Science and art meet in the Southern Ocean
By Luca Magri, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies/University of Tasmania and Joline Lalime, Sea2SchoolAU
The Southern Ocean is an immense water mass. The way it moves directly affects how other water masses circulate all around the globe, shaping the resulting climate systems from the tropics to the poles. Like a swimming pool is contained in a plastic or concrete basin, the natural water mass we call the Southern Ocean is contained in a vast basin formed by the Earth’s crust. Yet its boundaries are not fixed, and part of our job in Antarctic waters is to understand what the shape of this basin is. However, the boundaries are constantly moving, extremely slowly over geological time. As they change, new shapes redefine the direction of the ocean currents, with reverberating effects through the climate system and therefore life on our planet.
To understand the shape of the Earth beneath the ocean, we use sound (acoustic) waves that are generated onboard the ship, travel through the water layers and into the seafloor. Like the interaction between an audience listening to musicians playing songs at concerts, we ‘sing’ to our planet and listen carefully for its response. By measuring the time that the sound takes to travel to the bottom of the ocean and return – an ‘echo’ – we can begin to reconstruct what lies beneath us. The returning signals, recorded by a receiver (the seismic sensor), which are like microphones, allow us to start learning about Earth’s structure and piecing the picture together. As a result, we can visualise what the bottom of the ocean looks like and how the pieces of Earth’s crust fit together – which features stand out – underwater mountains, deep trenches, layers of sediments, and we can start to learn how they move in relation to each other.
From countless echoes, the final product is not a single clear picture but a vast number of small waves – basically wiggles – tracing the contours and showing us the boundaries of the giant basin that contains the waters we are currently sailing. Each sector of these boundaries is a fragment of a story, revealing the edges of an enormous basin and the features within. Mapping the seafloor is therefore, a process of interpretation, patience and imagination.
As geophysicists we are required to combine different sensory information to better understand our planet, making me feel like we are not only scientists, but musicians and painters. Like painters use colours to create their art, for data interpretation we pick different colours to better visualize the conversation we had with Earth. If we want to see something specific in a small region, we use contrasting colours that reveal delicate variations in depth, to highlight less noticeable differences in the shape of Earth’s crust. On the other hand, if we want to paint a portrait of the whole ship track of our voyage, we choose a narrower range of colours, which enable us to visualize more noticeable differences in the shape of our planet, at a larger scale. This is particularly useful for connecting the basin containing the Southern Ocean to all the other parts of the Earth’s crust that contain all the other oceans. In this way, maps become more than tools, they become visual narratives of the planet’s hidden form.
Each map is a kind of artwork. Lines and gradients combine to tell a story about forces that operate far beyond human timescales. The mountains and basins we trace are the result of tectonic movements, volcanic activity, glacial erosion, and sediment deposition over millions of years. When we look at these maps, we are not just observing shapes – we are reading the history of the Earth written in layers of rock and sediment.
Science at sea is exploration and creativity. Together, our work on data becomes a dialogue between sound and colour. We are not only measuring the Earth – we are learning to see it. What begins as a series of echoes and coloured images gradually transforms into a deeper understanding of how our planet is shaped, how it moves, and how it sustains life.
However, the maps that we geophysicists and the onboard CSIRO mapping team create remain only some sort of abstract art. We can talk to the Earth, we can visualize what the Earth looks like based on the conversations we had, but we don’t physically touch what lies kilometres below the surface. Based on previous knowledge, we interpret and infer that the art we create is based on something real.
This is when fellow scientists onboard CSIRO research vessel (RV) Investigator become extremely important to the geophysicists, to help clarify the assumption. Colleagues collecting samples such as water, sediment, and animals, are key to reminding us that what we create as geophysicists is part of the most complex and beautiful artwork ever made: the living, shifting structure of our planet.
Join us on the expedition
The IMAS-led research on the expedition will be showcased through blogs released through the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science and can be followed on social media at Sea2SchoolAu Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the CSIRO Voyage (IN2026_V01) Page
This voyage is supported by the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiatives Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (Project Number SR200100008), the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP250100886), the COOKIES GEOTRACES process study GIpr13, Horizon Europe European Research Council (ERC) Frontier Research Synergy Grants; the Italian National Antarctic Program (CNR:DSSTTA) and Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF) (Project Number SR200100005) and by a grant of sea time on RV Investigator from the CSIRO Marine National Facility (MNF).
Top header image: ACEAS/IMAS scientists and CSIRO staff during COOKIES voyage preparations in Hobart (Image Credit: CSIRO/Fraser Johnston)
