Saga of Ice NATURE
Saga of Ice
The Saga of Ice Images contemplating the struggles of our planet’s ice. This work is a selection of images from my expeditions to the Arctic. Over four years, I traveled a vast area including Iceland, Greenland, and Svalbard. Some of the most remote places on Earth are in the Arctic. Here you also see the struggle of our planet’s ice. It is diminishing at an astounding rate. Ice resembles a living organism, conceived in a snowstorm. Water turns to snow and falls to the ground, collecting into glaciers and transforming into ice. You may think of ice as a solid, as something immovable, as something permanent. But ice continually changes form. It is dynamic and transformative. It travels valleys of rock, continuously altering the landscape and carving a path to make its journey easier. As more snow falls on top of it, ice becomes denser. It separates and breaks when it falls over cliffs, and it recombines into something solid. Rivers of ice flow together forming larger streams. Flowing quickly or slowly, its movement depends upon what lies below. The terminus, or end of a glacier, is where icebergs are born. In a dramatic event, a glacier calves a gigantic block of ice into the ocean. There icebergs are set on a journey. Some are trapped in fjords for many years, grounding themselves then becoming frozen in seasonal sea ice. Some are set free to travel the oceans. Tossing and turning, they become shells of their former selves. As the Arctic changes, the struggle of ice changes, but the cycle continues. The iceberg eventually returns to elemental water, waiting for rebirth in a snowstorm to begin the next journey.