Tour the Ocean through the Art of Sound

The ocean is one of the largest ecosystems on our planet. From eye-catching waves to the darkness of the twilight zone, it’s a place filled with mystery and rapid change.

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For a scientist studying ocean color at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, there was one more question–what does it sound like?

Before long, a “symphonic ocean experience” was born, combining satellite imagery, ocean color data and programming expertise. Learn more about how data gets converted to music and sound here:

This World Oceans Day, enjoy a tour of the ocean set to sound. Here we go:

Bering Sea

This melody explores the phytoplankton blooms in the western Bering Sea along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula collected by Aqua/MODIS on May 15, 2021. The melody created for this image was aimed at capturing the movement of the eddies or the circular movements of water. Data came from the image’s red, green, and blue channels.

Rio de la Plata

This melody explores a spring bloom in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, lending the water many different shades of green, blue, and brown. The Rio de la Plata estuary in the northwest corner of the above image gets most of its tan coloration from sediments suspended in the water. The melody paired with the data evokes the sediment plumes and swirls happening off the coast.

Coral Sea

Data for the sounds of the Coral Sea were collected over the course of one year from the Aqua/Modis satellite. The information was extracted from a series of 32-day rolling averages for the year 2020, displaying the movement of chlorophyll a data.

Chlorophyll a is a specific form of chlorophyll used in photosynthesis. It absorbs most energy from wavelengths of violet-blue and orange-red light. It is a poor absorber of green and near-green portions of the spectrum, and that’s why it appears green.

Western Australia

Off the coast of western Australia is the appearance of swirls in the ocean. To catch the movement of the Indian Ocean, data was collected from 31 days of imagery examining blue wavelengths of light. The information was gathered from the Suomi-NPP/VIIRS instrument aboard the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) series of spacecraft.

More moments of zen

Looking for more moments of zen? Explore them with NASA’s Soundcloud page, where many are out of this world. Curious on how we get these breathtaking ocean images? Take time to read about Goddard Oceanographer Norman Kuring and how he helped create them.

*instagram, whatsapp and facebook are down*

tumblr: oh how the tables have turned 

Our Commercial Crew Program has worked with several American aerospace industry companies to facilitate the development of U.S. human spaceflight systems since 2010. The goal is to have safe, reliable and cost-effective access to and from the International Space Station and foster commercial access to other potential low-Earth orbit destinations.

We selected Boeing and SpaceX in September 2014 to transport crew to the International Space Station from the United States. These integrated spacecraft, rockets and associated systems will carry up to four astronauts on NASA missions, maintaining a space station crew of seven to maximize time dedicated to scientific research on the orbiting laboratory

We begin a new era of human spaceflight as American astronauts will once again launch on an American spacecraft and rocket from American soil to the International Space Station.

As part of our Commercial Crew Program, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will fly on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft for an extended stay at the space station for the Demo-2 mission. Launch is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, May 27.

Demo-2 will be SpaceX’s final test flight to validate its crew transportation system, including the Crew Dragon spacecraft, Falcon 9 rocket, launch pad and operations capabilities. While docked to the space station, the crew will run tests to ensure the Crew Dragon is capable of remaining connected to the station for up to 210 days on future missions.

Our Commercial Crew Program is working with the American aerospace industry as companies develop and operate a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems capable of carrying crews to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station. Commercial transportation to and from the station will provide expanded utility, additional research time and broader opportunities for discovery on the orbiting laboratory.

The station is a critical testbed for us to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight. As commercial companies focus on providing human transportation services to and from low-Earth orbit, we are freed up to focus on building spacecraft and rockets for deep space missions.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Tumblr has a feature hidden in their “Labs”, called “Reblog Graphs”.  It’s a neat little thing that lets you see how influential you are, and also which blogs have large followings.  It’s a great way to see why your post from three years ago is suddenly getting a thousand notes a day, too.

This is a graph of a couple hundred reblogs from a recent post somebody made.

The original post is the orange dot.  I’m the purple dot one generation away.  You can see how many people reblogged from me, but my following isn’t nearly as big as that large dot off to the right.

Only four people reblogged it from me, while that other person had a cluster of around a dozen.  But you can see that my overall influence was greater.  Their cluster died out quickly, while mine kept going and going.

You could say this post went viral.

That’s what I’m actually here to talk about today…

Let’s go back a slide and change the caption.

Now this isn’t a blog post we’re talking about, this is, say, a novel coronavirus that no one is immune to or something like that.  Now we’re not talking about reblogs, we’re talking about infections.

I know this Patient Zero, they’re a friend of mine.  We get together with another friend, whose sister works in a nursing home.

So now I’m infected.  And so’s that other friend, whose sister works in the nursing home.

And I infect four other people.

It’s just a slight cough, and I feel silly for staying home over just a slight cough, so I go into work.  Same goes for that sister who works in the nursing home.

It is week 1 of the pandemic.

It’s flu season, so none of my coworkers think twice about this fever and cough that they now have.  Meanwhile, over at the nursing home, people start noticing that the flu is especially bad this year.

It is week 2 of the pandemic.

The nursing home realizes they have a huge problem.  EMTs are taking several people to the hospital with trouble breathing every day.  Two have died.  And now Fire Station 27, the one near the nursing home, has several people who are sick.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling fine, and so are my coworkers who had the flu right after me.

And so on…

It is now week 9 of the pandemic.

Each of these circles represents another week in the spread of the virus, with more and more people infected.  You can see that the nursing home and the fire station in the upper right were contained by week 3, because they quarantined and stopped it.  That outbreak made the news.  But what didn’t make the news were all the people in the lower left, the ones who continue to spread it to one or two, maybe three people.  Once in a while, a large cluster flares up, but for the most part, it’s silent.

What you might not see is how much of this graph rolls back up to me and my actions.

Fully 2/3 of the reblogs cases are the product of my infection.  If you take me out of the picture, it’s not just those four people I infected that don’t get it.  It’s the 7 people they infected.  And the people they infected.  And the people they infected.

Without me, it is over in Week 5.  My single infection in week 1 ended up causing this to run for another month.  If I’d stayed home that day instead of reblogging going to the office, it would’ve made a huge difference.  It doesn’t really matter who patient zero was, every person on this graph is essentially patient zero of their own outbreak.

This is why staying home when sick matters.  This is why hand-washing matters.  This is why social distancing matters.  This is why schools are closed and why large companies are having people work from home and why March Madness is canceled.

Because just one infection matters.