Ice and Fire
Listen to climate change in Alaska through place-based narrative.
Ice and Fire is a podcast that uses audio storytelling to share cryosphere change as the global climate warms. The cryosphere is all of Earth's frozen surface water including frozen freshwater lakes, glaciers, permafrost and sea ice -- frozen saltwater.
It only takes a small temperature increase for water to melt or thaw from solid into liquid form, yet a cascade of impacts result when we lose ice to fastly flowing liquid.
Season one emphasizes the significance of glacier melt, and connects listeners to distant glaciers rapidly responding to anthropogenic climate change through dialogue with researchers, traditional knowledge-bearers, and by sharing audio of ice-melt in real time.
Season two, available now, is all about permafrost thaw.
Ice and Fire
glacier thread
In the last full episode of the season, we travel to the Greenland ice sheet and hear from a researcher who collects data at the face of tidewater glaciers, studying the turbulent zone where freshwater meets and mixes with seawater. This episode emphasizes the transition of solid ice into liquid freshwater, occurring globally, due to increasing temps, and shares why loss of the frozen reservoir matters.
topics and purpose: scene-setting in Greenland, transition and movement of water molecules globally as part of the interconnected hydrological cycle, increasing temperatures and glacier melt events due to anthropogenic climate change, research methods on ice and at the glacier-ocean interface, the global significance and utility of glaciers, balance, wrapping up the season
terms defined: freshwater reservoir, seismology, sonification, geophones, icequakes
notes: Learn more about the Glacioburst/sonification project by Mertl Research