When the artist Peggy Weil first learned about the National Ice Core
Laboratory, a few years ago, she was captivated. She contacted Geoffrey
Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, and soon found herself inside a giant
freezer, bundled in an Arctic-ready parka. (The temperature was minus
thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.) With the help of lab assistants, she
loaded up a cart with cannisters made of thick cardboard, each
containing a small segment of a two-mile-long core from the Greenland
ice sheet. Weil trundled her specimens to a cylindrical scanner and
photographed them in high resolution. Eventually, she strung together
eighty-eight scans, top to bottom. Then she animated them and added an
accompanying score, creating a four-and-a-half-hour video, designed to
be projected onto a wall.