2020 | 1080p HD Video | 5.1 Surround Sound or Stereo | 00:10:12

SEA ICE SAGA is a multi-part video artwork about the transformation of Greenland’s sea ice, and the vanishing of sea ice on the Greenland Sea (the body of water between Iceland and Greenland) during the last century.

Iceland has the longest running sea ice record in the world. Extending back to the colonization of the country over 1000 years ago, the movement of sea ice in Icelandic waters was first documented when Viking settlers arrived on the island. Norðurlandvestra, the rugged, least-populated, Northwest region of Iceland, experienced the most sea ice of all. There, the cold East Greenland current moved south from the Arctic, pushing icebergs, sometimes even polar bears, into warmer, northward-flowing Atlantic water. The significance of this clash of currents with Arctic drift ice in the North Atlantic cannot be understated. Then, as today, sea ice greatly impacted Northwest Iceland’s communities. Ice boundaries drove seasonal weather patterns for centuries, and we now know sea ice correlates to the health of Arctic oceanic biomass overall, as well as seawater salinity, and ocean-atmosphere energy transfer. These seemingly disparate factors in turn directly impact the region’s culture, its social imaginary and construction of the sea, and its cultural traditions.

Norðurlandvestra today remains a remote, wool and fishing-centered region of Iceland. It carries literary and cultural mythos as a location of many significant events in the Icelandic Sagas. Despite the richness of its culture and history, over the last several decades the Northwest has dramatically changed. There is less ice than ever before in the Greenland Sea, harming the region’s fishing viability. The region’s social and cultural fabric has weakened, and villages are shrinking. As sea ice vanishes, the region’s folkways are further endangered. Creative traditions and Arctic ecosystems are linked and increasingly imperiled.

Building on the knowledge and relationships fostered over the last decade, Rachel Lin Weaver and Les Duffield built a collaborative video artwork that explored the ebb and flow of Icelandic sea ice over the centuries and its near disappearance in recent years, and served as a way to document and convey the narratives and memory of sea ice in the Northwest Iceland/Eastern Greenland regions.