Presentations and Ideas
After doing the deep dive into our research, it was time to prepare a seven minute long presentation on it that would also reflect some of the game design areas that I might wanna take my research towards. I would link the presentation down below for anyone to see.
I broke down the presentation into various key points:
Life around Seamounts - I changed my theme from Seamounts to "Life around seamounts" as I discovered through my research that I am more interested in how biological life exists and thrives around seamounts.
Geology of Seamounts - I talked about how seamounts are formed under the ocean and how these mountains form undersea caves, canyons and make the world underwater much more packed with interesting sea structures. I also talked about the abundance of minerals that these structure possess and how we are using and misusing them.
Conservation - The next point was about the various research and educational programs that are being structured around the conservation of these biological hotspots. There are various organisations that focus on preserving the seamounts from human activities like deep sea mining and deep sea fishing.
Deep-sea Currents and Deep-sea Corals - The last thing I wanted to cover was ocean currents and deep-sea corals. I talked about the interaction of deep-ocean currents and the seamounts and how the deep currents provide these mountains with nutritional goodness, making these locations a biological hotspots. Because of this, it helps the corals grow even in parts where they don't get much sunlight. I also talked about how the ecosystem works near the reefs and how it provides protection to smaller species of fish.
Just like phase 1, we got feedback right after our presentation. There were lots of points related to communal aspects of my research and conservation. Throughout my research, I was very much interested in the idea of a community and how it works around these beautiful and diverse seamounts. How corals provide a colour pallet for vibrant fishes, allowing them to camouflage. It was very obvious that people were interested in those aspects of my research as well.