MELTING ART TIC

These pictures were taken during my third trip to Iceland in September 2018. During the first two trips, as many photographers, I shot the beauty of Icelandic landscapes, fascinated by the strength of the ocean, the fury of the waves, the striking colors. Local people I befriended shared their concerns mostly about glaciers retreating at a speed that’s noticeable even for the youngest of them. As I drove around the Golden Coast road, I was astonished by the length of bridges over rivers and the ongoing works to protect their base. Trucks built dams to channel water to the ocean to avoid damage to infrastructure. I was face to face with the impacts of climate change. Iceland’s glaciers cover about 10% of the country’s surface. A report published in 2015 by a team of geologists from the University of Arizona found that the earth’s crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island’s great ice caps. Iceland loses 11 billion tons of ice per year due to accelerated climate change. I wondered where the melt waters went and decided on my third trip to go airborne and get a bird’s eye perspective to appreciate the scale. Seeing it from above was breathtaking. Melt water mixed with sediments created fascinating and abstract patterns only mother nature could create. These images are a hymn to beauty of nature, even in the face of destruction. They are an homage to all scientists and environmentalists working for positive change around the world. I hope this body of work will help viewers meditate on the urgent issue of climate change and our own actions. We are all in away responsible for the ice loss and we should ask: where will it go?