Interviews with the Ice: Art and Science

"Interviews with the Ice", an art science collaboration is an installation made up of five columns, each representing a point in time where scientists have made leaps in understanding about Greenland's geologic history, ice coverage and melt rates. Methods have included marine sediment samples, seismic data of Greenland's continental shelf, the drilling of ice cores, ice-penetrating radar and satellites. Each of these datatypes have particular textures and have been used to reconstruct particular ice geometries, bedrock sediment formations, and documentation of Greenland's ice coverage through the millennia. Bring the scientific methods and data of this far off region into our physical environment, the work is mixed media combining wall constructions and bowls of glass and clay documenting Greenland's ice sheet changes.

Contributors

Francesca Samsel University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, United States Focusing on multidisciplinary collaboration, Francesca Samsel, a research scientist who trained as an artist, collaborates with environmental scientists, scientific visualization research teams, applying her artistic voice to the science that underpins the climate challenges of this generation.

Benjamin Keisling The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, United States Benjamin Keisling, a glaciologist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, researches the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica in order to understand the mechanisms involved in past ice-sheet change to understand how those same processes will impact ice-sheet change in the future.