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When photographer Camille Seaman stood on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, she felt dizzy. It was 200 feet down to the sea, and below sea level was another 800 to 1,000 feet of ice. And all this, she thought, was made by one snowflake falling on another, through time.
On The Forum, Bridget Kendall finds out more about the ice masses of the polar ice caps. Along with Native American artist Camille Seaman, she is joined by the Danish glaciologist Poul Christoffersen, who's been measuring the effects of a warming ocean on that very ice shelf, and American engineer Mary Albert who drills down into ancient snow cores for crucial climate clues.
Mary Albert is Professor of Engineering at Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth, in the US. She is also executive director of the US Ice Drilling Program. Her work is focused on firn, or ancient snow, extracted from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. She is examining firn's microstructure and how it traps atmospheric gases before it's compressed into ice. This will help us to better understand our record of past climate, gleaned from ice cores that date back 800,000 years.
Poul Christoffersen has recently returned from Antarctica, where he's been measuring the effects of a warming polar ocean on the Ross Ice Shelf - a tongue of ice the size of France, which extends outwards from the landmass. Poul is a Senior Lecturer at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge University.
Award-winning Native American, African American artist Camille Seaman, was raised to believe that everything is connected. She's been travelling to the polar regions to take photographs of ice for the last ten years, and says that when she stands in front of an iceberg, she feels that she is meeting one of her ancestors.