What the ocean has done since SEAing Breath

In the 2017 SEAing Breath environment, a visitor’s breathing changes the virtual sea level. The relationship is immediate and visible. Actual sea-level change unfolds through several overlapping processes. Water expands as it warms, melting land ice adds water to the ocean, and weather patterns redistribute water between land and sea. The artwork offers a bodily encounter with change. Observations provide the measurements needed to understand its scale.

NASA’s analysis published on 29 January 2026 reported a global sea-level increase of 0.08 centimetres during 2025, following 0.59 centimetres during 2024. NASA linked the smaller 2025 increase to La Niña conditions that brought more rain over land, particularly the Amazon basin. The two annual changes describe a variable system. A single year needs to be read within the longer record. ^[1]

WMO’s State of the Global Climate 2025, published in March 2026, reported record ocean heat content in the upper 2,000 metres during 2025. It placed global mean sea level about 11 centimetres above the 1993 level. Ocean heat content and sea level describe different aspects of the same changing ocean. The first concerns stored heat. The second concerns the height of its surface. Their values retain the reporting periods and methods of the institutions that publish them. ^[2]

Reading these measurements beside the original project gives the archive a continuing question. How can an experience make a slowly accumulating change perceptible while keeping short-term variation understandable? A virtual gauge can hold attention. A dated source and a clearly described measurement let a visitor investigate further.

A global mean is one scale of observation. Conditions at a particular coast also depend on tides, storms, land movement and local geography. NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Viewer provides a way to explore coastal inundation scenarios and the accompanying explanations of its assumptions and limits. A reader considering Miami should consult those local layers alongside the global record. ^[3]

The original scientist interviews remain a record of the questions raised during SEAing Breath’s development. Returning to them after reading current reports shows how an archive can preserve a moment of public engagement and also create a route into later observations. The 2017 scene, the interviews and the contemporary reports each have a date. Keeping those dates visible makes the relationship between them useful.