Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers

2012 (New York: Rizzoli)

In this kaleidoscopic view of remote Arctic and alpine landscapes, Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers celebrates a realm of exquisite beauty at the same time as it reveals how climate change is altering our world

Since 2006, renowned environmental photographer James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) team – mountaineers and explorers, artists and earth scientists – have produced an historic, definitive look at ice and glaciers. Greenland … Iceland …  the Himalaya … Alaska … the mountains of Canada and the United States … EIS ventures into the world’s wildest places – some are so remote they have never been touched by human footsteps.

Selected from the million-strong EIS photo archive, Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers celebrates the art and architecture of ice. We see stupendous ice sheets transformed by the sun, sea water and time, until they become small, glittering diamonds melting into the ever-rising global ocean.

EIS is famed worldwide for the unprecedented feat of designing, deploying and maintaining a network of glacier-watching cameras that withstand some of the harshest conditions on earth. Dozens of cameras click away every half hour of daylight year-round. Each camera annually records some 8,500 frames. When assembled into time-lapse sequences, these images provide a jaw-dropping look at how changing climate effects even immense, seemingly static landforms like glaciers. When you see these photographs you’ll realize there’s no such thing as “glacial pace.”

Ice matters: it is on glaciers and ice sheets that we can see and hear and touch and feel climate change in action. This book preserves a monumental legacy of how the cryosphere – the landscape of ice – appears today. See it now, because what’s shown in this book will never be seen again in the history of civilization.