Imagine that one morning, one of the most famous natural wonders in your region disappears. It is not progressively lost, it simply ceases to exist from one day to the next. This is exactly what happened in October 2003 in the Basque Country. The Mudanka wave, considered one of the best left waves in the world and an economic pillar for the area based on surf tourism, stopped breaking.
The cause. It was not a mystery: a dredging of 243,000 cubic meters of sand from the Oka River, carried out to facilitate the passage of barges to a shipyard, undid the underwater sandbank that, like a reef, sculpted the wave. The surf sank, and with it the local economy, which was based on surf tourism.
This event is the starting point of ‘Las Olas Perdidas’, a research and exhibition at the Botín Center in Santander that unites the duo of artists and researchers from Cooking Sections, Daniel Fernández and Alon Schwabe, with the geomatics and oceanography group of the University of Cantabria.
The project reveals an alarming truth: the oceans are losing their waves, becoming calmer, and we are the reason.
Traveling in time. As the two researchers have acknowledged to ABC, although it seems impossible that the waves will end up disappearing, the reality is there. They point to the seas and oceans being calm and losing their strength.
To demonstrate this, the GeoOcean team from the University of Cantabria applied its modeling technology in a novel way. According to the artists, they discovered the scientific group’s “ability to travel through time” to be able to see the waves that seemed to be only in the memories of the surfers.
By using satellite imagery, historical databases, and complex numerical models, GeoOcean was able to do something amazing. “We indicated a day, month and year and they were able to show the height, speed or direction of the waves perfectly,” explains Fernández. All this with technology that today is used to predict future storms and the impact they may have on the coast. Although going back in time.
The objective. Seeing exactly what was happening in the past made it possible to compare the state of the mythical wave before and after the key intervention that led to its eventual disappearance: a new breakwater. The conclusion in this case is that at the moment of ‘touching’ the seabed with any building or by simple trawling, the damage is caused by the wave.
The investigation, which lasted two years, analyzed cases on all continents, including mythical enclaves now disappeared or degraded such as Cabo Blanco in Peru or Jardim do Mar in Madeira. They showed that when infrastructure cuts off the natural drift of sediment or dredging alters the seabed, the result is a loss of energy and, ultimately, the death of the wave.
The injured. Logically, the fact of eliminating waves affects the surfers themselves, above all, and also the economy in general, since it is a very important driver of tourism in different regions. This has caused them to rise up on a war footing to defend the oceans and different phenomena.
In Peru, for example, the protests of surfers and fishermen in Cabo Blanco were fundamental in promoting the pioneering “Break Break Law”, a unique legislation in the world that protects waves from infrastructure that could alter them. In Cantabria, groups such as ‘Surf & Nature Alliance’ are looking for formulas to declare the surf as natural heritage to prevent human hands from altering it.
However, Cooking Sections warns of the other side: massive surf schools and championships that radically transform the life of a region is a double-edged sword. Surf-focused tourism and real estate speculation have fueled gentrification and, paradoxically, driven coastal development that ends up destroying the very waves that attracted people in the first place.
The move to art. Science can sometimes be difficult to understand because you are working with a lot of data. That is why the team wanted to turn it into an artistic representation. Composer Duval Timothy turned the rhythms of each break before its disappearance into eleven unique sound pieces. In the room, eleven suspended structures undulate and vibrate activated by interpreters, simulating the “breathing” of those waves now extinct in order to raise awareness of the great problem that exists.
In this way, ‘The Lost Waves’ uses data science to create an archive of what we have erased in the sea, demonstrating that the seabed and the surface are intimately connected and that our ‘scars’ on the ocean floor have direct consequences on the energy that materializes on the surface.
Images | Silas Baisch
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