Several years ago, during the production of the documentary A Sea Change, I had the chance to fly low over the glaciers of Svalbard, an archipelago north of Norway in the Arctic Circle. What I witnessed out my window was a glacier in movement. For the first time I understood and recognized the dynamic nature of these mountains of ice. I could see their movements, clearly recorded by long streaks of sediment that looked like tire tracks embedded in the glacier as it scraped the mountains standing in its way as it made a slow trek downwards. This was an “ah hah” moment for me, but very few people have the opportunity to see what I saw. How will they understand the motion of these giants at the world’s extremes?

By merging the visual arts and science, with a little technology thrown in, abstract information about the environment can take a new form, giving us a different vantage point. For instance, how can you take numerical data about the speed of glacial melt, and make it accessible to people who might never have been in a snowstorm, let alone near a glacier? Continue reading →