As glaciers melt and ice sheets retreat, information about the Earth’s climate histories is also vanishing as ancient air bubbles captured in ice are released. The atmospheric archive recorded by glaciers and ice sheets provides unequivocable evidence of increased greenhouse gas emissions and thus global warming. As mountain villagers abandon their remote communities due to extreme water scarcity in the Himalayas and move to cities, environmental knowledge and practices of caring for glaciers also disappears.

This “record” and vinyl pressing gathers together material from my encounters with scientists, ecologists, activists, communities, and folksingers. From field recordings captured at various glacial sites by researchers in Canada, Svalbard, Norway, and India to a Ladakhi folksong about mountains, rivers, and streams, these tracks take listeners into the sonic worlds of ice.

Every recording is a consequence of the moisture content, air pressure, and temperature that combine to modify the properties of sound waves as they travel through a medium. Glaciers too undergo mass balance changes due to temperature rise and precipitation seasonality, which accelerates melt by reducing surface albedo and increasing absorption of solar radiation by glaciers. Thus ice is modified in much the same way that sound is shaped by environmental factors. In a sense, these field recordings can tell us both something about the past -- the changing nature of glacial ice -- but they also carry more recent information about the conditions under which they were made. This includes air pressure, humidity, and notably temperature. The sounds of ice are, in effect, an acoustic archive of multiple temporalities and environmental histories.

ICE RECORDS is a limited-edition vinyl LP produced by BEK Centre for Electronic Arts, Bergen in Norway and pressed at Nordso, Copenhagen in Denmark.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/32948