Retreat in the Arctic Circle

Watercolor and Colored Pencil, 16” x 20”, 2023

This piece is a complex story of change in the Arctic Circle, based on research by Dr. Will Kochtitzky. The focus on the map and the surrounding data is on marine-terminating glaciers (those that flow into the ocean.) A gradient in the map shows the amount of ablation (ice melt and loss), the darker yellow part of the gradient represent more intense ice loss, and the light yellow represents slightly slower loss. So what is shown here is the varying degrees of ice loss (ablation) in coastal and near-coastal environments on glaciers in the Arctic Circle.

A stacked bar graph of ablation at each region shows the total amount of ice loss at the marine glaciers at each of the 5 landmasses in the Arctic Circle. The green part of the bar graph is the amount of melt between 2000-2010, and the yellow is the amount between 2010-2020, highlighting that Franz Josef Land and Svalbard have had the most ice loss at their periphery in this region.

The data I used is from: Kochtitzky et. al, 2022: The unquantified mass loss of Northern Hemisphere marine-terminating glaciers from 2000-2020

Sea level rise data: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-sea-level