Shift

2018

Glacial ice is a unique form of ice. Layers of snow pile up year after year, and the hexagonal crystals get compressed.  The pressure creates just enough heat to cause enough melting to change the crystal shape and to align its position with the direction of flow.  Through this process of melting and freezing, the ice moves incrementally downhill with its own weight; the ice crystals compress, align, and shift as this solid-liquid-solid flows. 

When Cheryl E. Leonard, composer, and I climbed around on the Nigardsbreen glacier in Norway, we found crevasses and moulin (holes) in the ice, revealing intense and unusual blues, tints of turquoise, blurring into a sky blue, then dropping into a marine blue, down deep.  The density of the ice allows only these blue wavelengths of light to pass through. Streams run through and under the ice. At night it will refreeze and then re-melt the next day, sculpting the ice.  A glacier is a moving sculpture that is geological – it is a part of the land and it shapes the land. 

Glaciers are batteries, storing water and releasing it slowly, feeding all the downstream ecosystems. They also store cold, and this is key to global temperature balance. 

Nigardsbreen is receding rapidly.  Our guide pointed out 200 meters down the canyon where the glacier ended when he was a child. A glacier is in a continual process of shifting, changing, and replenishing itself yearly.  When that balance of renewal and melt is upended, the glacier will eventually die.

A glacier feels like an animal, alive, changing, interacting with all the life forms around it.  The surface layer of brown dust on glaciers is typically organic material including bacteria and other microorganisms. 

Our roll as visitors was to stand in awe and to bear witness to that living animal.  We may not be able to stop the animal from dying, but we can at least come to know the animal as best we can and feel our kinship with it.

This series is an attempt to sit with the mystery, to explore what is blue and to explore how deep does it go.