This post is the 2nd of a set of articles focusing on a song on Eliot Hester’s The Beauty Lost album, which launched this past Earth Day. You can get it on iTunes or wherever you go for digital music.
Eliot Hester, composer and performer, on his song, “Cracks in the Ice (The Arctic Glaciers):”
“At the beginning, you hear waves that are crashing against some Arctic or Antarctic landform, and that’s a really calm sound and is supposed to be calm, but about midway through the song you hear this real low rumble of ice breaking and it’s less calm and more frantic. The waves and breaking ice are actually two separate tracks that continue running simultaneously, but it’s hard to hear the waves when the sounds of breaking ice start. This is supposed to symbolize that this place is still calm, but its calm is being overshadowed by this violent process.
The bird sounds you hear are actually penguins running on a totally separate track because I wanted to show that there is something living there, where their floor is constantly changing. I thought this would give us something to attach to. Penguins are normally known as likable animals, and when you put them in your mind in this really vulnerable position, I thought it would promote more change.
Interestingly, this is one of the only songs on the album to have percussion, and it’s very distinctive. I used a kick drum sample and just kept it going. I first recorded a version of this song really early in the album process, before I knew I was going to create this album. It was just a fun little loop pedal thing I did on the keyboard and I thought it sounded cool, but when I started to formulate the idea of this album I decided I would try to use this song and I really wanted to create a change from the very beginning to the middle, and then near the end it switches back to calm again. So I wanted it to go in stages — calm and then violent — and I thought if I added this harsh beat going on in back of the melody, it would make the piece kind of strive and be a little wrong and more moving. It would feel like the song was being forced to move forward just as those glaciers are being forced to change.
The keyboard sound I used is actually called ‘dark glacier.’ I don’t know why it’s called that, and I only noticed it after I finished the song.”
I think Eliot’s choice of the kick drum, relentlessly and incongruously moving the gentle melody forward, is a brilliant musical metaphor for the process by which climate change is altering the distribution of ice and liquid water on our Earth. These changes are slow but relentless. Summer is arriving, and soon all of us in the Northern Hemisphere will have lots of time to ponder this process as we enjoy an icy drink on a hot day. The moment you plop the ice in your glass, it’s destined to melt. Assuming you don’t stick your drink in the freezer, there’s no saving that ice. It sticks around for a good long while, though, giving you ample time to enjoy its delightfully cooling effect on your drink.
In scientific terms, your icy drink is a non-equilibrium state of matter. Ice is not thermodynamically stable sitting in a pool of liquid warmer than 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The moment it’s out of the freezer, the ice is in a transitional state guaranteed to end in liquid water. A couple ants that enter your slippery-sided glass might be able to save themselves from drowning, for a time, sitting on the ice. They may feel secure in their position for quite a while. The changes going on under them are slow, almost imperceptible. Sooner or later, we might imagine them arguing with one another about how secure they are. The ice seems to be shrinking, but maybe ice in their glass shrinks and grows periodically? But the ice doesn’t care what either of the ants thinks; it’s in a transitional state fixed by the laws of physics.
Our Earth has been in an almost identical, human-induced transitional state ever since the Industrial Revolutions shown on the graph below, when people commenced “… carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment” by “within a few centuries … returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years” (Roger Revelle & Hans Suess, climate scientists, commenting in a 1957 paper about global climate change).
As we’ve built our human civilization over a couple thousand years, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been remarkably stable, as you can see in the graph above going back to Biblical times. So has the distribution of water and ice on our Earth, with which we’ve become quite accustomed.
But that distribution of water and ice is not thermodynamically stable with higher CO2 concentrations, certainly not at our current concentration greater than 410 ppm. By absorbing reflected infrared solar radiation from our Earth and converting it to heat, higher levels of CO2 increase the temperature of our air and our oceans. This is the greenhouse effect, about which responsible scientists have a unanimous consensus, the science of which can be simply explained, and the reality of which has been verified by thermometers. We are departing from our former thermodynamic equilibrium very quickly, as you can see by the nearly vertical line at the right side of the graph. In a geological sense, this is every bit as abrupt as taking ice out of the freezer.
Absent “negative emissions” (a term used by policy makers to describe future potential human activities to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere — a process that would require substantial societal changes and technological advancements for which we are currently neither planning nor investing in any meaningful way), there is no saving the ice that is destined to melt at 410 ppm of CO2. And every ppm higher we go takes us further from the equilibrium we have become used to, and deepens the transitional state that is underway. Even as we argue.
Pushed to the extreme, there are possible future equilibrium states of our Earth for which we would not wish to sign up. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, complete melting of the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets would raise sea level by 10 meters, flooding out 25% of the current U.S. population. At what CO2 level does such a terrible outcome become our Earth’s destiny? It’s about questions like this that scientists are uncertain.
It’s happening slowly and (mostly, at least) in remote places a lot of us don’t get a chance to see. But it’s happening, and any Pacific Islander or coastal Miami property owner will tell you the results are arriving at our shores. See more:
- Arctic sea ice
- Larsen B, Antarctica
- Larsen C, Antarctica
- The melting glaciers in time lapse
- The largest glacier collapse ever caught on film
- The Greenland ice sheet
- Shishmaref, AK
- Kiribati
- Fiji
- Miami #1
- Miami #2
- Glacier National Park
Read more about other pieces on The Beauty Lost album.
Visit Eliot’s The Beauty Lost Project web page.
See more changes happening Before Our Eyes.