In 1992, a cargo ship carrying bath toys got caught in a storm.
Shipping containers washed overboard, and the waves swept 28,000 rubber ducks and other toys into the North Pacific.
But they didn’t stick together.
Quite the opposite– the ducks have since washed up all over the world, and researchers have used their paths to chart a better understanding of ocean currents.
Ocean currents are driven by a range of sources: the wind, tides, changes in water density, and the rotation of the Earth.
The topography of the ocean floor and the shoreline modifies those motions, causing currents to speed up, slow down, or change direction.
Ocean currents fall into two main categories: surface currents and deep ocean currents.
Surface currents control the motion of the top 10 percent of the ocean’s water, while deep-ocean currents mobilize the other 90 percent.
Though they have different causes, surface and deep ocean currents influence each other in an intricate dance that keeps the entire ocean moving.
Near the shore, surface currents are driven by both the wind and tides, which draw water back and forth as the water level falls and rises.
Meanwhile, in the open ocean, wind is the major force behind surface currents.
As wind blows over the ocean, it drags the top layers of water along with it.
That moving water pulls on the layers underneath, and those pull on the ones beneath them.
In fact, water as deep as 400 meters is still affected by the wind at the ocean’s surface.
If you zoom out to look at the patterns of surface currents all over the earth, you’ll see that they form big loops called gyres, which travel clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere.
That’s because of the way the Earth’s rotation affects the wind patterns that give rise to these currents.
If the earth didn’t rotate, air and water would simply move back and forth between low pressure at the equator and high pressure at the poles.
But as the earth spins, air moving from the equator to the North Pole is deflected eastward, and air moving back down is deflected westward.
The mirror image happens in the southern hemisphere, so that the major streams of wind form loop-like patterns around the ocean basins.
This is called the Coriolis Effect.
The winds push the ocean beneath them into the same rotating gyres.
And because water holds onto heat more effectively than air, these currents help redistribute warmth around the globe.
Unlike surface currents, deep ocean currents are driven primarily by changes in the density of seawater.
As water moves towards the North Pole, it gets colder.
It also has a higher concentration of salt, because the ice crystals that form trap water while leaving salt behind.
This cold, salty water is more dense, so it sinks, and warmer surface water takes its place, setting up a vertical current called thermohaline circulation.
Thermohaline circulation of deep water and wind-driven surface currents combine to form a winding loop called the Global Conveyor Belt.
As water moves from the depths of the ocean to the surface, it carries nutrients that nourish the microorganisms which form the base of many ocean food chains.
The global conveyor belt is the longest current in the world, snaking all around the globe.
But it only moves a few centimeters per second.
It could take a drop of water a thousand years to make the full trip.
However, rising sea temperatures are causing the conveyor belt to seemingly slow down.
Models show this causing havoc with weather systems on both sides of the Atlantic, and no one knows what would happen if it continues to slow or if it stopped altogether.
The only way we’ll be able to forecast correctly and prepare accordingly will be to continue to study currents and the powerful forces that shape them.
The AlloSphere: it's a three-story metal sphere in an echo-free chamber.
Think of the AlloSphere as a large, dynamically varying digital microscope that's connected to a supercomputer.
20 researchers can stand on a bridge suspended inside of the sphere, and be completely immersed in their data.
Imagine if a team of physicists could stand inside of an atom and watch and hear electrons spin.
Imagine if a group of sculptors could be inside of a lattice of atoms and sculpt with their material.
Imagine if a team of surgeons could fly into the brain, as though it was a world, and see tissues as landscapes, and hear blood density levels as music.
This is some of the research that you're going to see that we're undertaking at the AlloSphere.
But first a little bit about this group of artists, scientists, and engineers that are working together.
I'm a composer, orchestrally-trained, and the inventor of the AlloSphere.
With my visual artist colleagues, we map complex mathematical algorithms that unfold in time and space, visually and sonically.
Our scientist colleagues are finding new patterns in the information.
And our engineering colleagues are making one of the largest dynamically varying computers in the world for this kind of data exploration.
I'm going to fly you into five research projects in the AlloSphere that are going to take you from biological macroscopic data all the way down to electron spin.
This first project is called the AlloBrain.
And it's our attempt to quantify beauty by finding which regions of the brain are interactive while witnessing something beautiful.
You're flying through the cortex of my colleague's brain.
Our narrative here is real fMRI data that's mapped visually and sonically.
The brain now a world that we can fly through and interact with.
You see 12 intelligent computer agents, the little rectangles that are flying in the brain with you.
They're mining blood density levels.
And they're reporting them back to you sonically.
Higher density levels mean more activity in that point of the brain.
They're actually singing these densities to you with higher pitches mapped to higher densities.
We're now going to move from real biological data to biogenerative algorithms that create artificial nature in our next artistic and scientific installation.
In this artistic and scientific installation, biogenerative algorithms are helping us to understand self-generation and growth: very important for simulation in the nanoscaled sciences.
For artists, we're making new worlds that we can uncover and explore.
These generative algorithms grow over time, and they interact and communicate as a swarm of insects.
Our researchers are interacting with this data by injecting bacterial code, which are computer programs, that allow these creatures to grow over time.
We're going to move now from the biological and the macroscopic world, down into the atomic world, as we fly into a lattice of atoms.
This is real AFM -- Atomic Force Microscope -- data from my colleagues in the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center.
They've discovered a new bond, a new material for transparent solar cells.
We're flying through 2,000 lattice of atoms -- oxygen, hydrogen and zinc.
You view the bond in the triangle.
It's four blue zinc atoms bonding with one white hydrogen atom.
You see the electron flow with the streamlines we as artists have generated for the scientists.
This is allowing them to find the bonding nodes in any lattice of atoms.
We think it makes a beautiful structural art.
The sound that you're hearing are the actual emission spectrums of these atoms.
We've mapped them into the audio domain, so they're singing to you.
Oxygen, hydrogen and zinc have their own signature.
We're going to actually move even further down as we go from this lattice of atoms to one single hydrogen atom.
We're working with our physicist colleagues that have given us the mathematical calculations of the n-dimensional Schrödinger equation in time.
What you're seeing here right now is a superposition of an electron in the lower three orbitals of a hydrogen atom.
You're actually hearing and seeing the electron flow with the lines.
The white dots are the probability wave that will show you where the electron is in any given point of time and space in this particular three-orbital configuration.
In a minute we're going to move to a two-orbital configuration, and you're going to notice a pulsing.
And you're going to hear an undulation between the sound.
This is actually a light emitter.
As the sound starts to pulse and contract, our physicists can tell when a photon is going to be emitted.
They're starting to find new mathematical structures in these calculations.
And they're understanding more about quantum mathematics.
We're going to move even further down, and go to one single electron spin.
This will be the final project that I show you.
Our colleagues in the Center for Quantum Computation and Spintronics are actually measuring with their lasers decoherence in a single electron spin.
We've taken this information and we've made a mathematical model out of it.
You're actually seeing and hearing quantum information flow.
This is very important for the next step in simulating quantum computers and information technology.
So these brief examples that I've shown you give you an idea of the kind of work that we're doing at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to bring together, arts, science and engineering into a new age of math, science and art.
We hope that all of you will come to see the AlloSphere.
Inspire us to think of new ways that we can use this unique instrument that we've created at Santa Barbara.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)