Monday, June 22, 2015

In Living Color: Antarctica's Vibrant Wildlife Under the Sea

Mostly when Antarctica is mentioned, the first color one thinks of is white. An easy conclusion to reach given that the majority of the continent is thickly covered in ice, but a recent collaborative experiment between scientist Skye Moret and I has yielded far more colorful results.

In Living Color: Antarctica's Vibrant Wildlife Under the Sea

Asking for 50 of my most boldly colored dive images from the two months I spent exploring the Southern Ocean earlier this year, she then paired them against 50 of her own images from above the water to see what might be realized when comparing the two worlds.

Devising a way to represent the information in the most compelling manner, Skye crafted a pixellated color bar to represent the variance in each image individually. Fascinating in their own right, simply because we spend so little time dwelling on the inhabitants of our most southern continent, the color bars take on a whole new appearance when placed together.


In Living Color: Antarctica's Vibrant Wildlife Under the Sea

Published by The Ground Truth Project at Medium, Skye writes of her time aboard research vessels in the Southern Ocean and how such a project came to form in her mind.

Check out the recent article in the Boston Globe about Skye's work: Teaching Scientists How to Visualize Their Data

Also not to be missed her website where science and a designer's imagination meet: Skye Moret

In Living Color: Antarctica's Vibrant Wildlife Under the Sea

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