A field journal / Issue 04

After/ Ice

Three journeys across a landscape that remembers every season.

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Aerial view of fractured sea ice around a dark channel of water
78° 46′ N 56° 12′ W
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In this issue

Three sites / three registers
Sea ice drifting beneath a blue-grey Svalbard sky 01 The Blue
Hour Svalbard, 78° North Read field note Blue glacier ice with a mineral seam above dark water 02 Memory
of Melt Scoresby Sound, East Greenland Read field note A black hydrophone suspended below dark Arctic seawater 03 Sounding
Line Kalaallit Nunaat, West Coast Read field note

Observation record

Field Notes

Three measures of a season in motion. What we could count, trace, and hear became a way to remember.

Measure / 01

64days

64 days in the field

From the first pale crossing to the last blue night, the rhythm of fieldwork followed the light: record, wait, listen, return.

The camp shifted by degrees. Snow softened at noon, hardened after midnight, and held every footprint as a temporary archive.

First light
02:14
Last reading
23:48
Measure / 02

1,240km

1,240 km recorded

By sea, by ice, by quiet resolve. Each coordinate marks a place where the landscape refused to hold still.

Layered blue ice meeting Arctic water
Compressed seasons / Scoresby Sound
Measure / 03

17hours

17 hours of hydrophone audio

Below the visible weather was another climate: pressure, fracture, the knock of loose ice against a hull.

We lowered the listening line and let the water write its own field notes—seventeen hours with no beginning and no clean end.

Hydrophone hanging below the surface on an orange survey line
Listening station 03 / West Coast