Arctic Ice

The Arctic Ice series was made on a 2024 trip to Svalbard, an archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

Svalbard is one of the fastest warming places on the planet. More than half of its land area is covered with ice, representing about six percent of Earth’s glaciated space. In the last century, Svalbard’s glaciers have lost about 40% of their mass. Hornsund Fjord, where these pieces of ice are from, has retreated at an average rate of 70m per year—about 172 square kilometers from 1899–2010.

Each individual piece of ice in this series contains thousands of air pockets. These fossilized bubbles formed as ancient water froze, and now preserve samples of the atmosphere from when that layer of ice was formed, up to 1m years ago. As the glaciers calve and melt, they release ancient water back into the ocean and ancient air back into the atmosphere.