Men's Journal

Martin calls his new book a "love story" about retreating ice. Photo credit: Dan Larson

James Martin’s passion for glaciers has taken him to the ends of the Earth to photograph a vanishing resource.

By Martin Mulkeen

Five years ago, global warming dealt a direct blow to writer and photographer James Martin. “I went back to the Canadian Rockies, to the Columbia Icefield near the Athabasca Glacier,” says Martin. “I stood in the place where I first taught myself to ice-climb 30 years ago. I couldn’t see ice anymore. The cliff was absolutely bare. At that point the debate on global warming turned personal.”

The loss drove the Seattle-based artist to embark on a photographic journey, confronting and capturing the retreat of ice with his camera all over the world. He traveled to central Africa’s Mountains of the Moon, the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, Greenland, Iceland, and both of the polar ice caps over the course of almost three years, amassing a comprehensive and haunting catalog of the state of Earth’s ice. His work, along with essays from Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, geologist Richard Alley, and others, is collected in his new book, out this month, Planet Ice, which Martin describes as a “love story.”

An English major, Martin was first introduced to glaciology through the writings of Clarence King and John Muir, but it was Austin Post and Edward R. LaChapelle’s groundbreaking 1971 photography book Glacier Ice that inspired him.

In contrast to other ice documentarians’ work — such as James Balog’s exhaustive approach, employing time-lapse cameras to shoot on the hour, every hour, for months on end to record the mechanics of ice vanishing — Martin’s photos are abstract studies of shape and light. His images capture vast landscapes, but also glacial surface details, sinuous moraines, fleeting surficial lakes, deep-blue crevasses, névé penitents, and cryoconites — the holes in the ice created by swirling dust.

“The thing that animates me is not the effect of the loss of ice on people in practical terms, but rather this loss of beauty,” Martin says. “I want to show people what we stand to lose if we don’t act in a responsible manner.” Hiking with burros in Peru, riding aboard the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov above the Arctic Circle, dodging Antarctica’s katabatic winds, camping on cryoconites in Greenland, and tiptoeing through mud bogs in an African cloud forest, Martin says he found “a photographer’s dream and an environmentalist’s nightmare.”

Ultimately, Martin believes ice can be a valuable teaching tool. He plans to build a traveling exhibit and is developing online classroom resources for teachers, in addition to writing a children’s book about ice and its animal inhabitants. “When I was growing up, I fell hard for ice, dazzled and awestruck,” he writes in the introduction to Planet Ice. Even as he examines this natural resource under attack, the wonder endures.

—-

Go Before They’re Gone

James Martin talks about three accessible glaciers to see before they disappear.

-

Columbia Icefield, Alberta, Canada

How to get there: Drive 200 miles northwest from Calgary.

What to expect: “The Athabasca Glacier, which is rapidly receding, flows down from the ice field, bracketed by large mountains near the border between Banff and Jasper national parks. There is a hotel by the road and campgrounds nearby.”

-

-

-
Jokulsarlon, Iceland

How to get there: Drive 170 miles east from Reykjavík.
What to expect: “Giant icebergs in a lake with Europe’s largest ice field in the background. The glacier has receded in recent years, doubling the lagoon’s size.”

-

-

-

Ilulissat IceFjord, Greenland

How to get there: Fly to Kangerlussuaq from Reykjavík, and take a prop plane to Ilulissat.
What to expect: “This is the world’s most amazing assemblage of icebergs, the detritus from the dissolution of the world’s most active glacier. The parade of bergs hangs up on an underwater moraine at the terminus of the fjord. At night hundreds of huskies howl, and kids play soccer under the midnight sun.”

-

-

—-

This article originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.

Print this article