Covering 660,000 square miles and extending up to 2.2 miles deep, the Greenlandic Ice sheet is itself an archive, containing thousands of years of the earth’s climactic history beneath its surface. Through natural processes, atmospheric gas and particulates are trapped and preserved in the ice sheet. Through mass amounts of governmental and private funding, research missions are sent out to extract this natural archive and collect deep ice cores, drilling to the surface of Greenland. Shipped around the world, the ice core as an object explicates a broader network of global climate politics. This project then attempts to reveal and rethink the ways in which global interests extract data from the Arctic in the form of the ice core. The archive is not neutral, but seen as an actor in the larger stage of global climate discourse.
