ABYSSAL STORM
Artwork of Ned Kahn
Created for the Ocean Sciences Building, School of Oceanography, University of Washington, 2001
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ABYSSAL STORM
by Ned Kahn, 2001
Conceived in collaboration with the School of Oceanography, University of Washington
Funded by the Washington State Arts Commission
This sculpture allows you to tilt and rotate the elliptical vessel filled with a mixture of water
and tiny glass spheres. Depending on the angle that the vessel is tilted, many different flow patterns can be created.
These complex flows are suggestive of turbidity currents and undersea avalanches in the depths of the ocean. When the fluid
is stirred, the fluidized sediment beoomes dense
and can support internal wave motions.
The experiment reminds us of larger scale ocean flows: the 'overturning' of an estuary
where a small input of river water drives a much larger circulation, drawing denser ocean
water inward, feeding and ventilating creatures living there.
At still larger scale, the entire world ocean is 'overturning', with waters sinking in just a few
places in the cold, high latitudes; again a much larger rising motion is then driven that ventilates
the oceans of the Earth from beneath.
The apparatus sits like a ship's binnacle, or astrolabe, or an earthly globe,
inside the first crest of a glass wave.
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