New book vividly captures climate change in action

Between record ice melt and the new reality of offshore drilling in the Arctic, these are heady days for the Great White North. With his new book, Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers, National Geographic photographer James Balog captures in gleaming color just what's at stake as global warming transforms the Arctic.

The 288-page coffee table book, featuring 200 color photographs shot in extreme northern climes around the world, opens with wise words from environmental writer Terry Tempest William. Published by the always on-point Rizzoli, the book's release coincides with that of "Chasing Ice", a new documentary that won the Excellence in Cinematography award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. As cinematographer, Jeff Orlowski documented Balog's long-term photographic survey of the loss of Arctic ice. 

"The deeper I got into it, the more I realized that our aesthetics were the pathway to communicate the science effectively, the knowledge base that the scientists had," Balog said. "The visual information can only be part of the puzzle but that’s the piece of the puzzle that I know how to put in the board."

(via Grist)