It’s kind of a dripping, clicking, popping sound reminiscent of rain falling off of roof. I know this thanks to artist Katie Paterson, who spent a week recording the sounds of Iceland’s Vatnajokull Glacier as it melts into the sea. NPR featured Katie last weekend; see the story here and click on the sound link under the photo to hear the glacier melting.
Katie says what you hear is the air escaping from hunks of glacier after they break off into a lagoon. The air has been trapped for millions of years.
To record the sounds, she used an underwater microphone dipped into a lagoon at the edge of the glacier. She connected it to an amplifier and that to a cell phone for the week (set to auto-answer) and people could call in and listen to the glacier. All of this was part of a project for her master’s degree show at the Slade School of Art in London.
This was a brilliant idea. Her project is both art and science at the same time. It’s fascinating to listen to the glacier crackle and pop — the sound of global warming, the sound of a changing planet.
(Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office)
WOW! The sound of the melting glacier was very cool but eerie at the same time.
I think I’d call it … haunting …
Imagine this sound going on even now!
_the sound of global warming,_
Please, you’re projecting your own bizarre cult belief (that everything done by man harms the earth, and we’re all causing global warming) onto an activity that has been going on with great variability for milennia. Glaciers are like rivers…they flow to the sea, where they…guess what? ….Right, boys and girls…they melt when they hit the warmer salty waters of the Gulf Stream. I’ve lived in Iceland…they have glaciers that are melted by geothermal activity as well as those melted by warm sea water.
Climate change cycles were going on long before apes decided they needed to wear the skins of other animals to survive a cold snap.
More Real science, less primitive Gaia worship, please.
“Katie says what you hear is the air escaping from hunks of glacier after they break off into a lagoon.”
I hear hot air escaping from pseudo-scientists.
You can purge my comments…but the truth is glaciers have been flowing to the sea and melting from time immemorial. And to deny that in the name of Global Warming is not science…it cult belief.
Mmm. Doug. Earth is warming. The climate is changing. Sorry, buddy, but there’s nothing “cult” or “pseudo” about that.
No one is denying that Earth has warmed before!
Deborah
Wow, what other sounds are out there that we should hear? Our earth is so rich!
Hi Dan,
Thanks for mentioning Katie Paterson’s project in your blog.
It was a unique project. It started out as a very low key demonstration and mushroomed into an event that was carried all over the world by radio, TV, blogs and newspapers. There were thousands of telephone calls from over 100 countries in the short time it was operational.
It was no easy task for Katie! The Vatnajokull glacier where she was camped is quite remote and required a several hour trek by foot from the nearest road. She had well over 100 pounds of bulky gear to transport on her back as well. Once there the only accomodation was the tent she carried.
Dolphinear.com (I work for them!)loaned the equipment to Katie. For Karen and others out there who are wondering what else we never hear, have a look at the dolphinear.com website. There is also a link to Katie’s page http://www.katiepaterson.org and photos sound recordings of the glacier at http://www.dolphinear.com/katie
For those skeptics who think climate change is a hoax, all I can do is to remind them that even bigger skeptics (scientists themselves) are now in agreement that human activity is changing the equation of life on this planet.
Is it really all that hard to understand? Look at our everyday lives. Everything is highly balanced, and small changes can bring big undesireable effects. For example, we break time into slots for various activities. Unexpected events that steal a few extra minutes throw our delicately balanced schedules into chaos. I don’t really need to give you examples, you can supply dozens of your own.
I live in the UK. We just had devastating floods that were unprecedented.
I got caught in them. At the same time, the mediterranean countries are experiencing record high temperatures.
Both events are connected.
The earth’s climate is powered by a heat engine. The sun warms the water in the sea and land. Water vapour escapes into the atmosphere through evaporation and is carried by the winds. As the air carrying the water vapour cools it condenses forming clouds, which eventually bring rain to nourish the earth.
A stable and predicable heat cycle produces a stable and predictable climate. If you interrupt that heat cycle in one place you can affect large areas of the planet. The interruption doesn’t even have to be great. Small changes can create large effects.
The Mediterranean sea region has been experiencing record breaking temperatures this summer. This heating is causing a larger than normal amount of evaporation which releases water vapour into the atmosphere. A high pressure weather system over Europe is carrying this water vapour in a counter-clockwise direction - across the med, northwards over Cyprus then east over Germany and the UK. When cold polar air hits this warm water vapour it condenses, forms clouds and deposits rain on the land beneath. Unfortunately for us, that land is where I live (UK). We are being flooded by water from the Mediterranean sea!
So what’s so hard about believing that humans can change the climate?
An even bigger question is: what harm does it do if we cut our pollution? Even the most ardent skeptic has to agree that cutting CO2 and other greenhouse pollutants does NO HARM. Hey, even the national economy is better off!
While the US is in denial, Europe, and Asia are developing new industries around the clean generation of electric power. Low-emission cars are on the dealers lots and zero-emission vehicles aren’t far away.
Katie’s genius is to make the effects of global warming ‘personal’. We (at Dolphinear) told her that thousands of people would be calling and that one phone connection wasn’t going to be enough. Yes, a lot of people didn’t get through. But those who did experienced something very personal - they were the only ones on the planet at that instant in time who could hear the glacier melting! It made an impact.
Thanks again for your blog, Dan.
I agree, Dan, this project shows how art and science can amplify each other. Art is such an important way to get a message across… would so many people have listened to “An Inconvenient Truth” if it was a poorly done film?
I wrote this blog post because the fact that someone recorded the sound of a glacier melting struck me as unusual — and the fact that I could listen to it online was pretty cool. I don’t live near a glacier (most of us don’t) and I associate glacial melt with images, not sounds. So I wrote to share this unique item I found.
As for the science, the “Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis” report issued in February by the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change said that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.” This study was written by 152 scientists from 30 countries (including the United States) and reviewed by more than 600 experts. The report was based on thousands of data sets. Global warming is happening.
They note in the report that “Mountain glaciers and snow cover have declined on average in both hemispheres. Widespread decreases in glaciers and ice caps have contributed to sea level rise.” These climate scientists have observed that sea levels rose 6.7 inches in the 20th century and they say with high confidence that the rate of observed sea level rise increased from the 19th to the 20th century.
Furthermore, they estimate that the rate of glacial melt per year increased — contributed more to sea level rise — from 1993-2003 as compared to 1961-2003. The glacial retreat probably started in 1850. The scientists note that the faster rate for 1993-2003 could be due to decadal variability or to an increase in the long-term trend. They are not sure.
But we know that the net effect in both hemispheres is that the glaciers are melting and sea level is rising. I think it is important that we keep tabs on this and stay aware of what is happening on our planet. For example, according to the report, the last time polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period of time — some 125,000 years ago — the loss of polar ice volume caused the seas to rise 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 feet). If a trend like that develops, we want to know about it.
Some quick Web research reveals that there is some dispute over why the Vatnajokull glacier is melting. Vatnajokull is the largest glacier in Europe and an interesting one at that, because it has several active volcanoes underneath it.
In any case, glaciers are declining on average worldwide because of higher temperatures. Climate scientists have shown that the Earth is warming; the glaciers are one of the most visible signs of it. In the report summary, the scientists say they are 90 percent certain “that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming,” due to an increase in greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use, land-use (deforestation) and agriculture.
That’s the scientific basis for the importance I place on global warming and man’s role in it. You can read the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at this Web site, http://www.ipcc.ch/
Check out the Physical Science Basis report here, http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html I got my info from the Summary for Policymakers, the FAQs and the section on Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground.