The cascading effects of climate change create their own sound; but no one has really bothered to listen. We are recording the sounds of glacial recession and its effects on meltwater runoff downstream, the sounds of ice melting, rocks and sediment moving and people adapting, from the source to the sink. We are following the water rhythms of nature and humans, a dialogue between the lifeblood of both people and the earth system, freshwater.
To our knowledge, no one has yet created an acoustic database of cryospheric change; this is our attempt to do so. We believe that sonic monitoring may be a useful tool, new to the field of physical geography, to capture and document both the physical and cultural adaptations to climate change.
We are working on an immersive soundscape that will run from the glaciers to the river mouths on various continents, from the coasts of BC and Alaska, to the edges of the Greenland Ice Sheet, to the mighty River Ganga in the Indian Himalayas. Listening to this journey tells the story of the cascading impacts of climate change from the mountains to the ocean. This is an evocative and immersive sonic journey that captures nature along an edge of intense climate impacts. We believe that by hearing and immersing into local soundscapes, the stories of the ice, the water, the people and their cultures will be shared. As the recordings move from cold crackles of supraglacial streams to the cacophonous expanse of the massive rivers, listeners will experience for themselves that these systems – the glaciers and their cultures – are intertwined.
We hope that our work will allow the Earth and its people to speak for themselves.