Exploring Antarctica through Art

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Originally appears in the Winter 2017 issue

by Madeline Crouse and Skye Morét

LAST YEAR one of us was staring out at the dark ocean—horizontal snow stinging the face—from the back deck of an Antarctic research vessel. In the dead of night, with the ship rolling from side to side, Morét was hauling up a scientific net from the sea floor that contained something she didn’t expect to see in Antarctica: a veritable rainbow of sea creatures. Meanwhile, Crouse was teaching in her warm art classroom in Denver, Colorado pondering new techniques for engaging art with science. What follows is the result of our chance meeting and the art-science activities sparked from our dialogue, all classroom-ready for learners aged 8–16.

How can students explore new and creative ways of portraying diverse ecosystems, particularly regarding places that most people will never see? Antarctica is the most geographically and socially isolated continent on the planet, and knowledge about the variety of its living organisms is poorly publicized and thus difficult to teach. In this article, we offer teachers a figurative dive beneath the coastal waters of Antarctica. We explain new visual and tactile tools that allow students to experience—using color and contrast—the diversity of life above and below the sea surface.

Teaching about the Antarctic ecosystem is challenging because it is difficult to conceptualize. Sure, we know about penguins—we see them at aquariums and in popular movies—and we can imagine the stark white, gray, and blue landscape that makes up their ecosystem. When we think of Antarctica (or even do a Google image search of it), these monochromatic scenes come to mind. But can we imagine the colorful undersea realm that dominates Antarctic bio-mass? Using art as a medium to explore this harsh and unfamiliar habitat, teachers can upend this chromatic paradigm by exploring another side of Antarctica that includes different creatures and colors.