Seafloor Sediment

In September, 2024, I completed an Artist at Sea residency with Schmidt Ocean Institute. For three weeks I had the honor to live onboard the Falkor (too) off the coast of southern Chile. My role was to make art that communicated the research being done, the project was an international collaboration led by Dr. Sebastian Watt, and titled Fire and Ice: Volcanic and Glacial Interactions. Learn more about my participation here!

Many sediment cores are needed to begin to understand past processes and climate in a region. These cores highlight the variety of sediment types, things like volcanic ash, mud, sand, and gravel. The team was most interested in finding ash to learn about volcanic history in this region, in particular the eruption of Chaitén Volcano in 2008. The painted cores are scaled according to their actual length, and the blue lines next to them are scaled according to the water depth in which they are taken. The colors in these cores can be subtly beautiful, and they contain so many clue as to the history in this part of southern Chile.