Dust

Every glacier is a particle, and its height and colour follow its snow.

The full-length video is not published yet. This loop is a four-second excerpt.

Format: Animation
Duration: 23 s
Sound: With sound

What it shows

Every glacier is a speck of dust. Its height and colour say how much of it is covered by snow that year, from the top (cyan, a lot of snow) to the bottom (red, almost none), and the more scattered the specks, the more fragmented the snow. Glaciers are sorted from left to right by mean altitude. A counter shows the year.

Data

For each glacier and each year, the share of its surface covered by snow, from 0% to 100%, and how fragmented that snow is. Glaciers are sorted by mean altitude.

How it is made

Each glacier is a point of light placed by its altitude rank and its snow of the year, with a halo.

Sound

Tiny plucked grains scattered through each year. There are more of them when the snow is more fragmented, from about 25 to about 245 a year, and their pitch rises with the mean snow.