Art meets science in photographer James Balog's Extreme Ice Survey

Art meets science

 

 

Art meets science in photographer James Balog's Extreme Ice Survey. The project, begun in December 2006, will attempt to capture global warming in the act using 26 solar-powered cameras taking time-lapse photographs of glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Alps, and the Rocky Mountains. Photographer James Balog hopes that by presenting clear images of rapid glacial retreat, the Extreme Ice Survey will help change public perception of global climate change as an abstract concept and show its real-time effects.

Here, a large, glistening iceberg calved from the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland drifts through Disko Bay on its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Decaying ice and icebergs crowd Jökulsárlón, a glacial lagoon in southeast Iceland. The 2.5-by-3-mile (4-by-5-kilometer) lagoon began to form in the 1930s as glaciers from the Vatnajokull icecap started to retreat.

These massive icebergs were calved from Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier, a massive frozen river that sends 11 cubic miles (45 cubic kilometers) of ice into the ocean each year, more than any other glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. "Jakobshavn is the biggest of the big," says photographer James Balog, founder of the Extreme Ice Survey.

This doughy-looking iceberg in western Greenland's Disko Bay was once part of the enormous Jakobshavn ice stream, a river of ice four miles (six kilometers) wide and several thousand feet thick.

The Extreme Ice Survey is focusing heavily on Jakobshavn, which in the past decade has retreated at about 120 feet (37 meters) per day, twice its normal rate.

Icebergs, including one with a sapphire pool of meltwater, clutter Greenland's Jakobshavn Fjord near the village of Ilulissat. The glacier that produced this flotilla has receded some four miles (six kilometers) since the year 2000.

Bare rock and meltwater pools mark the edge of the shrinking Harrison Glacier in Montana's Glacier National Park. Of the 150 glaciers found in the park a century ago, only 27 remain. And scientists predict that by 2030, those will all be gone.

A crystalline iceberg drifts in Columbia Bay near Valdez, Alaska. The source of this iceberg, the Columbia Glacier, has lost more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) of ice since 1984.

The town of El Alto, Bolivia, sprawls beneath snow-draped Huayna Potosi. Glaciers on the 20,000-foot (6,000-meter) mountain feed streams that supply El Alto and the Bolivian capital La Paz with water for irrigation, drinking, and hydroelectric power. As glaciers there continue to shrink, future water supplies will be imperiled. Some studies say the Andes' smaller, lower-altitude glaciers will be gone within a few decades.

Glaciers coat the valley north of Mont Blanc near Chamonix, France. At a length of 8 miles (12 kilometers), Mer de Glace, or Sea of Ice, is one of the largest glaciers in the Alps.

Estimates indicate the Alps have lost about half their glacial ice in the past century. And if climate change trends continue, they could lose 50 to 80 percent of their remaining glaciers by 2100.

Massive Columbia Glacier, photographed here in June 2006, wends its way through western Alaska's Chugach Mountains. The bald streak at the bottom of the mountains, called the trimline, shows this glacier has lost 1,300 feet (400 meters) of thickness since its maximum in 1984. It has also retreated 10.5 miles (17 kilometers) since that time.

(NGC)