Glacier & Climate Change Photography

The North (Yukon, Alaska, Iceland)

The North Gallery takes you to delicate areas where the glaciers are melting and the climate is rapidly warming. You’ll leaarn what drives glaciers to advance and retreat. Eric Hatch uses his fine art photography to bring climate change to life. You’ll visit places few people have seen or hiked. In some places, the glaciers are hanging on, but in others glacial retreat is obvious. You’ll see images from Canada’s Columbia Icefields Parkway, the remote Tombstone Territorial Park high in the Yukon, and you’ll fly low over immense glaciers among the volcanoes of Alaska’s Kachemak Peninsula. You’ll visit non-touristy parts of Iceland as well.

Photography by Eric Hatch is more than a record of landscapes and wildlife. His photography opens a deep visual conversation about global warming. Eric’s images make clear the urgency of dealing with climate change and the horrific price we pay by ignoring it. Text and images explain what is happening, why it is happening, and what we lose by doing nothing.

Eric Hatch presents exhibition-quality images that present both the causes and effects of climate change. Viewers learn how glaciers form and grow, and why they melt. These images show global warming as a clear and accessible reality. Melting glaciers captured in stunning detail not only present a visual document but also share an emotional story. It’s been 20,000 years since the Yukon’s glaciers melted. Next door in Alaska, increased warming presents us with a catastrophic challenge. All of this is made clear through Eric Hatch’s evocative photos and informative text. In clear, readable prose, Eric explains how glaciers form and how and why they retreat.

Visions of the North

Journey with Eric Hatch through the majestic Northern spaces of the Yukon, Alaska and Iceland.

I've spent years photographing the Arctic and sub-Arctic: Alaska, Iceland, New Zealand, places where glaciers are retreating faster than most people realize. This gallery is my attempt to show what's happening up there through fine art photography that doesn't look away from the reality of climate change.

The work is straightforward. Glaciers are melting. Ecosystems are shifting. I'm documenting it. But I'm also trying to create images that do more than just record facts. They communicate something about beauty and loss at the same time, making people feel the urgency without hitting them over the head with it.

The Alaska and Iceland glacier photographs function as both art and evidence. They're meant for exhibition spaces where people come to think and look closely. Museums, galleries, places where photography can start conversations about what we're doing to the planet.

I think of this as part of a larger movement sometimes called Vanishing Horizons: photographers working to preserve landscapes that are disappearing. My approach is to let the images speak without too much editorializing. The glaciers tell their own story if you give them space to do it.

This work has been shown in Art exhibitions about climate change and glacial retreat. I make it available for institutions that want to use visual art to educate people about environmental change. The goal is simple: foster understanding, create engagement, and maybe shift how people think about their relationship to the planet.

These Images are not comfortable work to look at, and they are not supposed to be.

Roadside Falls on Icefields Highway, Cabadian Rockies

Glacial Tunneling near McCarthhy AK

Boulders in Iceland

Fireweed in glacial valley, Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory

The dentist’s challenge — just looks like a broken crown, really a volcanic core in the Yukon

Toad River, British Columbia

Dalton Highway (the Ice Road) in Summer — Near Gold Camp, AK

Fireweed (foreground) is the first plant to arrive after a forest fire (shown in background) Campbell Highway, British Columbia

Matanuska Glacier front face in 2010 — now completely melted

Matanuska Glacier stretches back 30+ miles from this viewpoint, but the front face has melted back about 1.5 miles since 2010

Woods bison snoozing by the Alcan Highway, British Colombia

Dalton Highway through Atigun Pass. About 250 miles from the Bering Sea. Once you’re through here, it’s boring tundra all the way to the Arctic Ocean!

Alaka pipeline north of Cold Foot, Alaska. Mountains are the Brooks Range. Cold Foot was where some prospectors gave up and turned back.

Gold Dredge #4, the largest extant dredge in the Yukon, near Dawson City. This is a museum, not currently functional. These things actually floated down the creeks, dredging millions of dollars of gold out of the stream beds and making a major mess where they passed.

Dawson City Ferry on the Yukon River, arriving in Dawson City.

Mt Denali, AK. The mountain is usually wreathed in clouds, but I got lucky my second day in Denali National Park and took advantage of the moments I had.

Glacier Blue

Alaska Aerial

Shot in late August. Snow remains in spots but the glacier that was here is gone.

Glacier Blue 2

Grewink Glacier Terminus

Mountainn Ridge near McCarthy, AK

Iceland's Basalt Buttress

The terminal point on this glacier is getting further and further up the mountain. Most of Alaska’s glaciers are both thinning and receding.

Baby woods bison snoozes beeside the Alcan highway, Canada’s Route 1

Reindeer Running

Kviarjökull Glacier - This expanding melt lagoon shows how fast this glacier is melting. In the next few years it will break through and flood the Ring Road, which you can just make out in the far right background.

This formation—mountain peaks forming a circle or semi-circle—is called a “cirque,” which is a French term derived from Latin for “circle.” This particular glacier is visible only from the air; it was photographed during a short flight from Copper Center to McCarthy, Alaska, just before sunset. You can plainly see that this glacier, which at one time extended well up the sides of the cirque, is diminishing. You can see the terminal moraine, lower left, and how rapidly the glacier is retreating from it (leaving a new moraine as it withdraws).

Glaciers In Retreat

The Athabasca Glacier covers 2.3 square miles and is measured to be between 300 and 980 feet thick. Yet as you can plainly see from the photo, it used to be a whole lot bigger, extending the width of the valley it has carved out. The glacier is one of the five “toes” of the Columbia Ice Fields. I visited this glacier twice, in 2010 and 2017, and a comparison shows that the glacier has clearly lost thickness and that it had retreated some 400 yards from when this picture was taken. Currently it is both retreating and thinning.