Just before filmmaker Michelle Sanders set off for the Arctic in July 2023, a study was published by the science journal, Nature. It said that the Arctic could experience its first ice-free summer within a decade, and this devastating prediction changed the whole trajectory of Sanders’ trip.
“Sea ice is vital,” she tells me – it’s where animals move, hunt, breed, nest; it’s what makes the Arctic the planet’s “refrigerator”, reflecting sunlight and covering the dark ocean, which would otherwise absorb that sunlight – and heat up. “This research showed sea ice could drop to a level below what’s needed to maintain the ecosystem in less than ten years,” says Sanders. “Ice had to become the protagonist of our film.”
The previous year, Sanders had met musician and sound designer Alice Boyd at the Royal Geographical Society’s Explore symposium. The women, both 25 at the time, were speaking on a panel about the arts and how they can be used to talk about the climate crisis. They clicked. “I think there’s something special about how the arts can move people so deeply,” says Boyd, “which is a really important part of the equation in getting them to make change.” Sanders agrees, telling me that if a message reaches people emotionally rather than politically, it is “far more likely to stay with you.”
Boyd had been looking for ways to reconcile her interests in the arts and the environmental sector, and had most recently been an artist resident at the Eden Project in Cornwall. There she had recorded the conductivity in photosynthesising plant leaves and transposed them into musical scores.
Meanwhile, Sanders had known she wanted to make a film about the Arctic for a few years – a film about its beauty, and the gravity of what it faces with the onward rise in global temperatures. By the time she went to capture footage, with a grant from the Explorers’ Club, she had the report to steer her story – and a collaborator in Boyd. Together, they made Arctic Ice: Under the Midnight Sun, an audiovisual exploration of a mesmerising, little-known and threatened ecosystem, which was released this year.
“I hadn’t spent much time thinking about ice before this,” says Sanders, “but because I’m both British and American [she grew up in Pennsylvania], I had flown over Greenland many times and been intrigued.” Her challenge, she says, was to see the ice in enough different ways to keep it visually interesting – to make it a true protagonist, with all the contrasts and conflicts we expect from good characters. In comparison with “charismatic megafauna” – a term which refers to animals such as polar bears or chimps, which capture human imaginations due to numerous representations of them in popular culture – Sanders and Boyd’s subject moves at a slower pace and in more mysterious ways. “Luckily the boat got stuck in sea ice for a couple of days,” says Sanders, “so I had time. I became enamoured by sea ice.”
She set out to capture as much variety and as many patterns in the ice as possible. “It was mostly long lens shooting because of how far away the ice was from us,” says Sanders, who also wanted to record the diversity and patterns of wildlife, from a whale blowing, to swooping gulls to a tiny black sea snail on which the camera pauses. Sanders recorded the ice in all its manifestations: its crisp edges, hard angles and fluffy undulations; its grades of white, grey and blue; its various complexions – crystalline, powder, cracked. To begin, these scenes lull with their beauty, suddenly building to a panic-inducing pace – scored by Boyd – as water floods the ice in the final scenes.
When Sanders came back from the Arctic, she handed Boyd her long video footage of what she’d shot. I ask if it was difficult that Boyd had not visited herself, but the pair felt that their two perspectives became a strength. “I was in the imaginary realm of connecting with the place,” says Boyd. Her score evokes the expanse and sublimity of the Arctic, with ethereal, haunting vocals and strings, which, as she puts it, “work together to provide turning points – the serenity keeps being interrupted.”
As well as depicting the beauty and fragility of the Arctic, the film makes a case for art’s role in communicating the urgency of the climate crisis. With climate change, says Boyd, “the rate of change isn’t always linear, especially in the Arctic – it might look like there’s lots of ice now, but all it takes is one really hot summer.” It was this idea that inspired the long stretches of calm instrumentation interspersed with fast paced strings.
Boyd likes to bring natural sounds and field recordings into her music. For Arctic Ice, she wove collected sounds of wildlife, ice and Arctic Ocean, sourced from audio-naturalist Martyn Stewart. Stewart has subsequently inspired Shifting Soundscapes, Boyd’s recent project with BBC Radio 4, retracing his steps in three locations in Britain to chart how our national soundscapes have changed. “Sound is a real marker of human change, or changes to environments as a result of humans,” she says, “it exposes the pathway that we’re on as a species – a pathway we can still change.”
“I think hope should be an action,” agrees Sanders, “it needs to be a thing that we do, a way that we live. They say every fraction of a degree matters, so I believe that now is the time to act – all is not lost”. Hope, then, became the guiding principle in Arctic Ice. “We made a conscious choice not to have dripping sounds or to show dripping until the end of the film – we wanted to build to it,” a strategy which works – once again, we feel the march of crisis, as well as knowing it.
At the film’s end, we feel the urgency. As the ice melts, drips quicken like a rising heartbeat, strings become discordant, and a quote appears (by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an advocate for environment, cultural and human rights): “When the ice goes, so does the wisdom.”
Michelle wears the TOAST V-Neck Cotton Poplin Jumpsuit. Alice wears the TOAST Check Crinkle Cotton Tie Shirt.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Aloha Shaw.
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