Opinion | Crying Glacier – The New York Times

When you look at this gigantic mass of ice, it’s hard to get a personal relationship to it. So we wanted to document this landscape to give us an idea of what it sounds like inside a glacier. There is also the sadness because you know that all these sounds are disappearing right now. Of course, melting is something natural for glaciers, but the problem is that nothing new is coming back. The more alive the glacier seems, the more the glacier is actually dying. All the little air bubbles that are released are maybe 100 or 1,000 years old. And they make just a little “plop” sound, and then they’re gone forever. This project is an attempt to conserve these very last sounds of the glacier. I like to see these sounds that I’m recording as a form of language. And so for me, these are stories that the ice is telling. In our world, we’re also silencing these voices of mountains, of glaciers, of rivers, of animals. They’re not part of the discussion, you know? Glaciers have become, really, the symbol of climate change. But when you look at how the discussion about glaciers is, they talk mainly about resources. Through the idea of voice, we could also see it more as a kind of person. It could drastically change our way of perceiving the world and shaping our actions. If everything goes wrong, the glaciers are not there anymore in 100 years. And we can only imagine what this valley here will sound like when it’s not there anymore. So it’s almost like the last cry of the glacier in this valley. [SOUNDS FROM GLACIER]