Groundwater Takes Manhattan: Natural Resource to Get Broadway Treatment on World Water Day
The global search for a piece of artwork that could help save a prized natural resource is over.
Dutch visual artist Richard Vijgen has won the HeadsUP! Times Square Visualization Challenge, an animated, data-driven competition that will alert the public to America’s deteriorating groundwater supply, organizers HeadsUP! and Visualizing.org have announced.
His winning design, “Seasonal and Longterm Changes in Groundwater Levels,” will be displayed in Midtown Manhattan on a 19,000-square-foot Times Square Squared signboard on the Thomson Reuters and NASDAQ towers.
The visual artwork will be unveiled on March 22, 2012—World Water Day—and run for 30 days.
“Being Dutch, I’m of course aware of the important role water plays in our environment,” Vijgen tells TakePart. “Water management is a crucial part of Dutch culture. So even though groundwater shortage is not a problem I’m dealing with in daily life, the need to act responsibly and think ahead when it comes to managing water has always been clear to me.”
Roughly half the U.S. population depends on groundwater to supply its drinking water. Groundwater also provides approximately 50 billion gallons per day for agricultural needs. But, on nearly every continent around the world, aquifers are being drained faster than they can be replenished naturally.
“The beauty of the HeadsUp! competition is that it will allow millions of people to see underground and understand how rapidly groundwater is disappearing around the world,” says Dr. James Famiglietti, the director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling and one of the competition’s jurors. “That's exactly the scale at which we need to be raising awareness in order to make sustainable water resources management a reality.”
Visual artist and lead competition organizer Peggy Weil says the first year competition garnered a great deal of international interest.
“Designers from the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and Poland, as well as the U.S., submitted data visualizations to portray fluctuations in global groundwater levels,” says Weil.
Weil wanted to recognize honorable mention winners Roxana Torre and Enrique Krahe, for their piece “Groundwater in Movement,” and Linda Chamorro and James Willeford, for their project “Water Positive.”
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