March 7, 2024
The first astronauts to witness Earth from space were awed by the inspiring sight. They felt a shift in their perspective and an understanding of Earth’s fragility, an experience now known as the “overview effect”.This recent visualisation of Antarctica, evokes the overview effect showing that southern, vast, frozen expanse breathing, alive.
This visualisation of Antarctic sea ice coverage,
was created by a collaboration between Dr Ed Doddridge, a physical oceanographer with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership (AAPP) at the University of Tasmania, and research software engineer visualisation specialist, Owen Kaluza, from the Model Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) team at the Australian Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-NRI)
“We wanted to show the winter expansion and the summer contraction of the Southern Ocean sea-ice and its essential role in the planet’s climate. The annual cycle of freezing and melting is like a heartbeat for Earth. Visualisations like this one, are powerful tools to show how the ocean currents are driven by the annual cycle of sea ice, as each year’s growth and contraction pumps huge quantities of cold salty water into the ocean, ” says Dr Doddridge.
Watch this video, where Ed Doddridge explains Antarctica’s essential role in regulating the climate of our planet.
This visualisation is based on satellite data from 1978 to the end of 2023 collected by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC). Antarctic sea ice at its winter peak covers an area more than two times the area of Australia and during summer, the remaining sea ice will reduce to an area the size of Queensland.
Mr Kaluza describes the visualisation process as “we import a variety of data sources, imagery and 3D models and transform them into the resulting colours and shapes in the visualisation to show the cycle of sea ice coming and going, the depth of the ocean and the surrounding geography”.
“The satellite-sourced passive microwave data can’t provide us with true colour photographic snapshots of what the ice actually looked like at the time, so using a mosaic of images of real sea ice with increasing levels of ice coverage, we recreate what the ice coverage may have looked like from above based on the satellite data and plot this imagery in context on a stylised 3D globe,” he says.
Visualisations of research are vital engagement tools, helping researchers to communicate scientific findings to the public, but also for the researchers themselves as they can help to simplify complex data, understand temporal and spatial aspects and identify patterns.
“One of the goals of ACCESS-NRI is to make available the source code for these visualisations to the Australian research community, so researchers can use the code with their date to create their own visualisations. They were created with open-source and freely available tools and the source code will be published on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/ACCESS-NRI/Visualisations),” said Mr Kaluza.
In the case of Antarctica, understanding and explaining its role as a life support system for Earth to the public has never been more critical because there are indications that Antarctic sea ice may have entered a new state of diminished coverage.
Since 2016, Antarctic sea ice has been below average almost constantly. 2023 broke records for the lowest sea ice coverage, alarming scientists all over the world. Dramatic changes in a seasonal cycle as critical as Antarctic sea ice underscore the urgency to reduce emissions and stop global heating.
“We need to communicate this urgency clearly to decision makers, government and the public and we are hoping these visualisations can help people to understand the profound impact Antarctic sea-ice has on the global climate system,” says Dr Doddridge.
This visualisation is a collaboration between the Australian Antarctic Project Partnership (AAPP) and the Australian Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), using data from satellites run by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC).
ACCESS-NRI and TERN are enabled by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS)
CONTACT US
Australian Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) – email: access.nri@anu.edu.au website: https://www.access-nri.org.au/
Australian Antarctic Program Partnership (AAPP) – email: aapp.enquiries@utas.edu.au website: https://aappartnership.org.au/
CREDITS
Animation: Owen Kaluza, ACCESS-NRI
Presenter and researcher: Dr Edward Doddridge, AAPP
Video Editing: Nicolas Rakotopare, TERN
Video narration shot: Pete Harmsen
Science communication content: Natalia Bateman (ACCESSS-NRI) and Mark Horstman (AAPP)
Sea ice data
National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder
NOAA/NSIDC Climate Data Record of Passive Microwave Sea Ice Concentration, Version 4 https://nsidc.org/data/g02202/versions/4
Near-Real-Time NOAA/NSIDC Climate Data Record of Passive Microwave Sea Ice Concentration, Version 2 https://nsidc.org/data/g10016/versions/2
Other assets (public domain and/or creative commons)
Relief colour maps https://www.shadedrelief.com/
Topography and Bathymetry: NASA https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/
Ocean wave texture: https://www.manytextures.com/texture/23/sea-water/
Archival photos: Royal Library of Belgium KBR
Map: Georges Lecointe, Belgica expedition, 1903