Jan Erik Waider flew a drone over the Baltic off the German coast last winter and found the sea rolling underneath a skin of new ice. Too thin to stop it, yet too tough to break.
The footage looks digital, but it’s not. It’s a field of pale polygons drifting and flexing, edges opening and closing, the whole surface moving like something alive.
It isn’t an animation. It’s a few weeks of cold sitting on top of open water.
What you’re watching has a name. Sea ice this young is called nilas, an elastic crust up to about ten centimeters thick that bends with swell instead of resisting it. Ice is much stronger squeezed than stretched, so when a wave lifts the sheet, the upper surface goes into tension and splits. The cracks open at the crests. The wave passes, the sheet settles, and they close again.
So the polygons aren’t decoration. They’re a map of where the ice got pulled hardest, drawn and redrawn a few times a minute.
Waider has spent something like thirty months of the past decade alone in the north, in Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica, mostly photographing water in the middle of changing state.
He’s said he finds these places meditative rather than frightening, and it shows. Nothing in the videos is dramatic. The ice just breathes.
He shot this one close to home, off the island of Rügen. No Greenland required, just a cold enough month and a camera pointed straight down, and the keen eye to capture this type of natural magic. See more of his superb eye on his website.
Videos by Jan Erik Waider. Used with permission. Spotted via Kottke.
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