What knowledges emerge when we listen to a glacier melting in real time?
How does it feel to become ecological witnesses to our rapidly shifting landscapes?
5th June, 2026 listening from Bristol (UK)
We are listening to a live audio broadcast from the “End of the World” glacier in Northern Italy’s Stelvio National Park. The solar-powered listening station, installed at ca. 2,600 metres above sea level on the Ortles mountain, has been transmitting the cryospheric soundscape since 16 July 2025 (with a 5–10 second delay).
The audio stream is a living archive of the glacier’s cyclical sonic and material life, allowing us to witness meltwater rhythms, torrential sediment flows carving through the ice, avalanches, animal life, tourism, and the seasonal impacts of wind and weather stroking the microphones in real time.
We listen to veins of meltwater running downhill, to shifting sheets of ice and moraines moving like heavy blankets. There are splashes as boulders the size of desks plunge into a growing meltwater pond, formed as the glacier slowly collapses into itself during the summer months. We eavesdrop on almost human-sounding utterances, the soft release of bubbles escaping from the ice, and sense the distant presence of sheep grazing higher up in summer, never quite setting foot on the glacier’s unsettling ground.
The durational live composition creates a portal between “here” and “there”, connecting us to more-than-human environments as they unfold over time. It is an act of remote presence, attuning us to the accelerating transformations of our planet through sound, technology, and listening.
My aim is to resist framing the glacier as a disappearing landscape to be captured or preserved, and instead to sustain a live connection with a place undergoing unprecedented loss and remain in relation with it. Rather than producing an archive of loss, the glacier transmission creates a sonic portal, allowing listeners to witness environmental change as a process rather than an aftermath, while asking important questions about the spatiotemporal dissonance of climate change cause and effect.
In this sense, the broadcast asks what it means to listen to a melting glacier in real time, and what kinds of attention or responsibility might emerge from that. By shifting the question towards “who is listening to whom?”, I hope to approach the glacier not as an object to study, but as a presence within its own environment — something we ‘listen with’, rather than simply listen to.
As the Earth continues to heat, oceans warm and acidify, and ice caps and glaciers melt, the live transmission raises and reflects on urgent questions concerning the ubiquity of extractive technologies and the expansion of AI infrastructures. The digital technologies of our everyday lives that connect and sustain us are deeply entangled with our changing environments. How far are we prepared to go? How much are we prepared to lose in favour of technological advancement?
Transmitting not recording
What feels important in this work is that this is not a recording in the usual sense, but an ongoing transmission carrying the traces of its liveness: distance, fluctuations in signal, atmospheric interference, exposure to weather, the continuous movement of ice, water, and air, and the experience of time passing.
We hear the instability of the glacier as well as the instability of the signal itself. While it may not offer the same clarity as a traditional field recording of a glacier, it creates a mediated presence that foregrounds connection, distance, and vulnerability.
Crucially, the work shifts the role of environmental sound recording away from preservation and toward relation. Instead of creating an archive of loss, my practice sustains an ongoing engagement with a glacier that is actively transforming and melting. The work therefore embodies urgency—not through representation, but through transmission—allowing listeners to encounter environmental change as it happens.
By positioning listening as a shared, more-than-human process, I hope to open a sonic space in which the glacier is not simply heard, but perceived as a presence that participates in the act of listening itself.
Lia Mazzari
On the occasion of World Environment Day, Lia Mazzari’s work invites us to listen attentively to our changing environment and to rethink the relationship between humanity, technology, and nature. The live stream can be followed at any time via the artist’s website and can also be heard on site at MMM Firmian in Bolzano and MMM Ortles in Sulden — as a shared moment of listening, remembrance, and reflection on the melting glacier.