-There's so much data dealing with climate change, but because of the enormity of it, people can't really understand how it impacts them individually.

The designers and artists that we present are actually allowing us to visualize and see this thing that is very abstract and distant for many people.

-I saw this photograph of the ice core lab with just miles and miles of core stored in these individual canisters and my first thought was, I want to put one back together again.

[music] -The title of the exhibition is called, Seeing the Unseeable Data, Design, and Art.

Our show is actually a variety of things, from paintings and sculpture to conceptual installation pieces.

It really shows that data is manifested in multiple ways, not simply just on a screen or just on a two-dimensional plane.

-Both science and art share the process of observation.

For science, there's this process of testing a hypothesis and advancing knowledge.

In many cases, art, it's observation, but it's an attempt to observe the world, to situate ourselves within it to record it, to provide a connection.

-Through our research, we're noticing different themes that we can organize around.

The first being climate change and impact on environment.

-If we think about the climate, we have to think about deep time, we have to think about deep space, we have to think about the space above our heads, we have to think about the space below our feet, we have to think back in time, forward in time.

I started looking at data and ways that we can actually experience or start to comprehend that.

I started looking at the L.A. aquifer groundwater.

There's actually areas of gravel and silt and clay that alternate.

In a sense, it's a modern landscape portraiture.

-Peggy actually went to look at the repository of ice cores that are collected as samples for study and photographed them.

-This is a series of 77 ice cores taken from a drill from 1989 in the Greenland ice sheet and they're stored in Lakewood, Colorado, at the NSF Ice Core Facility in individual 1 meter canisters.

This is core one, so this would be the surface.

This is 1 meter below the surface and this is one year's worth of annual snowfall.

Looks like snow.

As you start moving down, you'll see the snow's more compressed.

They call this firn.

Multiple years are contained in 1 meter.

As we get further here, it's compressed thousands of years into 1 meter.

Each one of these lines is an individual year.

You see these beautiful bands, and they can be counted like tree rings.

Those bands can be correlated with dates because of the particulate matter that's floating, chemicals in the air, pollen, and volcanic ash.

This is a very clear band of volcanic ash and this particular meter dates about 50,000 years.

-Peggy is taking actual evidence from the ground and showing it as a aggregate form of data and allowing people to be able to see with their own eyes the material effects over thousands of years.

-Ice cores are considered paleothermometers.

That means simply that they're able to use the data within the ice to actually determine what the temperature was in past millennia, which is really the scale we have to begin thinking about.

This era seems to have been of particular interest to scientists, so they would request these chunks from these particular ice cores dating to this period for study and analysis.

This repository doesn't just sit there.

It's very active.

Think of it as like a library.

They actually have a very specific procedure to scan them, because they have a scanning room at about 11 below zero.

It's a complicated process.

Many of them are already scanned.

Also, the lighting they use changed over the years.

You got more LED, cooler lights, LEDs became warmer.

What you're seeing here is not only a record of these 77 individual cores, but you're also seeing a record of the process of science.

This last one is 3,043 meters at the bottom.

You can see that the ice is mixed with the ground.

It's dated 110,000 years ago, but current research shows that it could be much, much older than that.

In a very real sense and in a very poignant sense, this entire project is a monument to the Greenland ice sheet, because it's sadly and tragically melting.

-Weather feels so anecdotal to us when we experience it day to day, but to be able to see it really changes the way we understand it.

-We've become very used to conceptualizing seeing ourselves from space, but we don't understand or see the wealth of data or the totality of this planet we live on.

-Peggy's positing that by showing people the ice cores and the different kind of gradients of change, it's a way for people to physically see elements of change in our environment.

It's amazing that something as simple as just showing photos in series can do something like that.

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