Sebastião Salgado's 'Glaciers' Book Captures Vanishing Ice with Climate Science

Sebastião Salgado's new photography book 'Glaciers' presents 65 duotone images of remote ice formations from Patagonia to Antarctica. The Brazilian photographer, known for his black-and-white documentary work on the Amazon and Serra Pelada gold mine, traveled to locations including the Himalayas, Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and the South Sandwich Islands. Climate scientist Elisa Palazzi contributes an essay describing glaciers as 'sentinels of climate change' that regulate Earth's temperature and supply water to two billion people. The collection documents dramatic ice fields, crevasses, and penguin gatherings, with many photographs taken in the early 2000s and 2010s. Salgado's images evoke the sublime aesthetic theorized by Edmund Burke and exemplified in J.M.W. Turner's paintings, creating compositions that feel both timeless and urgently contemporary. The book highlights how approximately 750 glaciers disappear annually due to human-caused heating, positioning the volume as both artistic documentation and verifiable climate information. Specific images include Grey Glacier in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park (2007), icebergs near Bristol Island (2009), and scenes from Kluane National Park in Canada (2011). Published by Prestel, the work maintains Salgado's signature focus on environmental themes while expanding beyond his human-centric series like 'Workers' (1993) and 'Amazonia' (2021).