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Coral reefs provide stunning images of a world under assault

Colin Foord
Colin Foord
APTOPIX Climate Coral Reef Awareness
Colin Foord, J.D. McKay
Colin Foord, J.D. McKay
Colin Foord
staghorn coral
APTOPIX Climate Coral Reef Awareness
Posted at 8:54 AM, May 09, 2022
and last updated 2022-05-09 08:54:09-04

MIAMI, Fla. — Humans don’t know what they’re missing under the surface of a busy shipping channel in the “cruise capital of the world.” Just below the keels of massive ships, an underwater camera provides a live feed from another world, showing marine life that’s trying its best to resist global warming.

That camera in Miami’s Government Cut is just one of the many ventures of a marine biologist and a musician who’ve been on a 15-year mission to raise awareness about dying coral reefs by combining science and art to bring undersea life into pop culture.

Their company — Coral Morphologic — is surfacing stunning images, putting gorgeous closeups of underwater creatures on social media, setting time-lapsed video of swaying, glowing coral to music and projecting it onto buildings, even selling a coral-themed beachwear line.

“We aren’t all art. We aren’t all science. We aren’t all tech. We are an alchemy,” said Colin Foord, who defies the looks of a typical scientist, with blue hair so spiky that it seems electrically charged. He and his business partner J.D. McKay sat down with The Associated Press to show off their work.