All photos are copyrighted: 2008 James Balog/Extreme Ice Survey
In 2006, photojournalist James Balog launched the Extreme Ice Survey, a collaborative effort between image-makers and scientists to document how changing global temperatures are altering our glacial landscapes. Twenty-six time-lapse cameras, installed at fifteen different glaciers, are shooting pictures once an hour for every hour until 2009. The result is an artist’s eye on the alpine environments we rarely see, but are intimately connected to.
Still shots show retreating glaciers throughout the world. This still is of the Solheimajokull in Iceland, which has retreated 1,900 feet since 1996.
Various time points show the Solheimajokull melting.
This shot shows a meltwater stream forming on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Temperature measurements taken at the glacier show an increase of 5.4° in the springtime and 9° in the winter since 1993. As a result, the amount of melting ice has more than doubled, from twenty-two cubic miles in 1996 to fifty-four cubic miles in 2005.
At Glacier National Park, increased temperature and/or decreased snowfall is resulting in a loss of 3 to 8 percent of glacial mass per year. In 1968, GNP had fifty glaciers; by 1998, there were only twenty-seven. Sperry Glacier, below, is a third of the size it was in 1850, when the first precise measurement was taken.
A huge iceberg broken off from the Columbia Glacier in Columbia Bay, Alaska.
Photo source: James Balog
