Our contribution to the Diplomatic Suitcase of Water Bodies, a multimedia traveling exhibition, is a print of the Stommel Diagram (°).

With A Seat for the Sea we share the awe that must have been Henry Stommel's who made this image. This is why we think that the Stommel Diagram deserves the title of Ocean Representative and want it to have its place in the Diplomatic Suitcase (°°).

Take a close look and let its meaning sink in. How deep is the ocean, how wide, how old? We may think that it is unfathomable, timeless. These dimensions are expressed at once in a single drawing. It seems to show how tectonic excitement can produce tsunamis and algae blooms relate to ice ages. This speaks to our imagination but stays close to what science sees.

The ocean speaks with many voices, its movements seemingly entangled in a mysterious phantasy. This diagram opens this world to factual understanding. It's maker, US scientist Henry Stommel (1920-1992), was sticking to his discipline. In the mean time long time series of data exist. So, the image begs to be filled in with other branches, with a water column that reaches to the deep, with variable layers of salinity, with an ever expanding classification - a web - of species and life forms, adapted to the extreme systems of this outer world.

Henry Stommel is above all famous for the first insights in the Gulf Stream and designing a model to analyse ocean currents. Generations of scientists have build on his work. Today's research on El Niño (the heating of the ocean near Peru, and its continental impacts) or AMOC (the system of ocean currents that circulates water within the Atlantic Ocean) are indebted to him.

(°) The Diagram was first published in 1963.

(°°) The Diplomatic Suitcase is designed by Jakob Kukula and Leon Lapa Pereira. It unpacks to showcase the identities, struggles, and legal rights of grassroots initiatives representing rivers, seas, lakes, and glaciers.