Editor’s Note: This is the second post in Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Sarah Pickman.

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Figure 1 & 2. Columbia Glacier, Alaska: Time-lapse showing retreat from 1984 to 2022. Video by Google Earth Timelapse, 29 Nov 2016. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.¹

Let’s try an experiment. Open your preferred search engine and type in “Arctic climate change.” What images appear? Most likely, you are offered two familiar scenes: first, the lone polar bear perched on a melting iceberg, adrift in open water; second, a satellite time-lapse tracing the retreat of permafrost or sea ice. Together, these form the dominant visual ‘cues’ of the Arctic under climate change. The Arctic has become an Anthropocenic entity itself, as an emblem of planetary crisis suspended somewhere between (alarming) scientific observation and emotional appeal for the cause. Effective, surely. But… 

Figures 3 & 4. Greenland Ice Melt, 2000–2024.
Images generated by Audrey Medaino-Tardif using Google Earth Engine with publicly available satellite data (USGS/NASA Landsat Collection 2). Generated October 14, 2025. Licensed CC BY 4.0.²

These images do more than document environmental change. Rather, they impose a very specific way of seeing that captures and conditions the Arctic as a whole, embedded in a visual monoculture of erasure. Rob Nixon’s term “slow violence” is useful here.³ He defines it as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”⁴ I argue that this visual regime of Arctic melt itself is performative. It produces a kind of slow violence—not through physical destruction, but through infrastructural oversight and the erasure of context and nuance. Its harm accumulates in the gradual abstraction of the North into data, maps, and time-lapse imagery that displaces relations and histories. What appears as a neutral observation is in fact a form of epistemic violence that makes the Arctic visible yet systematically (or technologically) erases its people, politics, and ecologies. 

Environmental degradation and melt in particular are paradoxical. It can appear fast and spectacular (the polar bear on a lonesome iceberg), but it is a symptom of an extremely vast climatic event that is too diffuse to be fully captured in a single image, even a moving image. Not to mention that the spectacle of collapsing ice condenses decades of warming, extraction, and political neglect into an image of instant crisis. Melt, which I define here as the disappearance of ice(-sheets; -bergs; permafrost and any other suffixes), is at the center of this visual regime that translates into a spectacle visible only by the material and digital tools and infrastructures that measure it. The violence of melt is felt as both a material and epistemic condition. Melt is not neutral; it is an affective and epistemic construct that produces both visibility and absence.

How Is Melt Aestheticized: God’s Eye or Data Eyes?

Figures 5 & 6. (Top) “White Marble” Arctic view (2012), image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, licensed under CC BY 2.0.⁵ (Bottom) “Earthrise,” taken on 24 December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission (NASA photo AS08-14-2383). Courtesy of NASA. Public Domain.⁶

The Arctic is melting. In the visual culture of environmental research, melt is affective: it is treated as both an aesthetic and scientific object. If Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence helps situate the aesthetics of environmental representation, and the ways in which prolonged harm is aestheticized, normalized, and made palatable through images, Laura Kurgan reveals how it is shaped and technically assembled into a composite. In her work, she compares the visual evolution of the Earth as a subject from Apollo 8 Earthrise (a human photograph taken from space) to NASA’s Blue Marble (a data composite sewn together and made possible by satellite readings). In a framing that parallels timelapses of a melting Arctic, Kurgan writes, “This is not the integrating vision of a particular person standing in a particular place or even floating in space. It’s an image of something no human could see with his or her own eye.”⁷

The difference here is notable: melt (in situ) can be witnessed by the naked eye, but it raises the question “What is missing?” from records of disappearance that are mediated through maps, satellite composites, and comparative graphics. Can we observe climate change neutrally, or are we conditioned by the measurements and abstractive lens? Kurgan insists, in contrast to the viewer’s positionality implied by these images, that we are not really at a distance, but rather fully embedded in these infrastructures. “Maps construct space,” Kurgan writes. “They have become infrastructures and systems.”⁸ It is not a passive representation, but rather a mode of governance and epistemic condition that converts the disappearance of ice into data and, in turn, constructs a synthetic reality, leaving the viewer completely unaware of these invisible technologic syncretises. 

The Violence of Melt: Material and Epistemic

To speak of the violence of melt is to speak of processes of how the Arctic becomes known and mediated. As Stefan Helmreich observes, the Whole Earth image first captured by NASA in the late 1960s became an icon of planetary unity and fragility. As he writes, it can also be “melted back” into its material and political infrastructures and indices like colonialism, inequality, extraction.¹⁰ The Arctic’s melt operates within this same logic. It is visualized through satellites and sensors that promise planetary comprehension (in this case, a unitary Arctic as both image and place), while reproducing inequalities and erasing human presence. Environmental crisis is thus abstracted into retreating glaciers, thinning permafrost, and lengthening summer seasons: elements of melt, not of life.

The idea of the Arctic as devoid of life has a long history outside of the Arctic, especially in Europe and settler North America. The concept of the North as pristine, frozen, and uninhabited—a blank canvas for environmental observation or masculine adventure—has long served a colonial aesthetic of purity that serves as the backbone of our visual regime. The fantasy of purity erases histories of habitation, stewardship, and survival, reproducing the enduring myth of an empty North. In reality, today Arctic human life is nominally stewarded by the participating member nations of the Arctic Council (currently Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden and the United States), as well as Indigenous communities that have long called the Arctic home, including the Aleut, Athabaskan, Gwich’in, Inuit, Sámi, and Indigenous Siberian peoples. One of the key missions of the Arctic Council is to help the Arctic’s nearly four million inhabitants “to strengthen resilience and facilitate adaptation” to anthropogenic climate change.¹¹

While not neglecting to mention that climate change is transformative, the Council’s public statement does propose an alternative futurity: “the Arctic offers potential for sustainable economic development…[Indigenous Peoples] have learned to adapt to a changing environment over time, and thus hold a fundamental knowledge base of the lands and waters of their homelands.”¹²  This perspective disrupts the notion of the Arctic as a passive site of observation. Instead, it insists on the persistence of life, adaptation, and knowledge that goes beyond the frame of scientific visualization. Such a perspective exposes the limits and problems of a melt-focused visual culture: how the very scientific infrastructures built to observe change have normalized the erasure of four million people from the Arctic.

Toward a Plural Visual North

Having examined the violence of singular observation, it becomes necessary to ask what a plurality of visions might offer. Satellites and maps are tools that do an exceptional job at analyzing and quantifying very specific datasets from a remote, abstracted perspective. But they are just that: tools; ways of seeing that shape our collective knowledge of what the Arctic should look like. Climate change through this lens is measured and datafied. Timothy Clark observes this inherent issue as a problem of cartographic scale. 

With climate change, however, we have a map, its scale includes the whole earth but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless…Cartographic scale is itself an inadequate concept here. Non-cartographic concepts of scale are not a smooth zooming in and out but involve jumps and discontinuities with sometimes incalculable ‘scale effects.’¹³

The Arctic’s melt is a perfect instance of this scalar disjunction—mapped and modeled remotely, stripped of the relational encounters that might complicate the narrative of a purely scientific Arctic. What remains is a separation of people from environment.

To move toward a plural visual of the Circumpolar North, we need to fill the gap with histories and images of habitation, stewardship, and resistance in climate change discourse of the Arctic that go beyond the frame of melt. Otherwise, the violence of melt is then both material and epistemic, and unfolding through the loss of ice and the erasure of relations. Circumpolar visual culture must reckon with this double loss, particularly in the removal of Indigenous presence when environmental change is viewed only through the scientific lens. Introducing scientific visualization alongside Indigenous accounts is necessary not to idealize either, but to reframe how the North is historicized in the Anthropocene, as a living, entangled environment rather than a vanishing one.

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Notes

[1] Google Earth Timelapse, “Columbia Glacier, Alaska (1984-2022)”, video, 12 s, uploaded 29 November 2016, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Earth_Timelapse-_Columbia_Glacier,_Alaska.webm.

[2] Audrey Medaino-Tardif, “Greenland Melt Timelapse, 2000–2024”, image generated October 14, 2025, using Google Earth Engine and Landsat Collection 2 Tier 1 Surface Reflectance data (USGS/NASA). Imagery and derived product available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

[3] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

[4] Ibid, p. 2.

[5] NASA Goddard Photo and Video. “White Marble (Arctic View)”, 2012. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

[6] NASA. “Earthrise (AS08-14-2383)”, photograph taken 24 December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. Public domain, courtesy of NASA.

[7] Lisa Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 11-12. 

[8] Ibid., p. 14.

[9] Jean-Christophe André, “Iceberg (ID 2574997)”, photograph, captured in Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland. Downloaded from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/iceberg-2574997/. Licensed under the Pexels License (free for commercial and non-commercial use, attribution optional but recommended).

[10] Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 120.

[11] “Arctic Peoples,” Arctic Council, 2025. Accessed online at: https://arctic-council.org/explore/topics/arctic-peoples/

[12] Ibid.

[13] Timothy Clark, “Scale,” in T. Cohen (Ed.), Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 148-149. 

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Feature image: Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland. Photo by Jean-Christophe André via Pexels (ID 2574997). Used under the Pexels License.