Climate change: Ice

Summary

THAW is a collaboration between photography and science which explores the human interaction with nature and the complexity of its impact. I visited the Arctic polar ice cap, working alongside several scientists who study it, and was overwhelmed by the scale of the landscape and the enormity of associated problems. All of which I brought together in THAW.

THAW highlights the rapidly growing number of blue lakes and rivers that form on the Greenland ice cap – one of the most inaccessible areas on earth. Here, in the pristine landscape, stripped to the bare minimum of colours and shapes, the dramatic impact of climate change is more obvious than anywhere else in the world.

The Greenland ice sheet is not just a stark and frigid wilderness perched at the top of the globe; it is a vast frozen reservoir of fresh water that offsets seven metres of coastal flooding around the planet. In the past two decades, that reservoir has shifted from a steady state in balance with its climate, to one in which it is now losing an estimated 380,000,000,000 tonnes of ice annually. The project was two years in the planning, with the assistance of Prof. Alun Hubbard of Aberystwyth University and Prof. Julian Dowdeswell and Dr Poul Christoffersen at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

It is incredibly difficult to make compelling photographs of the Arctic icecap. The compromised beauty of the place has attracted photographers by the score but all too often the results are pretty confections that collapse into cliché. Timo Lieber's photographs skilfully avoid that trap. They are beautiful objects, of course they are, but they also have something important to say about the environmental disaster that is unfolding at an alarming rate in the polar regions. The fact that Timo's narrative is underpinned by a clear understanding of the science involved punches home the importance of what he has to say. It is a story that we ignore at our peril.