This dissertation asks how we come to understand Arctic melt, an event vast in scale yet intimately experienced through first-hand encounters and cultural mediations. It focuses on a range of cultural artefacts that tackle the phenomenon, spanning installation art, non-fiction, literature, and so-called lowbrow genres. I identify four dominant aesthetic modes—the elegiac (in its global and planetary guises), the panoramic, and the volumetric—and examine how each construct and deploys figures such as the globe, the planet, the panoramic vista, and the undersea imaginary to render the large-scale ecological dimensions of melt perceptible. I take none of these representations to be “natural”; rather, each carries its own political ethos. By staging a dialogue between historical aesthetic models and contemporary representations, the dissertation investigates how the cultural afterlife of the Arctic continues to shape our understanding of climate change.