Lisa Beth Robinson and Kristin Thielking were attempting something completely new—to digitally capture, and cast in glass, a three-dimensional model of a real, live wave.
“Ships Burning,” a glass sculpture by Lisa Beth Robinson and Kristin Thiekling, is part of their collaborative work exploring the ocean and how humans relate to it.
The two artists have worked together for years, exploring a mutual fascination with the ocean, creating glass boats of different colors and textures. But their goal to sculpt a wave represented new levels of challenge. First, there was the technological feat of digitally capturing something moving and transparent. Second, they aimed to use their art to catch people’s attention and wake them up to vast changes that loom for the ocean.
“Every second breath you take comes from oceans,” says Robinson. “All that phytoplankton is a huge generator of the oxygen you breathe.”
“People don’t consider the ocean’s relevance to their lives, especially if they are not on a coast,” observes Thielking. So she and Robinson want to create a series of glass columns, each topped with a rendering of an ocean wave and placed in unexpected locations, such as grocery stores or parks. The installations will use light and sound as well as text to describe the art and science behind capturing a wave, and why it matters.
“We want people to think about how the ocean is part of our daily lives and our survival,” Thielking says. “We can use the beauty and mystery of the glass to draw people in—to bring the ocean to the people.”
Many of us are at least superficially familiar with the vast changes occurring in the ocean. There’s the Giant Pacific Garbage Patch that’s grown to be more than twice the size of Texas. Climate-change driven increases in ocean temperatures are sending fish swimming toward the poles in search of cooler water, and turbo-charging hurricane seasons. As water warms it melts polar ice and also expands, both of which drive up sea levels. Higher seas flood coastal cities, erode beaches, swamp protective mangroves, and intrude into freshwater aquifers relied on for drinking water. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has already acidified ocean waters by 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, wreaking havoc on coral reefs and even oyster farms. And we know too well the ever-present danger of oil spills in a post-Deepwater Horizon world.
But that’s just the tip of the fast-melting iceberg. Other changes are coming on the heels of new maritime industries poised for launch, including massive offshore wind, tidal, and wave energy developments; oil and gas production in “ultra-deep” water; marine biotech prospecting; and seabed mining. A warming planet is causing Arctic ice to retreat, opening up millions of square miles to new activities including shipping, fishing, and the extraction of minerals, oil, and gas.
Any single one of these activities portends huge impacts on the ocean, and while this “blue growth” promises new sources of food, energy, and other resources, it also involves a strong push to privatize the Earth’s largest commons. Ocean advocates are scrambling to keep up, and too few of us know what’s going on.
The artists want to help change that.
In many ways, the open ocean is another, largely unexplored planet—we have better resolution maps of the surface of the moon, Mars, and Venus than we do of the Earth’s ocean floor. Ocean water makes it difficult for satellites to map the seabed; much of what we know comes from deep ocean drilling and core sampling.
Over the past three decades, such exploration has changed our ideas about plate tectonics, ancient climates, and even our understanding of life. We’ve found enormous microbial diversity in marine sediments, for example, and sea organisms able to flourish in complete darkness on a diet of methane and sulfur. There’s life as deep as 8,000 feet, and at extreme temperatures, living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents above 230 degrees Fahrenheit.
The DNA of this deep sea life is of keen interest to biopharmaceutical, biofuel, and chemical interests. By 2025, the global market for marine biotech is projected to reach $6.4 billion, a promise that has companies rushing to patent “marine genetic resources” to ensure their exclusive access to the promising economic benefits of the deep sea. The 2010 Nagoya Protocol created international obligations around sharing the benefits of genetic resources and their products, but only for those sourced from within national boundaries. No such mechanism currently exists for the “high seas”—the open ocean and deep seabed lying outside of the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone of any country.
A study published this past June revealed that 221 companies have registered 84 percent of all marine genetics patents, and a single one, German chemical manufacturer BASF, has gobbled up 47 percent—taken from microbes, fish, and even whales. Less rich countries without resources to explore, let alone develop, new technologies are entirely left out of the race to “own” these genetic resources.
Though they’ve long been accepted as res communis—common heritage of all people and held in trust for future generations—the ocean deeps are increasingly being treated as a private gold mine.
The high seas represent about 45 percent of the Earth’s surface, and 64 percent of the ocean’s surface. And though they’ve long been accepted as res communis—common heritage of all people and held in trust for future generations—the ocean deeps are increasingly being treated by individual states and corporations as a private gold mine.
Take the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, for example, a deep abyss stretching between Hawaii and Mexico. Since 2001, mining companies have been allowed to stake claims on the ocean floor, after the discovery that vast stretches of it (some 770,000 square miles) are dotted with small, round “polymetallic nodules,” rich in nickel, iron, cobalt, and other metals useful for making phones and computers. But the zone also hosts deep sea corals and a truly astounding breadth of deep sea life (just Google “headless chicken monster” or “Casper the Octopod”).
Scientists and ocean advocates are fretting about how the impacts of mining, including toxic effluent and clouds of sediment, could harm ocean creatures. But as in fracking, mining interests insist on secrecy, so environmental threats are difficult to identify.
“You’ve got [thirty] people making decisions about half the planet behind closed doors,” observed one environmental group representative at a 2017 International Seabed Authority technical meeting of companies and experts with deep sea mining interests.
And even if environmental impacts were somehow identified up front, it isn’t clear what treaties or other mechanisms are robust enough to offer real protection or ensure rules are followed. The International Seabed Authority, for example, is part of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was created in 1982 as a global framework to coordinate development and resolve questions of equity and environmental risk. But the United States, beginning with Ronald Reagan, has refused to sign on the basis that seabed mining rules are too burdensome, and, in the words of his U.N. ambassador, “thinly disguised world collectivism.”
All these threats to the ocean commons can seem very distant in the daily life of a busy landlubber though, and that’s something Robinson and Thielking want to see change.
Kristin Thiekling
The artists envision an installation of glass waves, each created from data on actual waves captured via photogrammetry and high speed imaging. Each wave would be mounted on a steel frame, and viewers walking through will experience a sense of submersion as the sea level rises at an accelerating rate, measured by a timeline on the wall.
The artists were inspired to take on the technical challenge of capturing a wave after initial discussions with John McCord of the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University.
McCord works with photogrammetry, widely used to generate three-dimensional digital images of the seafloor, and also has access to the university’s wave tank, used in tidal energy technology research. “I told them I was up for the challenge,” he said, “but there’s a high possibility we’ll fail.”
Thielking traveled from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she is an art professor, to North Carolina to work with McCord and Robinson. They had a week. They had figured out they needed a domed shape hanging above the wave tank, to position some dozen cameras that would simultaneously register an image of a wave from multiple angles. Their challenges included syncing the cameras to 1/1000th of a second, and then tricking the photogrammetry software to register the water surface. “It doesn’t like anything shiny or clear, said McCord. “Our first attempts got great images of the tank floor.”
They tried dusting the water with confetti, which got waterlogged, providing inaccurate images of the wave’s surface. They tried poly string yarn, which was hydrophobic, but failed to cover enough surface area for the cameras to pick up the complexity of the wave.
“I am not sure what led to us to think of sawdust, but that was the trick,” said McCord. The coup de grâce was the artists jumping into the wave tank with boogie boards to create a random wave pattern, after the team realized that the tank’s own waves were too smooth.
“Ocean waves have a randomness about them driven primarily by wind, which results in different heights, durations, and shapes,” explains Robinson. “It’s also what makes them so beautiful.”
“I am not sure what led to us to think of sawdust, but that was the trick.”
So if Thielking and Robinson’s goal is to help create more of a “public” for the ocean—people who understand its role in the health of the planet system and value its treasure trove of abundant, unusual life, not just its $2.5 trillion GDP—what might we look to to avoid a tragedy of the ocean commons?
It’s hard to feel confident looking at the existing holey patchwork of sea governance. Despite decades of attempting to negotiate sustainable yields, for example, the world’s fishing capacity is at a whopping 250 percent of sustainable maximum harvest.
“Some people might say we’ve made progress managing fish on the high seas, others not,” says Merrick Burden, economist for the Environmental Defense Fund’s oceans program of fisheries management. “If there is progress, it’s not very much.” A big problem, he says, is that the organizations charged with managing international fisheries can involve large numbers of countries with different needs, cultures, and objectives. “Setting common goals among countries with such large differences for the ocean is really hard,” he says.
Burden notes that “bottom up” agreements have sometimes worked where large international ones have not. He points to the Parties to the Nauru Agreement via which eight island nations achieved desired tuna population levels.
But, clearly, for an interconnected ocean, large-scale cooperation is needed. According to research from 2015, just thirteen corporations control up to 40 percent of the ocean’s largest and most valuable fish stocks and dominate all segments of seafood production including aquaculture.
Along those lines, Liz Karan of the Pew Charitable Trusts sees the World Trade Organization as a critical piece of high seas’ stewardship. Pew is asking WTO members to adopt a binding agreement that would limit subsidies for vessels, fuel, and equipment that drive overfishing.
Clearly, the ocean needs more advocates to push back against the forces of privatization and to build support for a healthy future for the ocean and its Earth.
Another key element, says Karan, is creating—and enforcing—a network of ocean sanctuaries. Member countries of the Convention on Biological Diversity set a goal to protect 10 percent of the ocean by 2020. But new analysis established that this is too little to effectively help the ocean recover from the exhaustive operation that defines much of today’s high tech fishing. Add to that how climate change upends ocean ecology, and at least 30 percent of the world’s marine area needs protection.
At this point only 7.4 percent of the ocean has these protections, and even the goal of 10 percent looks unlikely. But Karan is hopeful.
“We are heading into a pivotal time for oceans and 2020 will be a big year,” she says. The United Nations has proclaimed a “Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development” beginning in 2021, and Karan sees “a wave of recognition that something needs to be done.”
The United Nations has convened formal treaty negotiations to hammer out new agreements on the ocean commons, with the next meeting planned for April 2019. “It’s about looking at these resources as belonging to everyone, not unduly exploited, and that areas of biological importance are preserved,” Karan says. “The ocean is one living system.”
Two ocean stewardship agreements that might offer models include the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, signed by twenty-four countries and the European Union. Another is the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean. It’s a first in proactive ocean conservation, barring unregulated fishing in the high seas of the central Arctic—which are opening up as sea ice melts—until more is known about the newly accessible ocean.
But as much as international cooperation is critical for global problems like climate change and ocean stewardship, it’s an ever-elusive goal. The United States has continued to refuse to sign the Law of the Sea. And under the Trump Administration, U.S. participation in such agreements looks shakier than ever. Earlier this year, Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era cooperative strategy for U.S. waters put in place in 2011 after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And on October 24, despite long-term and widespread opposition, the administration approved the first Arctic offshore oil drilling development in U.S. waters.
Clearly, the ocean needs more advocates, including people who believe in strong multilateral agreements that push back against the forces of privatization and support a healthy future for the ocean and the Earth. This is what Robinson and Thielking aspire to.
This fall the two artists joined with Future Earth Coasts, an international research project on environmental change in the coastal zone, to take their wave project on the road, They presented during a session on the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 14, “Life Below Water,” at an international meeting.
“What we want to do is broaden the conversation,” Shona Paterson of Future Earth Coasts said at the conference. “And art is one way to do that.”
It took the full week, but the art-science team succeeded in capturing a three-dimensional image of a wave, albeit one in captivity. The team sent the image to a large 3D printer to generate the model from which Thielking could create a glass mold. They had their wave.
Closeup from a prototype “wavelet” by Thielking and Robinson.
Their initial firing included “wavelets”—prototypes of the larger wave sculptures. “We want people to be able to pick these up and physically connect with them,” Thielking says. “We imagine these little waves infiltrating communities and homes, reminders that we are interdependent.”
The wavelets are paperweight sized, and fascinating, with surfaces complicated by random patterns. The shiny sides reveal layers of green, blue, and white, suggesting a vertical complexity in the ocean waters.
Holding the wavelets up to light reveals patterns of bubbles and, delightfully, words. One of them reads, “Breath.”