Marbh Chrios

The Lovely Weather Donegal Artists Residencies, a ground breaking art & science project will examine the issues of climate change in County Donegal, Ireland. Softday is creating Marbh Chrios (Dead Zone) as our contribution to the project.

This project is ongoing and we expect to stage a major performance in County Donegal in October 2010. Watch this space!

We have chosen to situate our work in Killybegs, probably Ireland's most famous fishing town, and in the Donegal Bay area.

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Background

In 2008, Virginia Institute of Marine Science Professor Robert Diaz showed that the number of “dead zones”—areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine life—had increased by a third between 1995 and 2007. Diaz and collaborator Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that dead zones are now “the key stressor on marine ecosystems” and “rank with over-fishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems.” The study, which appeared in the August 15, 2008 issue of the journal Science, tallied 405 dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, affecting an area of 95,000 square miles, about the size of New Zealand. It is currently estimated that there are 20 such ‘dead zones’ in Ireland and two were identified in the study at both Killybeg’s Harbour (1999) and Donegal Bay (2000). Geological evidence show that dead zones are not a naturally recurring event in marine ecosystems; dead zones were once rare, now they are common place and increasing, which poses a serious threat to indigenous marine habitats and the human food chain.
Softday will examine the available data from the Irish dead zones and work collaboratively with three partners: local traditional musicians from An Charraig/Amhainn a’Ghlinne (Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí) in Donegal, Met Éireann (the Irish Meteorological Service) and The Marine Institute of Ireland, to address the relationship of climate and culture to sound.