The photo exhibition Testimonies of Ice can be experienced in public spaces at the Climate People’s Meeting in Middelfart, at Nordatlantens Brygge in Copenhagen, and at DOKK1 in Aarhus. The exhibition features spectacular images of ice crystals from research at the Niels Bohr Institute, where researchers read the hidden flow histories preserved in the ice

“Understanding how ice flows is also about understanding how much ice flows into the ocean, and how much sea-level rise we can expect in the future.”
Professor, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

Deep beneath the surface of the Arctic and Antarctic, ice sheets hold traces of time, movement and change. Over hundreds of thousands of years, and in some places millions of years, newly fallen snow has slowly been compressed into ice and preserved.

The ice contains deep-frozen data that tell the story of our planet’s history on a timescale extending far beyond the human time horizon.

Ice cores from depths of up to three kilometres are brought to the surface, where ice core researchers study the deep ice in a cold laboratory. Under polarized light, the ice crystals become visible, revealing their hidden crystal structures in a spectrum of colours. The colours of the ice crystals provide a visual record of how the ice sheet moves over time.

The Earth’s ice sheets are not stationary. These enormous masses of ice slowly flow towards the ocean, while the ice crystals deep within the ice change and evolve in shape, size and orientation. The colours reveal the orientation of individual crystals, while their size and shape reflect the temperatures, pressure conditions and movements the ice has experienced.

To understand how and how quickly the ice flows, researchers read the structures of the ice crystals under polarized light. This provides insight into the processes that cause ice crystals to deform, how quickly the ice flows towards the ocean, and how ice masses will flow in the future and contribute to sea-level rise.

Testimonies of Ice has been created in close collaboration with ice core researchers from the Section for Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.