Yahoo News Olafur Eliasson's iceberg artwork will melt in about a week — so get your skates on
Visitors to Tate Modern’s latest installation have about a week to see it before it melts away.
Artist Olafur Eliasson, whose 2003 weather project flooded the building’s Turbine Hall with fake sunlight, has brought over 24 huge chunks of ice from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland where they were melting into the ocean after breaking off from the ice sheet.
He said the project, called Ice Watch, was his attempt to make the debate on climate change “less abstract”. Launching the project this morning to coincide with a climate change conference in Katowice, Poland, he said: “The way I see it is looking at the ice we are suddenly confronted with something that in the news or in climate papers comes across as being very abstract. You don’t get a physical relationship from reading about something.”
The blocks have been placed on Bankside between the gallery and the Thames.
Another six blocks have been placed outside the London office of Bloomberg, whose boss, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, has supported the project financially.
The blocks were pulled out of the water by a team of divers and then transported by boat and truck across Denmark and to the UK in vehicles that usually carry frozen fish.
Eliasson said he expected them to last between a week and 14 days, but that heavy rain could speed up the melting process.
Visitors will be encouraged to touch the blocks, which are up to three metres high and emit a very low popping sound caused by long-trapped air bubbles bursting as the ice melts.
He said: “You can go up to it and you can listen to it and you can smell it. When you put your ear on it, it goes cold and wet but you can actually hear it cracking. It actually sings — it is giving the ice a voice, I almost say, and you can quite literally hear it.”
Eliasson, who also runs the Little Sun social enterprise, which produces solar-powered lamps, said he would offset the carbon footprint of bringing the ice to the capital three times over by planting trees in the UK.
He said: “This ice is between 50,000 and 100,000 years old. Think of the Bible being about 2,000 years old, the French Revolution, that’s like yesterday, so here you see 50,000 years melting away in a week.
“We have 24 ice blocks here, it’s going to take them about a week to melt — every second 10,000 blocks like these melt away all the time in Greenland.”
