A tsunami memorial

Beck’s tsunami memorial design on the reservoir at Arc2000 in Savoie, France was completed on March 11, 2012. This piece took around 10 to 15 hours to make, although Beck did not precisely time it. He dedicated this work to the many people affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. “A lot of the inspiration for the snow art comes from the gardens in the temples in Kyoto, where sand is raked in patterns [like these],” he says. “This is the closest thing I have seen elsewhere to the effect I achieve with snow.” The designs are a five-pointed version of the fractal “snowflake curve,” named by the mathematician Helge von Koch.