent impacts on the marine ecosystem. Over the coming century, our model projects that the ocean will become warmer, more acidic, with less phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass. These changes will negatively impact the rest of the ecosystem, as well as the AIMPA’s capacity to provide ecosystem services, such as tourism, sequester carbon, or maintain biodiversity.

This piece uses the NEMO-ERSEM model, developed by scientists at Plymouth Marine Laboratory as part of the Mission Atlantic project, and is built around the CMIP6 Ascension Island future projection from the CRACAB project, which was part of the Darwin Initiative. The musification tools and methods were developed for the UKESM’s Earth System Music project.

The video was generated in python using Matplotlib and Cartopy. The source code for the video is available here: https://github.com/ledm/MarineHeatwaves

The source code for the audio MIDI generation is available here: https://github.com/ledm/earthsystemmusic2

This piece is also available on spotify, apple music, amazon music and other music streamers.

References

Impacts of Climate Change on the Ascension Island Marine Protected Area and its Ecosystem Services (preprint, accepted)

Scenario choice impacts carbon allocation projection at global warming levels

Earth system music: music generated from the United Kingdom Earth System Model (UKESM1)