Sensible Zone

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The ocean is a sensorium: it records the transformations of the earth in its complex dynamics, and it inscribes back into the forms of life its own cycles. Today, the global ocean is rapidly changing its circulations, energies, interactions, and ecologies. It is the most dynamic and sensitive component of our living planet, yet the most unknown. The ocean is in a new phase of its non-linear history, shaped by the intensification of the impact of human activities on the earth system—the Anthropocene.

TBA21–Academy and Territorial Agency are collaborating to connect new forms of visibility and understanding of the ocean brought by science, culture, and art. Linking scientists, artists, policy makers, and conservationists by way of shared images, data sets, and narratives, the projects is structured as an instigation for new cognitive modes of encountering the ocean and a line towards attainable solutions.

Multibeam sonar sounding of Reykjanes Ridge in the Atlantic Ocean. ©Territorial Agency

OCEAN ARCHIVE‍
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OCEAN ARCHIVEThe world ocean is enveloped in a millenary shift following a long period of relative climatic stability. The transformations are plural: they traverse a multiplicity of elements, circulations, life forms, and environments and operate across a gradient of dimensions, energies, and rhythms.

The project assembles a variety of scientific data sets stemming from multiple research institutions to depict the magnitude of human impact on marine life. What emerges is a series of dynamic compositions that are disquieting and disorienting: the image of an empty ocean lingers on in many of us.

OCEAN ARCHIVEThe trajectories indicate the intricate interrelations between forms of the earth system and forms of human habitation. As they span the planet, they reveal the magnitude of the impact of human activity on the oceans and offer a glimpse into humans’ relation to a multiplicity of oceans in transformation, as well as a premonition about the future of these relationships. They indicate how fragmented and incoherent our knowledge of the oceans still is and form an invitation to collaborate and think together how to safeguard the future of the oceans and their habitants.

North Sea to Red Sea

The Gulf Stream

Equatorial Pacific

Mid Atlantic

Indian Ocean Gyre

Metropolitan Asia

Humboldt Current

DATA SETSHumans are starting to become aware of the impacts of our activities. We tentatively look into this new phase of the earth via remote sensing technology and scientific modeling. The same technologies of environmental surveying and modeling are at the basis of the increased exploitation of the Earth System and of its scientific understanding. Sensing technologies and the data derived from them need to become a key component of political engagement with a rapidly changing planet.

Anthropocene traces in the Pacific Ocean: fishing and trans-shipment data near the Nazca-Desventuradas Marine Park off of the coast of Chile. © Territorial Agency

DATA SETS

DATA SETSThe ocean is largely unknown. It is sounded and measured by a growing number of scientist, institutions, and research centers deploying a vast apparatus of remote-sensing satellites, buoys, fixed stations, high-resolution bathymetric sonar measurements, radar beams, lidar scans, GPS, automatic identification systems for vessels, complex mathematical models, and direct observations. The data they collect is often local and partial, and complex operations are undertaken to synchronize and normalize data, make it inter-operative, and increase availability to growing communities of researchers. The vast machine of climate change science is improving at enormous speed, and yet, data is often unavailable on a global scale, is not continuous, the data collections themselves are often incomplete, and it is difficult to access—even when it is available as part of scientific publications, it is often published in sites known only to experts.

ESA Sentinel 5P aerosols in the atmosphere © Territorial Agency

Despite efforts by scientist, activists, and the arts, many people remain indifferent to the Anthropocene. Thinking from and with the ocean can change this. The technologies that have caused the Anthropocene can be turned into sensors to monitor the health of the self-regulating systems of the earth, measure our actions to safeguard its inhabitability, and begin to add self-awareness to the self-regulation of the earth system.

DATA SETSEarth is alive. We need to acknowledge the planetary agency of life, and we need to keep oil in the ground. These are the first and key steps for any significant set of actions to safeguard the inhabitability of our planet.

Fossil fuels intrude onto the self-regulating processes linking oceans, atmosphere and land. Carbon waste from burning fossil fuels remains in the atmosphere for 300 to 1000 years and changes the chemistry of the oceans. Adapted from Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson, Revolutions that Changed the Earth

DATA SETLife is the key element of the complex self-regulating systems that form the Earth, maintaining conditions for habitation for the past 3.5 to 4 billion years. This is a complex process, self-sustaining, multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and without any overarching hierarchy, and the oceans are its main drivers. Self-regulation is not planned or foreseen by the myriad organisms that populate the world’s oceans and lands.

Time and spatial scale of ocean processes: the complex system of life self-regulation of the ocean is multi-scalar and without an overarching hierarchy.Adapted from Robert Lossing, The History and Evolution of Satellite Remote Sensing of Ocean Colour Science

DATA SETS

DATA SETSThe current epoch, the Anthropocene, has seen human evolution and technologies changing these self-regulating processes. A millenary shift from a long period of climatic stability of approximately 11,000 years has now transformed the Earth System. Human impacts on the self-regulation processes are mainly linked to the intensification of human energy consumption, which has rapidly escalated since the Industrial Revolution. Since the mid-twentieth century, a so-called “great acceleration” has transformed our impact on the Earth System into a vast, entangled system of technological dependencies. Humans have modified the carbon, the nitrogen, and the phosphorus cycles of the Earth, principally through energy produced by burning fossilized biosphere.

Life is a heterogeneous and networked process, changing its risky extension
in space and time by complex interactions with its abiotic environment. Adapted from Tim Lenton and Bruno Latour, Extending the Domain of Freedom,or Why is Gaia so Hard to Understand

All of humanity—a projected 9 to 11 billion people—depends on fossil fuels for its sustainment, through plantations, extensive agriculture, fishing, and the transport and infrastructure systems. We are so dependent on this system that traces of human activity now amount to approximately 30 trillion tonnes of material across the entire planet (the equivalent of 30 centimeters of rubble everywhere), from deep to the oceans and up to the stratosphere. This system has also distanced most humans from our most important environment, the oceans, from which we take half of our oxygen, while intruding on it with a swathe of technological waste and debris.

World Primary Energy Use: evolution of primary energy shown as absolutecontributions by different energy sources (in EJ). Adapted from Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Arnulf Grubler, GEA Global Energy Assessment

DATA SETSWe need to think about oceans and land as interconnected.
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The thin layer, the area between -200 meters and +200 meters, is the most important component of the Earth System, where the trophic chains connecting areas make chlorophyll photosynthesis possible, which is necessary for the complex processes of regulation of life on land. The sensible zone is the thin, yet vast site of carbon capture and of the life flows and fluxes of climatic homeostasis. It reaches deep into the waters until light can activate photosynthesis, and well above sea level into the mountains, valleys, and ridges of terrestrial life. It is a zone of accelerated and slowed recycling of materials, minerals, energies, trophic upwelling, life. And it is a sensitive zone that is susceptible to rapid variations from small perturbations.

Continuity between land and sea in Europe: from -200m to +200m. © Territorial Agency

DATA SETS

DATA SETSIt is also the most surveyed, measured, gridded and extracted zone of our globalized cities. It is enmeshed in remote-sensing technologies of automatized production of renewable energy, of drilling in the continental shelves, of dredging canals and overfishing of what is left to fish in securitized Exclusive Economic Zones. It is the zone where one can start to make sense of the multiple new horizons of global sea level rise.

High resolution bathymetric sonar sounding of the Venice Lagoon. ISMAR-CNR data. © Territorial Agency

DATA SETSBetween 1994–2017, we destroyed 28 trillion tonnes of ice.
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The rate of ice loss has risen by 57 percent since the 1990s, due to warming of the atmosphere and reduced reflectivity. Yet, the major part of sea level rise is given by thermal expansion of the oceans.

Anthropocene traces in the Pacific Ocean: fishing and trans-shipment data near the Nazca-Desventuradas Marine Park off of the coast of Chile. © Territorial Agency

DATA SETS

DATA SETSWe urgently need to establish a high sea sanctuary, where there will be a moratorium on fishing and deep-sea mining.
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Almost 98 percent of proteins from seafood originates from fisheries and aquaculture within Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), the sea zones over which states have undivided rights to exploit marine resources. These fisheries are heavily overfished, and many are unregulated, unreported, and illegal. Only luxury fish such as tuna and billfishes are fished on the high seas, with enormous costs, and often heavy subsidies. High seas fisheries play a negligible role in human food security and in the fishing economy, yet their impact on marine life is catastrophic.

Diagram of the principal jurisdictional zones of the oceans © Territorial Agency

DATA SETS

DATA SETSEstablishing a high sea sanctuary in the areas beyond national jurisdictions would create a vast Marine Protection Area where overfished species from the continental shelves of the EEZs could recover, prosper, and spill back into the EEZs, so that catches will increase. Closure of the high seas to fishing would have major economic and social benefits, and would protect the marine megafauna in its migration routes across the oceans.

Fishing activity, trans-shipment, maritime transport, high-resolution bathymetricsonar soundings, sea mounts and sea vents in the South Atlantic Ocean. © Territorial Agency

This process would require complex international cooperation. The cases of the world’s largest marine protected area established in Antarctica by the Convention on the Conservation of Marine Living Resource are an example of a preexisting moratorium on fishing and protection of wildlife. More can be done, and many studies indicate that it is possible to protect 30 percent of the high seas by 2030.

Fishing activity, trans-shipment, maritime transport, high-resolution bathymetricsonar soundings, sea mounts and sea vents in the North Atlantic. © Territorial Agency

The International Seabed Authority, established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is the body that can license exploration and extraction activities for deep-sea mining. The exploitation of deep-sea minerals, known for over 150 years, has started to be considered commercially valuable recently. The minerals, mainly poly-metallic nodules, also called manganese nodules—rock concretions at the bottom of the sea—or rare-earth minerals on sea vents, are parts of very fragile ecosystems, home to a myriad species yet unknown in their complexity. These minerals are crucial for the energy transition away from the dependence on fossil fuels. There is a strong case against deep-sea mining, since it is extremely high risk and incurs high economic costs. Nevertheless, the ISA has been granting deep-sea mining permissions in locations around the world ocean, pushing forth this uncertain future.

DATA SEOceans in Transformation is a collaboration between TBA21–Academy and e-flux Architecture within the context of the eponymous exhibition at Ocean Space in Venice by Territorial Agency and its manifestation on Ocean Archive

Editors:
Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Palmesino, Markus Reymann, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and Daniela Zyman

Editorial

DATA SENick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Palmesino, Markus Reymann, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, and Daniela Zyman

When Above

DATA SEJohn Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog

The Sea and the Breathing

DATA SEAstrida Neimanis

Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice

DATA SEAnne McClintock

The Fisherman and the Scientist

DATA SECresantia Frances Koya Vaka’uta

Infrastructural Snare

DATA SENabil Ahmed

Shipping Oil

DATA SELaleh Khalili

Forest Gardens Beneath the Anthropocene Seas

DATA SEMark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz

Revaluing the Oceans

DATA SEJeremy B.C. Jackson

Muddying the Waters

DATA SEMargarida Mendes and João Martins

Underwater (Un)Sound

DATA SEEmma McCormick-Goodhart

Four Cautionary Tales from the Future Asian Metropolis

DATA SEJunyuan Feng and Alvin Li