---
name: "Frozen Polygon Waves"
subtitle: "Baltic Sea ice cracked into a mosaic, still moving with the swell beneath it"
date: 2026-07-25
category: video
topics: [design-and-art, outdoors-and-nature]
tags: [ice, baltic-sea, drone-video, jan-erik-waider]
link: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35S6IM_aQ5Q"
linkText: "youtube.com/@northlandscapes"
description: "Drone footage of cracked-but-unbroken Baltic Sea ice off northern Germany, undulating in polygon slabs with the swell beneath it."
source: "Kottke.org"
fromFind: frozen-polygon-waves
---

import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
import hero from './hero.jpg';

<Image src={hero} alt="Aerial drone view of Baltic Sea ice cracked into long diagonal polygon slabs, low winter sun catching the plates in gold at the top and deep green below, fine pale fracture lines running between them." />

> Photographer Jan Erik Waider flew a drone over a stretch of Baltic Sea ice that had cracked into a mosaic of slabs without coming apart — each plate still rocking, independently, on the swell moving beneath it.

Waider shoots as Northlandscapes, usually from much further afield — a decade split between Iceland and Norway, chasing what he calls "the art and design that water can produce organically in hostile conditions." This one needed no expedition: a cold snap laid a thin, fresh skin of ice over a stretch of the Baltic coast in northern Germany, and before it could thicken, a swell moved back in underneath. The ice had no give left to bend as a single sheet, so it cracked instead — into a field of interlocking polygons that keep tilting with each pulse of the water, plate by plate, without ever fully separating.

What's on camera fits a real, named category of sea ice. Glaciologists call it ice rind: a brittle, shiny crust under two inches thick that only forms on very calm water of low salinity — a condition the Baltic meets easily, since its surface runs at roughly a fifth the open ocean's salinity, diluted by more than two hundred rivers and barely flushed by the North Sea. The standard definition, per the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center's glossary, is that ice rind is "easily broken by wind or swell, commonly breaking into rectangular pieces" — which is close to the choreography on screen: the sheet doesn't drift into loose floes, it keeps its shape and rocks, seam by seam.

Waider filmed it in the soft light of a winter evening — "fine crack lines, and shifting tones from warm gold to deep green," as he described it, turning "a fleeting moment into a study of structure, depth, and calm." Colossal picked the footage up in March; Kottke surfaced it again for us in July, saying he could watch it for hours. The 4K original is worth the resolution: at a distance the ice reads as texture, and only up close do the cracks resolve into a field of separate, independently rocking plates.
