PROJECT DESCRIPTION
As rapid climate change begins to affect the Earth’s polar regions, scientists are studying the intricacies of ocean, atmosphere, and polar ice to understand how increasing temperatures will affect sea level rise and coastal communities in the coming century. One area of particular interest for a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf.
Antarctica, a continent larger than the USA and Mexico combined, is covered by an average 2-km-thick ice sheet that, if completely melted, would contribute 60 m of sea-level rise. That would take thousands of years, but 1–2 m of potential sea-level rise in this century depends on the dynamics of floating ice shelves like the Filchner-Ronne.
Ice shelves are the product of accumulated snowfall pushing off the continent and contribute to sea-level rise with accelerated melting (in contrast, sea ice freezes and melts seasonally at the ocean’s surface and does not affect sea level).
Scientists believe that warming ocean waters beneath the ice shelves will increase their melt rates, which may in turn speed up the ice streams that feed the shelves.
As polar currents circulate, they push water masses—a classification oceanographers use to separate ocean water into specific ranges of temperature and salinity—beneath the ice shelves, where they become difficult to track.
Scientists must rely on models to understand the complex dynamics at play, as real-world observations only come through robotic submersibles or probes drilled through the ice. This creates a difficult visualization challenge in terms of providing clarity, detail, and data interrogation capability in a complex, three-dimensional space.
In order to accomplish this, we gathered an interdisciplinary team of expert ocean modelers, computer scientists, visualization professionals, and an artist, who tackled these modeling and design challenges in a two-step process: a data reduction phase, in which the specific requirements of the science drive the transformation of the raw data to higher level representations, and a design phase, in which the use of artistic color theory introduces clarity within the complex multivariate imagery.
Mingling art and science opens minds
Article by Physics Today: “Simulating ocean circulation gives clues about climate change. This view toward the South Pole is a snapshot of the Antarctic ice sheet. The yellow and orange squiggles are currents, and light blue to purple represents increasing water depth, with the transition to purple indicating the continental slope. The tracers indicate parameters such as salinity and ice shelf water. The US Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model incorporates hundreds of variables and has a resolution of 10 km. “