James Balog has spent years setting up cameras from Greenland to Alaska to capture beautiful images that capture the ugly reality of climate change. He has now assembled that work into the book Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers.

About the book:

A never-before-seen look into the forbidding environment of glaciers, this book celebrates a realm of magnificent endangered beauty. Since 2005, renowned nature photographer James Balog has devoted himself to capturing glaciers and documenting their daily changes. These stunning images are a celebration of some of the most extraordinary natural formations on earth, as well as a dramatic and timely demonstration of the stark consequences resulting from global warming—from Alaska to Iceland to the Alps. As glaciologists for the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog and his team are conducting the most extensive glacier study ever, covering France, Switzerland, Iceland, Greenland, the United States (Alaska and Montana), Nepal, Bolivia, and Antarctica. Their high-resolution cameras capture approximately 4,000 images per year. From this collection of nearly half a million photos, Balog presents the most stunning panoramic photography of glaciers ever published.

What Lies Beneath by Gabby O’Connor represents an iceberg brought indoors.

About the work:

At a time when we are becoming increasingly aware of global warming and climate change, and what it means for humans, the melting of ice occupies a sensitive place in the collective consciousness. One of the projected impacts of climate change is a rise in average sea level, due in part to the melting of land-based ice. The gallery installation projects this possibility onto a physical space, where we are imagined underwater.

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China’s Environmental Protection Foundation wanted to draw attention to the increasing environmental impact of the growing Chinese car industry and to encourage people to walk more, and drive less. DDB China Group put together a clever campaign that did exactly that in a fun and engaging way.

About the campaign:

We decided to leverage a busy pedestrian crossing; a place where both pedestrians and drivers meet. We lay a giant canvas of 12.6 meters long by 7 meters wide on the ground, covering the pedestrian crossing with a large leafless tree. Placed on either side of the road beneath the traffic lights, were sponge cushions soaked in green environmentally friendly washable and quick dry paint. As pedestrians walked towards the crossing, they would step onto the green sponge and as they walked, the soles of their feet would make foot imprints onto the tree on the ground. Each green footprint added to the canvas like leaves growing on a bare tree, which made people feel that by walking they could create a greener environment.

The Result:

The Green Pedestrian Crossing was carried out in 7 main streets of Shanghai and later expanded to 132 roads in 15 cities across China. A total number of pedestrians that participated exceeded 3,920,000 people. Key media both online and offline rapidly wrote about the campaign. According to research, the overall awareness of environmental protection had increased 86%. After the campaign, the print was exhibited at the Shanghai Zheng Da Art Museum.

This mural of a tree by Andreco mimics its subject by actually improving the air quality of its surroundings.

About:

Instead of using traditional exterior paints he used a special kind of photochemical paint that reduces the amount of nitrogen monoxide in the air. According to the artist, the artwork represents a big tree, inspired from the Philosophical Tree of the Alchemists of the 14th century. The painting is also designed to resemble a big egg and a crystal, symbols that represents the transition from the organic to inorganic material.

Above Zero by Olaf Otto Becker

About the project:

Following Broken Line, a prizewinning portrait of the coast of Greenland, Olaf Otto Becker turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero. Second only to Antarctica, Greenland has the largest inland ice surfaces in the world. Becker’s spectacular portraits of this region are taken during physically strenuous, sometimes life-threatening treks among glacial crevasses and melting ice floes, with a cumbersome large-format camera. His photo studies draw out the overwhelming beauty of this icy landscape, while documenting their present fragility: dust and rust in the air form black, crusty deposits, which, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets—with what will probably be inevitable, catastrophic results. Becker warns that even in these uninhabited regions, human actions can have fatal consequences.

Images from Camille Seaman’s exhibit The Last Iceberg at the Chroma Projects Art Laboratory in Charlottesville, VA through June 29, 2012.

These whimsical repurposed gas pumps designed by James Dive are part of the Zero Petrol promotion for the release of the all-electric Nissan LEAF EV in Australia.

Other Worlds and Future Memories by Catherine Nelson

About the work:

The Future Memories series comprises of 20 floating worlds, meticulously composed with thousands of assembled details. Visual poetry, nature photography and digital techniques blend together to give shape to these transcendental landscapes. The result is a contemporary pictorial mythology that subtly reminds the viewer of a profound truth: that it is in the flourishing variety of the local that the fate of the world resides.

Images from a great Wired gallery of stunning views of glaciers seen from space. Check it out to see more photos and to find out more about them.

These spectacular photos of icebergs are by David Burdeny.

Burdeny on his project:

During 2007 and into the spring of 2008, I made several long journeys to the upper and lower extremes of our planet to photograph the shorelines, monolithic ice forms and landscapes of Greenland, Icelandic and Antarctica. Most of these places are arduous to reach, beyond the borders of domestic transportation routes, accessible only by small aircraft or boat. All are endangered to some extent – threatened by tourism, climate change, industry and the hunt for oil.

This new series, Icebergs begins to explore what are currently the most geopolitical and geographically sensitive shorelines on earth.

Formally different than my previous work, but motivated by similar principals, these images attempt to encapsulate both the otherworldliness and the vital reality of the northern seas and oceans. I was drawn to the fragility and grace of the frozen landscape. For me, the work is both a celebration of nature’s survival and an elegy.

Artist Isaac Cordal’s dark sense of humor is just one of the tools he uses to point out the futility of a popular strategy for climate change: to just do nothing.  

Mother by Vrusha Patel

About the project:

We have many things to be low about this year but one thing can never change we all have a home and the majority of us will save it or do whatever is possible to protect her. This project is a tribute to Earth - Our home.

The Telegraph has put together a wonderful gallery of beautiful blue icebergs and glacier lakes in Iceland. 

There’s very little that’s natural about these rock formations from photographer Tito Mouraz’s series Open Space Office. He spent 2 years documenting the rock quarries near his home in Portugal and the result is both jarring and strangely beautiful.

Mouraz on his work:

I find it difficult to transmit on film the personal experience and all that one feels and observes at these immense and torn sites, where silence is felt in an unnatural and intimidating way. It is a well know fact that an image cannot replace reality. That is why I chose to include parts of a hidden horizon or an incomplete landscape, in this way suggesting a different perspective, since the proximity to these sites which grow in the opposite direction to what is normal, are usually unobserved by the spectator almost giving them the chance to rebuild them.

Selections from Traffic Jams/Future of Landscape Painting by Terry Berlier

About the project:

These aerial views of dystopias or never-ending traffic jams hint at the future of landscape painting.