Chapter 3: The Library of Ancient Ice, 2022 - 2023
The Library of Ancient Ice continues my longstanding investigations of ice, its relationship to human-accelerated climate change, its impermanence and fragility, and its natural and artificial presentation.
Curators at the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF) sent me two 1,000+ year old de-accessioned samples from Greenland and Antarctica during the COVID-19 pandemic. I built a backdrop and waited for a snowstorm to cover it with a thick layer of white. On a subfreezing February day, I opened the shrink wrap and photographed each of the cores. Five months later, I visited the facility in Lakewood, Colorado. The most famous examples of ice on earth are housed here, including the Vostok core (where scientists detected global warming) and a 2.4 million year old slab from Allan Hills, Antarctica. I was enthralled by humanity’s attempt to preserve ice in a cold environment (-35º C) when everything around it is warming (37º C on this particular afternoon). Knowing I was unable to preserve my samples before they acquired freezer burn or dissolved in a puddle during a power outage, I documented them melting upon my return. Two metal cylinders designed after the storage tubes in the NSF-ICF hold their watery remains.
Inspired by the isotopic differences between summer (clear) and winter (foggy), I constructed my own ice core out of glass. Each disk represents every year of my life with ash from Mount Saint Helens sprinkled in between 1979 and 1980, a break when I departed my home in the Pacific Northwest for Indiana, and the largest piece symbolizing the longest year, 2020. It is displayed on a light table modeled after the one in the NSF-ICF examination room in Colorado.
When we examine ancient ice, we are viewing a record of what the atmosphere looked like on a given day. The sky is the source of the snow which when compacted, turns to frozen water approximately one hundred years later. Ice is our history and there will be no evidence of this once it disappears.
This project would not be possible without the assistance of Richard Nunn, Assistant Curator, NSF-ICF; Joe Souney, Science Director, NSF-ICF; Jon Rees, Brent Cole, and Jennifer Halvorson for their expertise in all things glass; Jacob Stansberry for coldworking the heaviest core into the smoothest mass; and Chad Copeland for fabricating the cylinders and light table.
