Artists, explorers, and scientists are now recording audio of Antarctica sea ice cracking, moving, melting, and disappearing into the ocean. They hope that if more people actually hear the sounds of a changing climate and sea level rise, then it might help them contextualize and sympathize with the environmental crisis.
“In hearing ice, it was just this world that was unlocking. … That's a thing that exists in our world, that is happening all the time. And now we can actually hear it. So it's definitely that sense of wonder and awe,” says Grayson Haver Currin, a freelance nature and music journalist who recently penned an article titled “The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen.”
He says he views the recordings as poetry — rather than “being hit over the head with hard facts and with doom,” people can marvel at the planet, which puts the stakes in a different context.
Meanwhile, scientists are writing grant and funding proposals to install massive recording rigs off the coast of Greenland, hoping to create predictive models out of the audio.
“The idea would be … when ice melts, there's gas inside of it and it's released, and that makes a sound, or when a glacier cracks and splits apart, that also makes a sound, and that sound is energy, right? So if you can measure the energy or you can measure the release of this gas, how can you use that to model the rate of change?” he explains.
The scientists and artists who are doing this work have different feelings, Currin points out.
“Some of the artists that I spoke with … see this as really important and urgent music to make because of that political aspect, and because of … documenting it while they have the opportunity. But there are others who are just like, ‘What have I been doing all this time? I've been trying to show this earth, it's so beautiful … and we're not fixing it, we're not changing, maybe we're getting worse.’ And so I do think I do think it's a mixed bag.”