As if you didn’t already have endless excuses to visit Australia, there’s now one more. The Great Barrier Reef is one of the most amazing natural wonders on earth. Now, it’s going to become home to an underwater art museum.
With underwater art museums all the rage – in Mexico, and the Bahamas – it makes sense to add an extra element to the reef for visitors that doesn’t harm the coral.
The Great Barrier Reef is about to get even more beautiful
The aim of the Museum of Underwater Art (MOUA) is to take the pressure off some of the natural reefs and let them recover.
The sites proposed for Museum of Underwater Art are mostly in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park; near the coast of Townsville, Australia’s global centre for Marine Science.
The museum will have plenty to see: from a colour-changing figure warning of warming seas to a sunken greenhouse. The sculpture of a girl will change colour using live water-temperature data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
The greenhouse will be planted with 2,000 pieces of coral to help the reef grow.
The first artwork will open up on the Strand in December of this year. Artwork will be visible to the non-diving public at low tide and underwater at high tide. So don’t worry, you don’t have to go underwater to see the art.
The underwater museum is the brainwave of Jason deCaires Taylor
With scuba diving and sculpture skills, deCaires Taylor has been making underwater sculptures for over a decade.
Speaking the The Guardian, he says: “Part of creating an underwater museum is about changing our value systems – thinking about the sea floor as something sacred, something that we should be protecting and not taking for granted.”
He has created the world’s first underwater sculpture museum in Grenada, so it’s safe to say he knows what he’s doing. This is sure to be a great new reason to visit the Barrier Reef region.
