Hi, we’re Kerry Koepping and Andrea Sparrow, some of the executive team members of the Arctic Arts Project. We’re part of a network of photographers, working in the #Arctic, who try to bring home an understanding of #climatechange through our work. #SciArt #gueSTAAR 
We’re on a mission to provide visual storytelling that helps people understand the evolution of our warming world. We want to generate impactful imagery that is given context by current science. #seethingsdifferently #BenElkins
That’s why Kerry is an affiliate of @INSTAAR--we work closely with scientists because we need to get it right. We want to embed climate science into compelling stories. @KKoepping #BenElkins
But methane is invisible. Climate is invisible. How do we make them visible? How can we make the implicit explicit? How can we go between small details and huge systems? A lot of our process is wrestling with questions like these. #BenElkins
We can’t normally see methane, but in winter, as high alpine and Arctic lakes freeze, the soil below the lakes surface remains warm enough for #methane production to continue.
The Arctic Team photographing methane bubbles as they rise from the organics below. White pancakes of methane bubbles form in the lake’s surface ice, as the freezing process continues. #LakeAbraham #Alberta #Canada @AndreaSparrow5
How cold is it? The Arctic Arts Project Team has experienced temperatures on the ice as low as -35 degrees C - with winds in upwards of 25 mph. So, you know, balmy.
Methanotrophs are bacteria in water that eat methane. When conditions are right, these little guys eat a great deal of the methane produced and stored in the ice of high Arctic and alpine lakes.
A recent study (phys.org/news/2019-01-d…) found that with low snowfall or high winds that clear the lake surface of cover, methanotrophs don’t grow very well and can’t chomp away. So, snowfall can be really important in determining how much #methane is released.
We hope that our new winter methane film, and the rest of our art, will connect people to the science and to one one another. We are all connected. We are all relevant.
Our team keeps coming back to this observation by John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.”
Thanks for connecting with us today. Check out our website arcticartsproject.com for news on the release of our new film and follow along with us on instagram (@arcticartsproject) or Vimeo (vimeo.com/arcticartsproj…).
