An erratic is a rock that has been transported by a glacier and expelled once the glacier melts. An erratic signifies the time and place where the glacier originated—often hundreds of miles and hundreds of years distant. Erratics hold traces of the parent bedrock, the path that the glacier traveled, and the process of deposition. They are time travelers, treasure troves, reliquaries, and rubble. Encountering an erratic is akin to encountering a piece of sculpture, perched in a surprising location with an unstable or alien appearance. The material presence of an erratic is strange, an anomaly mismatched to its surroundings. It is often not clear how this solitary rock arrived. Erratics have a newness, a vulnerability, and a childlike awkwardness. They have an aura of meaning, promise and poetry that, for those of us who are not geologists, remains a mystery.
The landscapes through which I travel have been shaped, carved, gouged, and molded. I have sought the earth at its most dynamic, where great pieces of the earth move, geology is disrupted, the terrain changes, and resilience is revealed. Mountains and glaciers form and sculpt one another, the ice snaring and moving boulders and gravel by the ton. Glaciers continue to chisel the mountains around me, just as miners bore into their flanks and harvest their materials. I move and am moved.
Because I am an artist, I ponder what I am carrying within myself and what evidence my life will leave. I explore these displacements, their evidence, their trails, and the voids left when traces and relics of journeys are carried away. Below are photos and drawings of dynamic landscapes and erratics I have encountered. Click images to enlarge and view accompanying excerpts from journals, letters, sketchbooks, and notes.
A place out of time, made of time, exemplary of time, illustrating the urgency of our time.
Time is not linear. It is an ouroboros. Time consumes itself. Time transforms itself.
errare (to wander)
When enough snow falls, the accumulated weight compresses the air from the snowflakes. The airless snow is known as firn. Firn condenses into ice. Glaciers are mobile bodies of ice, set into motion by their own massive weight. They defy the camber of the earth.
The glacial sublime is a terrific composite of time, scale, temperature, and latitude.
We hold glaciers as the hallmark of fragility in this moment of fluctuation that we have caused: the Anthropocene. Here, in a landscape revealed after the glaciers have left, among towering moraines, piles of boulders, ripped and scraped mountains, words like rapacious and voracious come to mind. What an emulous rivalry we have set up between climate change and the cryosphere.
Land feels like a verb out here.
I have always thought of life, death, and the afterlife as comparable to the water cycle—different amalgamations and densities of like energy. The great metabolism. In the last 24 hours I have been on ice fields, under glaciers, in clouds, among rainbows.
Crinkling, crunching, carving, scraping, melting, molding, cleaving, collapsing, bulldozing, bending, banding, razing, rippling, pushing, plowing, furrowing, folding, sculpting, sliding, and on, and on, and on.
Why is transmogrification not a glacial term?
How, without the scale of the constructed world, would we describe or comprehend something this immense?
The Empire State Building. A football field. A school bus. A loaf of bread. The age of dinosaurs. The birth of Jesus. The Civil War.
The poetry and vibration of something that holds its own truth, its own inception.
A glacier is always falling, in a state of descent. There is no angle of repose.
The movement of erratics is not intentional, graceful, or singular. Grains of sand, pulverized particles, and giant boulders are lithospheric immigrants and refugees.
Entropy happens fast up here.
After a glacier retreats, the freshly exposed earth gains a bit of elevation in a process called isostatic rebound. A huge weight has been lifted. The earth breathes in. It expands. It decompresses. The land becomes softer and less dense. The planet seeks equilibrium.
The air we are breathing has been trapped inside of the ice for hundreds or thousands of years. Might there be something different in this newly released old air? A breath of pre-industrial purity? Or the threat of mastodon anthrax?
To look up: “The Kennicott glacier was named for Robert Kennicott, an American naturalist and herpetologist. The combination of stress, physical exhaustion and toxic "medicine" was too much for the young scientist's weak heart. With permission of his modern-day family, his body has been added to the human anatomy collection at the Smithsonian. To commemorate his efforts on behalf of science the Kennicott Glacier was named after him. The town of Kennecott, famous for rich copper mines, was named for its proximity to the glacier. However, the name was slightly misspelled. Natural features have retained the original spelling of his name, while the mines and related businesses have continued to use this alternate spelling.”
I wonder if miners envy the might of glaciers. Glaciers truly do move mountains.
Word to look up: ablation
I think of the glacier as a snake and a chicken. A snake because it is constantly shedding its skin as it changes sizes. A chicken because it carries stones in its entrails. And somehow both because, well, it has at once some self-defeating dualism, magic, and wild resilience.
I am sitting at the toe of the glacier, where this mass of ice ends in a rock-stubbled jumble and a smallish brown pond. It is too quiet to comprehend that millions of gallons of water are moving under me. The only sound is the sporadic tumbling of rocks into the water creating varied cascades and splashes. The rumpled texture of the landscape combined with the echoes make it nearly impossible to detect the source of the sound, so there is a tension. My ears are waiting and listening. My eyes search for movement. I fixate on a large boulder that cantilevers out from its icy constraints. I anticipate release. Its posture, nearly levitating, feels impossible. I never saw the rock fall, but returned in a few days to an almost unrecognizable landscape.
What are we creating that will get swept forward, born along in the destructive path of time, and be deposited in the future? What truths of our now and here will tumble along, resilient and intact, into another here and now?
What are the unintentional offspring of our actions? Of course it will be those monsters, mysteries, and miracles that will define us—much more so than the smoothly polished contributions that we intend to withstand the test of time.
Will the things we make hold our essence as the maker, the origination point? How will our objects and words move into the river of time and maintain their integrity? And later, upon some distant deposition, what will they reveal of our time and their nascency?
The poet writes about wildfire ash crossing oceans and coating glaciers. On the other side of the planet, the glaciologist discovers 8-million-year-old soot and silt. The cryospherologist toggles satellites in scientific orbit and sees a future with more fires and less ice. His poem settles into the pores and crevasses and gets caught in a cosmic wind. One scientist looks down from her satellite, the other looks up from her cold brittle instruments. There is a bridge of comprehension that has a poem in the middle.
Word to look up: albedo.
Word to look up: puddingstone.
A glacier does not yield itself to easy acquaintances.
A glacier does take captives from each place it passes.
In 1984, Sherrie Rabinowitz declared that artists need to create at the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy. I want to create in ways that are not obfuscated by destructive forces, but harness and metabolize cataclysmic energy to reach more meaningful destinations.
Featured image: Erratics. Photos by Nina Elder, 2017.
Editor’s note: This post coincides with Nina Elder’s visit to the University of Wisconsin – Madison as part of the Terra Incognita Art Series.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the Polar Lab at the Anchorage Museum, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the poets, scientists and bush pilots who have added to her understanding of glaciers. She is grateful as well to Wrangell Mountain Air for time in the sky and to Erin Elder and Nathaniel Wilder for each contributing a photo to this essay.
Nina Elder is an artist, adventurer, and arts administrator. Her work focuses on the changing culture and ecology of the American West and fostering relationships between artists, scientists, and diverse institutions and communities. Nina’s work has been featured in Art in America, VICE Magazine, on PBS, and elsewhere. Her research has been supported by the Anchorage Museum, Andy Warhol Foundation, Rauschenburg Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and Nevada Museum of Art. Website. Instagram. Contact.
