Moving Ice?

An Artistic Project to Depict the Dynamic Ice Flow as well as the Paleo Ice Extents in Antartica

This project is intended to depict the ice flow and ice extent of Antartica in an artistic way to convey the idea that the ice is not static, but is moving and changing. With the wonderful dataset compiled by the Norwegian Polar Institue for the Quantarctica project, I was able to generate an ice vector map with proportional arrows symbolizing the flow direction and flow speed, and to use concrete lines to represent paleo ice extents in ArcGIS. Furthermore, the tracing of ice flow lines, categorization of flow lines based on speed, as well as the styling of ice boundaries and flow lines to mimic real ice flow are all achieved in Adobe Illustrator. Overall, the final result is an artistic representation, nevertheless, it is largely based on a set of scientific observation. The message I wish to convey is, the fastest ice flow regions (Ronne Ice Shelf and Ross Ice Shelf) also are the regions with greatest ice lost (based on the paleo ice extents), and global climate change is clearly having a visible effect on Antartica ice sheets.

The map was created within the class Project Map Creation at TU Wien in summer semester 2018.

Moving Ice by Mengyu Liang
Larger map in jpg format (1mb)

Student: Mengyu Liang