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 among the 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 gather, sink, and become marine snow, billions upon billions of particles falling through the water column. Rachel Carson once described this endless descent as “the most stupendous snowfall the earth has ever seen.”

The Long Fall is an immersive audiovisual journey that traces the fragile threads connecting microscopic life to planetary climate. Beginning at the iconic White Cliffs of Dover, one of the largest visible monuments of ancient oceanic carbon capture, the audience plunges downward into the sea. Across shifting scales, the descent moves from towering cliffs into the ocean depths, following marine snow as it drifts toward the microscopic world of plankton. Then the journey rises again, zooming out from the microscopic to the planetary, as Earth turns into a coccolithophore, the plankton whose ancient remains helped form the White Cliffs themselves.

Using datasets from PlanktonScope and Gravity Machine, developed by Stanford’s Prakash Lab, the film vividly tracks individual plankton cells at microscopic resolution. Over the last seven years, eighteen ocean expeditions around the world have collected an unprecedented map of the dynamics of microbial life in the oceans.

This immersive journey places the audience within the vertical ocean column, embodying the perspective of plankton drifting endlessly downward. This new frame of reference underscores the overlooked significance of these microscopic organisms, which quietly regulate half of Earth’s carbon cycle. Ignoring them in climate models results in an 80-gigaton discrepancy, nearly 10% of the global carbon budget.
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.