Time Is Melting: Glaciers and the Amplification of Climate Change

Environmental representatives from around the world gathered in Paris in November 2015 for the twenty-first meeting of the "Conference of the Parties" (COP21). On the outskirts of the city, participants enacted their now-routine performance of recounting our ever-worsening ecological crisis and its symptoms: the acidification of the oceans, the toxicity of air pollution, and the melting of ice sheets the world over.¹ Part of the reason for reciting, illustrating, and performing the litany of symptoms of climate change, as Ursula Heise observes in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, is that it is not an immediately perceivable and everyday threat to many Western populations—for them (for us), climate change occurs at a geographical distance.² While COP21's historic "climate deal" seemed to vindicate and acknowledge a novel sense of ecological foresight on the part of the world's carbon emitters,³ it nonetheless obscured the ways in which climate change is still very much a contested discursive process. As such, establishing the reality of climate change relies on making the distant material and ecological proxies noted above—acidifying and warming oceans, toxic air, and, of particular interest for us in this article, melting ice—sensible to a broader public. Environmental artworks often participate in making the distant effects of climate change sensible to a broader public, provoking open-ended affective responses.

One of the most charismatic figures to circulate beyond the historic Conference of the Parties is the figure of the melting glacier, signifying as a melancholic index of global warming patterns. Although there have been many attempts to amplify the urgency, scale, and stakes of global climate change, contemporary art practices have enfolded visual and audio records of melting glaciers into new persuasive works as a tactic for establishing the reality of climate change. Here, the melting glacier figures as a particular kind of doomsday clock: take action now, before time runs out and the glaciers are gone.

In this article, we discuss artworks that center on the figure of the melting glacier as a symptom and index of climate change, foregrounding the fact of its melting in order to make the abstraction of climate change immediately felt on a human scale. We focus on two sets of artwork—Olafur Eliasson's sculptures and Katie Paterson's acoustic recordings—that imagine glaciers as entities capable of "life" in their sonic and aesthetic expressivity and "death" in their melting. As media objects, glaciers are unstable aesthetic indexes given both that they store time and release it and that they are themselves variably recorded across media.⁴ Yet the affective encounter with melting ice has an immediacy that many data-driven arguments for the reality of climate change lack. This feeling of immediacy is, on the one hand, intensified through sensory engagements: a slippery touch, visual deformation into a puddle, and (for larger glaciers) the bubbling sound of its melting recorded underwater. On the other hand, this sense of immediacy can also emerge through forms of digital interaction and participation (as in Eliasson's work), foregrounding the contentious scalar and temporal stakes of melting glacial ice as an index of global warming.

As sensuous objects with life spans of their own, glaciers seem to have the unique power to amplify the urgency of climate change to global audiences. This amplification occurs not only through a sonic register (as in the amplification of a voice) but, crucially, occurs through multisensory encounters with melting glaciers that are also visual and tactile in nature. In contrast to the commonplace understanding of "amplification" as a means of extension or enlargement,⁵ we theorize "multisensory amplification" as an aesthetic and as a tactic that emerges out of the particular use of glaciers in contemporary artwork to bring the effects of climate change into proximate contact with viewers. Beyond a directional politics with specific goals in mind (to limit global warming to 2°C), the tactic of multisensory amplification channels a more open-ended aesthetic sensibility that relies on an analogy between the mortality of human beings...