The End of Cathedrals by Jorge Fuembuena
About the project:
In this project he examines the most active and productive glacier in the northern hemisphere, Sermeq Kujalleq in Greenland. He systematically registers data such as height, latitude, length and the time of the day to build a metaphor about control and chaos. Time is the essence of his images, which are built upon and depend on it.
Parque Nacional Los Glaciares by Piero… on Flickr
Highlights from Environmental Graffiti’s slideshow: The Staggering Beauty of Iceland’s Glacier Lagoon.
Amazing images of Antarctica by Tim Laman
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.
These incredible photos of glaciers in Alaska are by Noppawat “Tom” Charoensinphon.
These gorgeous photos of Antarctica were originally part of a 2006 Australian Parliament House Exhibition, but I like how they look a little like travel posters for one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.
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.
This talk by James Balog from the 2009 TEDGlobal conference is fantastic for two reasons. First, TED is an excellent venue for Balog to discuss his mammoth project Extreme Ice Survey, which is an effort to capture the extreme ice loss that is occurring due to climate change with time-lapse photography. And second, he does a wonderful job explaining how the visual arts can play a valuable role in communicating complex ideas to the general public.
From the opening of his talk:
Most of the time, art and science stare at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. There is great confusion when the two look at each other. Art, of course, looks at the world through the psyche, the emotions — even the unconscious at times — and of course the aesthetic. Science tends to look at the world through the rational, the quantitative — things that can be measured and described — but it gives art a terrific context for [knowledge and] understanding.
In the Extreme Ice Survey, we’re dedicated to bringing those two parts of human understanding together,merging art and science to the end of helping us understand nature and humanity’s relationship with nature better. Specifically, as a person who’s been a professional nature photographer my whole adult life, I am firmly of the belief that photography, video and film have tremendous power to help us understand, and shape the way we think about nature and about ourselves in relationship to nature.
If you’re interested in the project but don’t have the time to watch the 20 minute TED video, here’s the 44 second promo video for Extreme Ice Melt:
This impressively large recreation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in the Arctic Sea was made by artist John Quigley in collaboration with Greenpeace. It will slowly melt away over the coming years until barely anything is left.
Greenpeace said they designed the art to represent how ‘climate change is eating into the body of our civilisation’.
The environmental campaigners claim that this September could mark the lowest sea ice levels on record. They say that world leaders need to take urgent action on climate change.‘We came here and created The Melting Vitruvian Man , recreating da Vinci’s famous sketch of the human body,’ Mr Quigley said.‘When Davinci did this sketch it was the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the dawn of this innovative age that continues to this day, but our use of fossil fuels is threatening that.’
This region of the Antarctic Peninsula has undergone one of the highest temperature increases in the world over the past 50 years. The mean annual temperature has risen by more than 3°C and has been responsible for a significant thinning of ice caps, recession of glaciers and break-up of ice shelves.
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