The Long Fall: A Descent into the Ocean’s Living Memory, Jiabao Li, Manu Prakash, Will Tallent, Michael Bruner

The exhibition is only viewable during NAS Building tours and select special events.

Plankton, the microscopic drifters of the sea, are quiet architects of Earth’s climate. Invisible to the naked eye, these oceanic cells form a vast living engine that shapes the planet’s carbon cycle. They produce nearly half of the oxygen we breathe, while their silent labor helps draw carbon from the atmosphere and carry it into the deep ocean. When plankton die, they sink as marine snow, billions upon billions of particles falling through the water column in what Rachel Carson called “the most stupendous snowfall the earth has ever seen.”

The Long Fall places you inside that vertical ocean column, drifting as plankton do. The descent begins at the White Cliffs of Dover, a monumental record of ancient carbon capture, then moves across scales, from towering cliffs down through falling marine snow to the microscopic world of plankton. From there it rises again, from the cellular to the planetary, until Earth itself becomes a coccolithophore: a microscopic plankton armored in calcite plates, the same organism whose ancient remains formed the cliffs. Yet most climate models still don’t account for plankton’s role in absorbing carbon — a significant blind spot in how we understand the ocean’s response to a warming planet.

The soundscape blends low-frequency vibrations that evoke the subtle movements of plankton, bubble-like sounds inspired by photosynthesis, and rhythmic pulses that mirror the endless fall of marine snow. Throughout the film, the voice of pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson interweaves with the soundscape, narrating the interconnectedness of life, the fragile beauty of marine ecosystems, and the urgency of biodiversity preservation. The imagery draws on microscopic ocean footage using datasets from PlanktonScope and Gravity Machine, developed by Stanford’s Prakash Lab over seven years and 18 ocean expeditions.

About Jiabao Li

Jiabao Li is an artist, inventor, and associate professor at Northeastern University. Working across immersive media, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, she creates experiences that reveal hidden relationships among humans, technology, and the natural world — often by shifting how we perceive scale, time, or other forms of life.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ars Electronica, and the Exploratorium.