Scientists predict a sea level rise of 3 to 6 feet or more by the end of this century, a shift that is projected to displace tens of millions of people and devastate coastal cities. Two major factors of that rise are the melting mountain glaciers in the Arctic Ocean, and Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheet.
Most striking was her ability to even travel through the Arctic Ocean so easily. Her path to the North Pole, for example, had for centuries and centuries been impassable. She writes:
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For thousands of years, the sea ice during the Arctic winters through the month of June was always too thick for surface vessels to access the North Pole. But now, because of climate change, our vessel was the third earliest to ever reach the Pole, and the only vessel to arrive during summer solstice. With a balmy temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the ice at the North Pole was too thin to disembark.
In Ilulissat, Greenland, where in 2007, she had photographed the icebergs, glaciers, and an ice sheet so massive she had to fly over it to photograph it, was drastically different when she returned. “The majestic Eqi glacier, which I had photographed in 2007, had retreated so much that it was now almost entirely on bedrock,” she writes. On the ice sheet, “snow and silt that were studded with hundreds of meltwater ponds, some so large that they could be considered lakes.”
