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 images from NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge aerial survey show the opening waters of Arctic Sea region. Scientists directly attribute the record high pace of ice melt this year to climate change, which is no laughing matter.

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.

From Melt by Simon Harsent

Harsent on his work:

[Melt] begins with images of the massive icebergs as they enter Greenland’s Disco Bay from the Ilulissat Icefjord; it ends with the icebergs off the East Coast of Newfoundland, by which time they have travelled hundreds of miles, and have been so battered and broken down that they are little more than ghosts of what they once were. Seeing them first overpowering in grandeur and then, later, about to be absorbed back into the flux from which they came, is both beautiful and humbling: a metamorphosis that endows them with a life-span, each with it’s own personality, each with it’s own story…It is impossible, however, to look at these images and not think of the environmental issues we face right now.

Beautifully heartbreaking: Industrial Scars by J. Henry Fair. This project documents the damage caused by industrial pollution, but it also captures how toxic waste can produce unnaturally vivid colors and abstract patterns.

Exposure by Antony Gormley

Gormley explains his project:

My concept of how sculpture works in the landscape is that it is a still point in a moving world. The whole idea of EXPOSURE is that this work, made at a particular time, rooted to ground, reacts over time to the changing environment. One of the known environmental changes that is happening is the rising of the sea level through global warming. It is critical to me that at the time of its making this work reacts with the viewer, the walking viewer, on the top of the polder and that the surface that the viewer stands on is the surface that the work stands on. The work cannot have a plinth. Over time, should the rising of the sea level mean that there has to be a rising of the dike, this means that there should be a progressive burying of the work.

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.’