The ocean’s most consequential workforce is microscopic. Plankton, marine bacteria, archaea, symbiotic microalgae: the species too small to see with the naked eye produce more than half of Earth’s oxygen, drive nutrient cycling, anchor every marine food web, and quietly regulate the climate. They are the engine room of the blue planet. They are also, for most students, invisible.

The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation has spent fourteen years using one of the most underrated tools in ocean education to fix that: a paintbrush. The 2026 Science Without Borders® Challenge, the Foundation’s annual international student art competition, has just announced its winners. This year’s theme, Microscopic Marine Life, drew nearly 900 entries from students aged 11 to 19 in 65 countries. The brief asked them to make the invisible visible.

15 to 19 age group

First Place went to Sophia (Jiye) Lee, a 17-year-old at Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey, for Ocean’s Hidden Jewel Box. The piece is a mixed-media work on a custom-cut wooden canvas shaped to mimic an oxygen molecule, two circular panels bridged by a rectangular insert. Inside the panels, microscopic marine organisms (diatoms, crystal-walled Acantharia) are rendered as gemstones glowing against deep ocean blacks.

“When people see my work, I hope they recognize that significance is not defined by scale. I want them to feel a sense of awe for the unseen and to realize that impact can extend beyond just the source. Just as my piece breaks traditional borders of a canvas, the contribution of these organisms breaks the borders of the ocean to sustain every breath we take, no matter where we are.”

Sophia (Jiye) Lee, First Place, 15-19

Second Place went to Qing Yang Cheng, 17, from Canada, for The Deep Microcosm of Life, a detailed portrayal of the archaea that thrive around hydrothermal vents and the chemosynthetic ecosystems they sustain in the absence of sunlight. This is biology that operates by rules most surface readers do not know: not photosynthesis but the harvesting of sulfur, methane, and dissolved minerals into living tissue.

Third Place went to Hyang Yu Lee, 17, from the Republic of Korea, for Sea Manual: an inventive illustration of marine bacteria’s decomposition and nutrient-cycling work, rendered in the unmistakable visual language of an IKEA instructional manual. Step one: a fallen whale. Step two: bacterial decomposition. Step three: nutrients return to circulation. The joke lands; the science does too.

11 to 14 age group

First Place went to Olivia Shin, 14, a student in Calgary, for The Giant and the Invisible: A Story of Ocean Recycling. The work is charcoal on a piece of recycled cardboard. It depicts a whale fall: the slow decomposition of a blue whale carcass on the seafloor, broken down over decades by microscopic organisms whose collective work sustains entire deep-sea ecosystems. The material choice and composition are not incidental. Both reinforce the theme of interconnection.

“I was inspired by how bacteria clump together and work with microorganisms, which to me resembled the game of Tetris. I hope that my artwork can encourage others’ thoughts and interest in marine life.”

Olivia Shin, First Place, 11-14

Inside the studio: Olivia Shin at work

Olivia’s winning charcoal-on-cardboard piece did not arrive on the page fully formed. She worked through it over weeks, building the whale fall in layers, refining the bacterial mats and sediment textures with her teacher, Ms. Lily Kim of About Art Studio in Calgary. The process shots below offer a rare look at the discipline behind the final image.

Second Place went to Jieming Zhang, just 11 years old, from China, for The Touch of Life: a vivid illustration of the symbiotic microalgae (zooxanthellae) that live within coral tissue, photosynthesising and feeding their host in a partnership without which tropical reefs would collapse. With ocean warming bleaching reefs at scale, this is exactly the biology a generation of young readers needs to understand.

Third Place went to Eason Liang, 14, from Irvine, California, for The Invisible Engine of the Ocean, a piece that reimagines microscopic marine life as the literal machinery powering Earth’s natural systems. The metaphor is precise. Without the ocean’s microscopic life, the carbon pump stalls, food webs unravel, and atmospheric oxygen levels fall. The engine is not optional.

Why this matters

Each winner receives a scholarship of up to $500 from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. The prize money is the smallest part of what the competition delivers. The larger return is what the students themselves carry forward.

“This year’s theme challenged students to explore a world that is rarely seen but absolutely essential to life on Earth. Through their artwork, these students transformed complex scientific ideas into powerful visual stories, helping others better understand the critical role microscopic marine life plays in sustaining our oceans and our planet.”

Amy Heemsoth, Chief Operating Officer and Director of Education, Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation

Marine phytoplankton are responsible for roughly half of global net primary production, the foundation of nearly every ocean food web (Field et al., Science, 1998). The biological carbon pump driven by these organisms transports an estimated 10 to 12 gigatonnes of carbon from the surface ocean to the deep sea each year, a climate-regulating service whose collapse is one of the most studied risks of ocean warming (Henson et al., Nature Climate Change, 2022). When a 14-year-old draws a whale fall in charcoal, or an 11-year-old paints symbiotic algae inside a coral polyp, they are not making decorative work. They are translating the biggest planetary processes most adults never learn about into something a stranger can grasp at first glance.

Now in its 14th year, the Science Without Borders® Challenge has put generations of young artists through that translation exercise. The Foundation’s bet, year after year, is that the artists who learn to render the ocean’s hidden machinery on a canvas at 14 will be the same people negotiating policy on its behalf at 34. The 2026 cohort suggests the bet is paying off.

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The full gallery of winning artwork and high-resolution images are available via the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation announcement. For information about the competition and the 2027 theme, visit LOF.org/SWBChallenge.

All artwork © the named artists, reproduced courtesy of the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. SEVENSEAS Media thanks Liz Thompson, Chief Communications Officer at the Foundation, for sharing the announcement with our community.

Falmouth, Cornwall, UK. Falmouth Harbour is trialling the world’s first all-concrete marina pontoon float, designed and built by the team at ScaffFloat in neighbouring Penryn, in a first step to removing all Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) floats from its leisure and commercial operations.

The Harbour has pledged to move away from EPS products in the light of mounting evidence that polystyrene microplastics in the world’s oceans inflict serious damage on the marine environment and life within it. Polystyrene, globally used for its lightness and buoyancy, is made from fossil fuels, is virtually un-decomposable, and when it breaks down into microplastics can be ingested by marine life with devastating consequences.

“The amount of broken-up polystyrene around our creeks and rivers, particularly after this year’s storms, is awful to see and very hard to clean up without damaging the delicate ecology of our shorelines. Expanded Polystyrene fragments in the marine environment pose a serious ecological concern, as seabirds, fish, turtles and other fauna mistake EPS beads for food, which can cause internal injuries or death; entering the food chain poses health risks to humans as well.”

Vicki Spooner, Environment Manager, Falmouth Harbour

Inside the Reef Float: an inert, recyclable alternative to EPS

Penryn marine company ScaffFloat Ltd has tackled the challenge of finding alternatives to traditional pontoons by inventing the “Reef Float.” Their first commercial prototype, made entirely from concrete, has been undergoing trials beneath a Falmouth Harbour pontoon. ScaffFloat developed the new product as part of a business development project that received £284,787 from the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund as part of Cornwall’s Good Growth Programme.

The Reef Float’s buoyant core is made using ultra-low-density waterproof concrete, instead of EPS foam, and the core is then cast inside a high-strength engineered concrete skin. In the highly unlikely event that a Reef Float ever failed, the materials would simply sit inertly as stone in the marine environment, whereas a cracked-open EPS float exposes its polystyrene foam core to the marine elements.

“We replaced a failing EPS pontoon float at Falmouth Harbour with a Reef Float, where it survived all that this January’s storms could throw at it. It’s what we would expect, of course, as we’ve designed it to be strong with an ultra-long life. But it’s also completely inert in the marine environment and 100 percent recyclable, so a game-changing alternative to the EPS floats currently used all over the world.”

Toby Budd, Founder and Managing Director, ScaffFloat

Local innovation, global stage

Local MP Jayne Kirkham, checking out the new Reef Float in Falmouth, called it “exactly the kind of innovation we want to see in Cornwall: local businesses developing practical but cutting-edge solutions to global environmental challenges. Cutting polystyrene pollution from our waters while creating skilled jobs is a win for our marine environment and our economy. I’m proud to see government funding helping projects like this lead the way.”

“Falmouth Harbour has made the conscious decision to move away from EPS foam pontoons in all our operations, and it’s fantastic that our neighbours at ScaffFloat are the first company to offer a plastic-free alternative. Reef Floats are easily installed, in situ, on a rolling basis, as and when we need to replace old EPS floats, and they have a zero-cost, 100 percent recyclable end-of-life disposal. It’s another tremendous example of Cornish ingenuity, and we look forward to working with them into the future.”

Miles Carden, CEO, Falmouth Harbour

The Reef Float team has been shortlisted for the Innovation Award at Marina26 in Australia this May, with an invitation to attend and present at the biggest marina conference in the world, demonstrating what a major issue EPS has become for the marina industry and legislative authorities alike.

Australia itself lost more than 1,000 pontoons in the 2022 Queensland floods, where they broke up and created an environmental disaster known as the “White Spill,” with the ocean and beaches covered with EPS balls that were almost impossible to clear up.

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Learn more. For more information on Reef Float and parent company ScaffFloat, visit scafffloat.co.uk/reeffloat. For more on Falmouth Harbour, including its wide-ranging environmental initiatives, see falmouthharbour.co.uk.

Adapted from a press release issued by Louise Midgley Communications, on behalf of ScaffFloat and Falmouth Harbour.

KINGSTON, R.I., April 20, 2026. A new study published in Nature Geoscience describes an artificial intelligence-powered technique that can measure ocean surface currents over broad areas in greater detail than ever before. Among the co-authors is Nick Pizzo of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography.

Called GOFLOW, short for Geostationary Ocean Flow, the approach uses AI to analyze thermal images from weather satellites already in orbit. Because it relies on existing satellites, no new hardware is required, marking what researchers describe as a major advancement in ocean observation.

The study was co-led by Luc Lenain of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and Kaushik Srinivasan of the University of California, Los Angeles. Co-author Roy Barkan of Tel Aviv University and Pizzo are also alumni of Scripps. The project was supported by grants from the Office of Naval Research, NASA, and the European Research Council.

Ocean currents and vertical mixing

Ocean currents play a huge role in shaping Earth’s weather and climate, transporting heat around the planet, moving carbon between the atmosphere and ocean interior, and carrying nutrients that support marine life.

“In areas where the ocean pushes together and pulls apart, information from the atmosphere and ocean interior are exchanged in ways we do not fully understand. This is one of the most exciting areas of physical oceanography today.”

Nick Pizzo, URI Graduate School of Oceanography

Understanding currents also matters for search-and-rescue efforts and for tracking the movement of oil spills. Yet measuring currents across large stretches of ocean has remained extremely difficult. Some satellites only revisit the same location about every 10 days, too infrequently to capture currents that can appear and disappear within hours. Ships and coastal radar can track faster changes, but only in limited areas.

This has left a persistent gap in observations at the scales where most of the ocean’s vertical mixing occurs, when shallower waters are mixed deeper, or vice versa. The phenomena that drive vertical mixing can be less than 10 kilometers (six miles) wide and transform in hours. Vertical mixing matters because it powers key processes such as bringing nutrients up to the surface and pumping carbon dioxide into the deep ocean, where it is stored long-term.

Deep learning, applied to a moving ocean

The GOFLOW team trained an AI model to recognize how surface temperature patterns shift as water moves below. The neural network learned from advanced computer simulations of ocean circulation, then applied that knowledge to real satellite imagery from the North Atlantic collected by the GOES-East weather satellite. The researchers tested the method against shipboard observations in the Gulf Stream and found that GOFLOW matched existing measurement techniques while revealing much finer detail, capturing smaller, more energetic features linked to vertical mixing.

For scientists such as Pizzo, these advances open new opportunities to study ocean dynamics through actual observations rather than relying primarily on computer models.

“We are using this real-world inference to better understand how the ocean transports important quantities like heat from one place to another, and how vertical motions that are important for exchanges between the atmosphere and the ocean are supported.”

Nick Pizzo, URI Graduate School of Oceanography

Because GOFLOW works with satellites already in service, the method could eventually be integrated into weather forecasts and climate models, helping improve predictions of ocean-atmosphere interactions, marine debris transport, and ecosystem change. The researchers are now working to expand the method globally and to improve performance when cloud cover blocks satellite views.

This story was written by Mackensie duPont Crowley, digital communications coordinator in URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, and is published with permission via the URI Communications and Marketing office.