Glacial Time + Island Time 🐋

from active glaciers to granite shaped a million years ago

Aug 27, 2024

Hi team,

I’m writing this from Mount Desert Island, Maine, where I live now. It’s been a nonstop-motion kind of summer and it feels good to be home (home at my parents’ house until our seasonal rental starts). Last week was the first week of teacher in-service at the sweet little school where I’ll be teaching part-time this year. Tom Wessels, a local terrestrial ecologist, gave our cohort a tour of island ecology from the bedrock up. One highlight was a sea cave deep in the forest: a hideout formed by waves many millions of years ago.

Tom described how over the last two million years, glaciers covered this place for ~10,000-year periods, then retreated. Geologic time—glacial time—felt slow and abstract as we surveyed the view from Cadillac Mountain. We know the ice forms are to thank for the many north-to-south ridges we run today, for the erratic boulders perched on the cliffs, and for the mini-chasms of parallel striations through the rock. The ice has not been here in an unfathomably long time, but the island remembers.

Two weeks before teacher prep, I sat on the Coleman Glacier on Mount Baker in Washington state, fabric and thread spread out on my raincoat in front of my crampons, and listened to seracs at the terminus calving off. Glacial time felt immediate and pressing. My job was to communicate the data the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project’s scientists were gathering through art.

Spoiler: they found that, overall, the glaciers are melting at an accelerated rate. One glacier—the Ice Worm— is technically no longer an active glacier and is, instead, a stagnant snowfield. The rotting ice under its surface it has hollowed into a system of beautiful turquoise caves. I didn’t need to go on this trip to know the glaciers are melting, but I did need this trip to feel them melting and remind me of the urgency this change in landscape calls for.

The North Cascade Glacier Climate Project is a labor of love. For forty-one years, Science Director Mauri Pelto has backpacked to the same sites to focus on glacier mapping, mass balance measurement, terminus observations, and glacier runoff monitoring. Art Director Jill Pelto has been along on the journey for over half her life, and has created incredible imagery along the way. Talented folks from Field Assistants to fellow artists and storytellers joined the seventeen-day trek at various points to lend their skills and perspectives (I was particularly lucky to overlap with Katie Hovind, Cal Weichler, Shari Macy, and Karin Kirk, among others). The on-trail and at-camp conversations about climate action, flora and fauna, and processing melting were galvanizing and grounding.

In my ten days with the Project, I visited six glaciers and created a series of five mixed-media flags on canvas.

The flags are both white-flag surrenders to all the melting we cannot stop and blowing-in-the-wind prayers for us all to act in the ways we can. I want them to help people feel the difference between where the ice was and where it is now. I think feeling that loss is groundwork for our urgent conversations about climate solutions, which can be uplifting and cool and pragmatic and creative!

I’ll share a couple images from each site below, and add even more to a blog on my website so as not to overwhelm everyone’s email inboxes.

01. LOWER CURTIS

02. COLEMAN

03. EASTON

04. ICE WORM

05. DANIELS

06. LYNCH

This journey was expansive and galvanizing and community-building and I’m so grateful for it, and grateful you’re here scrolling through, helping this work expand beyond our individual experiences.

More to come — keep an eye out for a glacier art show in Seattle in April 2025.

If any of this project resonates, I’d love to hear.

More to come, too, about moving away and moving home and all. For now, I’m off to a van-driver certification so I can drive kiddos around this island. School starts next week. We’ll park on Cadillac Mountain and hike around and look at the marks on the granite where the glaciers used to be.