Lakes, Greenland Ice Sheet

google earth

This image is the first in a series of large scale digital prints of lakes formed on the Greenland ice sheet captured by satellites and compiled in Google Earth. The image is produced by stitching together screenshots into larger high-detail files.

Google Earth is itself a large set of composite images, compiled across, time, space, and scale to allow us to see an unobstructed, detailed view of earth at a variety of levels. As a result the images feel both hyper-real and imagined as a product of stitched-together images from different moments in time that have already past to produce a singular composite moment that may or may not have exactly existed in the form that we see.

I think about this characteristic of satellite imagery in particular with these lakes because their own ecological behavior captures this transient dynamic quite vividly. These lakes are in constantly in flux, transforming and carving the ice around them with their pressure and movement, and can disappear in an instant.

2020