A visualisation of the global ocean derived from the GEBCO dataset. Rendered at 4k Fulldome resolution.
This is an excerpt from ongoing work – there is so much to do with this and I have only splashed the surface of the data.
The visualisation is set up as a conundrum: what can be 4.5 billion years old, eternally dark and bitterly cold; always seen and never seen?
It’s not outer-space but inner-space – and right here on planet Earth. Of course, this is poetic license, but it gets the point across: we think of geopolitical oceans and cartographic fantasies (the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Southern..) – yet in reality, there is only one Ocean, mostly unknown to us, yet seen and exploited everyday.
Hopefully, this is a vision of its alien-ness, to help us see again the familiar in a new and insightful way.
The model is derived from current GEBCO data (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) subtracted from WGS’84 – meaning that this is the ocean volume – the sea – the water – the world of sea-life and unimaginable depths. The physical geography of the Earth is intimated by the shape of water; the sea is a world itself.
Depth is exaggerated for visualisation purposes.
Made by Peter Morse (http://www.petermorse.com.au) and Paul Bourke (http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/).
Many thanks to:
Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT: http://www.anat.org)
WASP (Western Australian Supercomputer Program : http://www.www.wasp.uwa.edu.au)
IVEC (http://www.ivec.org)
University of Western Australia (http://www.uwa.edu.au)
Australian Antarctic Division (http://www.aad.gov.au/)
GEBCO (http://www.gebco.net)
