Extreme Ice Studies: Ice Studies, 2006 - 2022

In 2005, James Balog received a photography assignment in Iceland for The New Yorker magazine. This assignment led to a creative breakthrough on how photographic evidence could reveal climate change by capturing receding glaciers. This in turn led to a 2006 National Geographic assignment, “Big Melt” (published as a cover story in June 2007). Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) that year, a wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers. In addition to the time-lapse photography, the EIS also produced 12,000+ single-frame images of glacial landscapes, featured in this series. Locations include the U.S. (Alaska and Montana), Canada (British Columbia), Greenland, Iceland, France, Switzerland, and Bolivia.