Ludovico Einaudi ... performed one of his own compositions on a floating platform in the middle of the Ocean, against the backdrop of the Wahlenbergbreen glacier (in Svalbard, Norway).Greenpeace organized the performance to call attention to the fragility of the Arctic, in hopes of influencing OSPAR, an international consortium tasked with protecting the Northeast Atlantic ocean.
To Rosa the supreme wonder and delight of the scenery lay in the fact that everything was wet. Things had lately been dry and hard, unyielding to the touch, irresponsive to the cry of her heart. But here all flowed and fluctuated, the whole world was fluid. Near the shore there were patches of thin white ice that broke as she trod on them, so that she had to wade through pools of clear water. Her shoes soon got soaked; as she ran the water sprinkled over her skirt, and the sense of universal moisture intoxicated her. She felt as if, within a minute or two, she herself, and Peter with her, might melt and dissolve into some unknown, salty flow of delight, and become absorbed into the infinite, swaying, wet world. She seemed to see their two figures quite small upon the white plane. She did not know that her pale face became radiant as she ran on.Isak Dinesen, 'Peter and Rosa' from Winter's Tales.
This clip is amazing. The first aerial views of New York City, filmed in 1912 by Frank Trenholm Coffyn from his Wright Hydroaeroplane.
I love when he lands the plane in the river full of icebergs, and the flights under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Wow.
Listening to: Ocean Songs.
The video for this is outtakes from the film Dutch Harbor: Where The Sea Breaks Its Back by Braden King and Laura Moya. It is incredibly beautiful.
We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,Elizabeth Bishop
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we'd rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship's sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?
This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for.
The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.
The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another's waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.
It is hardly possible to look at Camille Seaman’s icebergs as inert or insentient. Therein lies the gift these images bestow. Though they are made of ice, these massifs of the sea are as diverse and distinct as any terrestrial form. The tabular mesas broken off from the Weddell Ice Shelf are white glazed deserts. The crystal pinnacles cast off from Greenland seem to be mountaintops set adrift. Icebergs known as drydocks can have arches and bridges carved by rain and wind. Unstable pinnacles can invert themselves as they melt above sea line, creating localized tidal waves that can easily swamp a nearby boat.
I returned to my book - Bewick's History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking: and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of "the solitary rocks and promontories" by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape ... Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold." Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely impressive.Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre.
