Plastics in Antarctica
Data Visualization / PERSONAL PROJECT / 2024
Web version
A series of outputs telling a story of who, when, where and how plastic waste reached to the antarctica and the southern ocean. In this online data visualization webpage, I practiced skills such as drawing maps through satellite image data from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services(GBIS), integrating various scattered research data to a high degree, so that users can easily understand the real situation of plastic pollution in Antarctica through the latest research.
Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are subject to increasing levels and diversity of human activities that may severely affect environmental, scientific and historic values within its marine and terrestrial ecosystems and cryosphere.
As an emerging research field, plastic pollution in Antarctica has not been fully studied and has received even less social attention. Therefore, based on the suggestions of scientists, I explore this topic to disseminate some valuable information to the public.
The most difficult part in this project was to effectively explain the research data that used different units and had huge differences in time and space. I first tried focusing on the impression by telling the data on a series of posters like a comic strip, which did not appear to explain the information well. In the data display webpage I made later, I redeployed the map of the Antarctic polar projection and achieved the expected effect. This reminded me that in a development team, the tasks undertaken by designers need to be more specific.
Data Source and References
This project involves a large number of references and data, the main ones of which are:
Martin, Cecilia; Young, Charlotte A.; Valluzzi, Letizia; Duarte, Carlos M. (2021), “Global data set on micro- and mesoplastic loads in marine sediments”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/6k38hr5zhw.1
Emily Rowlands, Tamara Galloway, Matthew Cole, Victoria L. Peck, Anna Posacka, Sally Thorpe, Clara Manno, Vertical flux of microplastic, a case study in the Southern Ocean, South Georgia, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 193, 2023, 115117, ISSN 0025-326X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115117.
Rota E, Bergami E, Corsi I, Bargagli R., 2022, Macro- and Microplastics in the Antarctic Environment: Ongoing Assessment and Perspectives. Environments. 9(7):93. https://doi.org/10.3390/environments9070093
Alex R. Aves, Laura E. Revell, Sally Gaw, Helena Ruffell, Alex Schuddeboom, Ngaire E. Wotherspoon, Michelle LaRue, and Adrian J. McDonald, 2022, First evidence of microplastics in Antarctic snow, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-16-2127-2022
Steketee A., Antarctic Polar Maps for the Web, Medium, https://medium.com/@anton.steketee/antarctic-polar-maps-for-the-web-b349f5653865