12,000 Years in Greenland

Watercolor, Colored Pencil, Acrylic, and Conte 12” x 16”, 2024

This piece is about changes to Greenland over the last ~12,000 years, which make up the Holocene, our current geologic epoch, which marks the end of the last ice age. The data included all spans this time period and is based on the PhD work of Dr. Robert Creel.

There four line graphs show from top to bottom:

• The smooth curve in the sky is June Insolation at 65 degrees N. Insolation is the amount of energy from the sun that reaches Earth.

• The jagged curve in the sky is surface air temperature at the Greenland Ice Sheet

• The dark line marking the top of the ice is the volume of the Greenland Ice Sheet

• The dark line marking the bottom of the ice is global mean sea level.

These 4 graphs detail the climate pattern that occurs when going into an interglacial period. This is part of the climate cycle that has persisted for about 2.5 million years (the Quaternary Period.) Over those millions of years the Earth has cycled between glacial periods and interglacial periods (like today.)

Data Source:

Creel et al. 2023: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/5419/