WALKING UP TO THE 56-STORY glass edifice of Brookfield Place in Calgary, Canada, you feel about as far away from nature as possible. The newly constructed office building towers among skyscrapers in the heart of Calgary’s commercial district. In its plaza, a permanent public artwork features seven suspended prisms that glitter and blink with LED lights. Each flash reflects out on a swirl of cut granite inlay on the plaza floor that clips smartly against the heels of office workers as they charge the bustling center five days a week.

Set against the roar of rush hour traffic, the plaza feels modern, even new-age. But when the noise quiets down, the mood changes. A gurgling susurrus replaces the pulse and verve of industrialization, emanating from 16 speakers surrounding the plaza. Every so often, it’s punctuated by an ear splitting crack.

If you know what those cracks mean, suddenly nature seems terrifyingly close.

Each change in light and sound in the Brookfield plaza represents a shift in the Bow Glacier, an outflow glacier from the Wapta Icefield located 220 kilometers northwest of Calgary in Banff National Park. The Bow is older than the city, older than its people, even older than the Bow River that flows like a lifeblood between them, providing nearly 60 percent of the city’s drinking water. It’s been there for some 100 or 200 millennia.

Like all North American glaciers, the Bow is melting. It has been losing ice since around 1850, but the rate of loss is speeding up. Glaciologists estimate that glaciers in the Canadian Rockies will lose 50 percent of their volume by midcentury in a process accelerated by anthropogenic global warming. Most will likely disappear by 2100. In Calgary, that means that for the first time in human history, children stand a strong chance of outliving their primary water source.

Still, living in one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, it would be easy to forget about the fate of a single glacier, even one so intimately connected to that city’s human population. That’s part of why artists Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp designed the Herald/Harbinger Exhibit.

“It is a kind of rift in public space,” the artists explained in an essay on Medium. “You are at once at the edge of the ice of the Bow Glacier, and in the midst of tall skyscrapers filled with oil and gas company offices. You have one foot in the Pleistocene, the other in the Anthropocene. In this strange, improbable space, the everyday gains new meaning as the ring of your cell phone is answered by the sharp crack of the glacier.”

For all its contrast against modernity, the work is only possible because of an elaborate technological apparatus. Each element of light and sound begins in a seismic observatory perched upon the Bow. Designed and installed in 2018 by the conservation technology group Conservify, the two-station monitoring system measures the movement of the glacier’s rock bed using a set of geophones, which convert ground movement into voltage. The voltage is then converted into a digital signal and the signal relayed from the glacier station to a nearby lodge, which uploads the readings to the Internet.

It takes about five minutes for a shift in the Bow to be translated into sound and reverberated around Brookfield plaza, where the installation documents the glacier’s slow but seemingly inevitable death.

“Herald/Harbinger is a living wake,” Rubin and Thorp wrote. “In fifty years or so the Bow Glacier will have receded up to the level of our seismic station. In the years after that, the signal from the mountain will start to grow quiet. Eventually the sounds of the ice will fade, and the plaza will again sound only with the sounds of our footsteps and the thrum of our vehicles.”

By then, Canadians won’t need an art exhibit to experience the perils of the climate crisis. Scientists expect that decreased snowfall and rising temperatures will inevitably push Calgary — and cities across much of the world — into a boom-and-bust cycle of increased flooding in the spring followed by severe drought in summer and fall.

But the Herald/Harbinger exhibit speaks to the hope that we’ll acknowledge this threat before we get there. That, forced to confront the evidence in the midst of our daily commute, we’ll hear the swan song of the natural world on which we depend.

And perhaps we’ll listen before it’s too late.