Artwork

This installation reveals the vivid and changing face of our planet’s water covering. Migrating rivers, shrinking and expanding wetlands, new coastlines, old coastlines, ancient meteorite impact craters, estuaries, mudflats, glacial melt lakes, rice fields and irrigation canals, salt ponds, fish ponds, new dams, old dams and the world’s great lakes underscore the beauty and fragility of our natural –and manmade- environment.

Water moves - we all instinctively know water flows downhill, but just think about the lakes that dry up (or have all the water extracted by humans), the rivers that change course, the coastlines that retreat (and advance) and the new lakes that come into being as dams are built or as rainfall increases, or glaciers and ice sheets melt. Our planet’s surface water covering is intensely dynamic.

And until now these dynamics have not been mapped. Where is Earth’s landmass permanently under water? Where are seasonal water-bodies found? When do they fill and empty? Where have new lakes formed and others emptied? Where do rivers move and where are they stable?

These new maps begin to answer the questions posed above. The first series of maps show the occurrence of water on our planet’s surface over thirty years, between March 1985 and March 2015. They have been created from more than 2.8 million satellite images acquired by the USGS/NASA Landsat programme (over 1000 terabytes of data).

Additional details

Installation by Alan Belward, Andrew Cottam and Luca Demarchi.

Loop projection of movies of about 10 min showing elaborated Earth observations of water, water and and vegetation in RGB, with background music fitting the projections.