CASE STUDY ICE CALVING
THE SOUND OF CLIMATE CHRONICLE GLOBAL WARMING Capturing the audio of Arctic glaciers splitting is no easy feat
WORDS KEVIN EMMOTT
W hen a glacier breaks apart it is spectacular. It is thunderous and dramatic – an awesome natural event. It thumps and cracks, rumbles, booms and pulses. Unfortunately these natural events, called calving, are more and more frequent. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on earth and its sea ice is declining by more than 10% every ten years. In fact, it is one of the largest contributors to the global sea level rise; Greenland’s ice sheet is disappearing four times faster than 20 years ago and already contributes to 20% of the rise in sea levels. Thomas Rex Beverly knows more about this than most. Based in Philadelphia, he is a nature sound recordist and composer, and his powerful audio tells the story of glacial erosion to a much wider audience, revealing how the planet is changing both above and below the surface of the water.
Greenland calving “I’d seen my first glaciers in Alaska and Iceland, but before Greenland I had not explored them up close,” explains Beverly. “There has been a lot of emphasis put on documenting receding glaciers, from time-lapse photography to documentary footage. But every time I’ve seen videos of these huge calving events, the audio was below average. Often it would be just off- the-camera sound, or even no audio at all. I wanted to capture those sounds. “Greenland is a magical place to record it. With a population of just 60,000 mostly concentrated on the south-west coast, there is very little tourism on the eastern side of the country, you can get to remote areas no human has ever set foot on!” Remote working He’s not wrong; getting so close to glaciers to record them is not easy. In Greenland, it involved a two-hour boat ride from
A specialist in documenting changes to our planet’s ever-evolving ecosystem, Beverly has been cataloguing the sounds of endangered species and ecosystems in the Arctic since 2019. After his first trip to Alaska, he now has four successful expeditions across the Arctic border under his belt, along with further trips to Iceland, Norway and Greenland. His output is prolific; he has over 90 nature sound libraries available on his website and 230 on his Soundcloud account. His work has been featured across television, games and film including HBO’s The Last of Us , Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and AMC’s The Walking Dead . Ironically, his contribution to Frozen II was a recording of crickets in the desert. His latest trip to Greenland opened his eyes – and ears – up to a host of new experiences, capturing the evolving drama of giant calving glaciers, ice caves and underwater icebergs.
52
PRO MOVIEMAKER
Powered by FlippingBook