Ice ─ Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers

This astonishing book is a production of James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey, which sets up automatic cameras around the world to photograph arctic features daily over a period of years. The Survey works to document the movement of glaciers, the speed of winter ice-over and spring break-up in arctic climates, and the seasonal round, as a baseline for scientific study. It has also discovered the world's glaciers, snowcaps, and arctic ice are rapidly disappearing. Photographs from the same location on the same day a few years apart show large natural features have simply evaporated. However, the book's focus is not on these findings but the breathtaking beauty of Survey photographs, selected from hundreds of thousands in the database by the author. This is an art book; the text is confined to a brief introduction about the Survey, and a short and cogent afterward by Terry Tempest Williams. The rest is photographs in full color. On single-page or double-page spreads, they strike the eye with such power, and appeal with such subtlety, that viewers could scarcely imagine such epic materials and landscapes could disappear. Balog may hope readers will choose to protect something so extraordinary, or that photographs vivid and skillful enough, presented in a high enough quality format, can replace the originals. This book comes as close as anything can. A short index in the back offers small portraits of the varied personnel of the Survey: individuals, teams, and families at work and play on the ice. General readers, artists, nature or geology fans, people who live or play in winter landscapes, and photographers, regardless of scientific or political bent, will all value this book. Oversize: 13x12". Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

James Balog’s photographs have been exhibited at more than one hundred museums and galleries worldwide, and his work has been featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, among many other magazines. Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is a well-known author of environmental literature and the recipient of dozens of awards for her nonfiction.