Father-and-son team document devastating ice loss at Iceland’s glaciers 30 years apart

Landscape photographer Colin Baxter, who captured the Icelandic glaciers in the late Eighties, said it was ‘overwhelming, and extremely alarming, to see the disappearance of all that ice after only 30 years’

New images released by a father-and-son team have revealed the devastating impact that the climate crisis has had on Iceland's glaciers over the past 30 years.

Dr Kieran Baxter, a lecturer in communication design at the University of Dundee, replicated the photos taken by his father, landscape photographer Colin Baxter, while on a family vacation in 1989.

Side-by-side comparisons of the images show how dramatically the outlet glaciers of the Vatnajökull ice cap – Fláajökull, Heinabergsjökull, Hoffellsjokull, Hólarjökull, and Skaftafellsjökull – have receded in the south-east of Iceland.

Dr Baxter said: "I grew up visiting these amazing places and inherited an understanding of the quiet power of these landscapes. It is personally devastating to see them change so drastically in the last few decades in a way that is not immediately obvious from a single visit.

"On surface appearances the extent of the climate crisis often remains largely invisible, but here we can clearly see the gravity of the situation that is affecting the entire globe."

The dramatic decline in ice cover from the Fláajökull outlet glacier over the past 30 years (Colin Baxter/Kieran Baxter, University of Dundee)

Dr Baxter is a leading expert in the visual communication of glacial retreat across Europe. He has also documented the impact that global heating has had on ice loss around Mont Blanc in Switzerland.

Vatnajökull ice cap, the largest glacier Europe, has lost 150-200 km³ of ice and its area has been reduced by more than 400 km² in the past 30 years, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.

The ends of many glaciers, known as termini, have retreated by more than a kilometre in the same period.

Colin Baxter said revisiting his family vacation pictures from Iceland had brought back happy memories.

He said: “I remember being in absolute awe of the stunning natural landscape and overwhelmed by the beauty of the glaciers tumbling down from the icecap up there in the distance.”

Hólarjökull outlet glacier in September 1989, taken by Scottish landscape photographer Colin Baxter (Colin Baxter/Kieran Baxter, University of Dundee)

But he added: “Now in 2020 it is equally overwhelming, and extremely alarming, to see the disappearance of all that ice after only 30 years. We all have to take responsibility for that, myself included. Our activity has indisputably contributed to the colossal volume of the melt which carries on today.” 

Ice is disappearing across the planet at an alarming rate, according to research published last month, which revealed 28 trillion tonnes was lost between 1994 and 2017. 

Hólarjökull outlet glacier in August 2020, taken by Colin Baxter’s son Dr Kieran Baxter, who documents glacier loss across Europe ( Colin Baxter/Kieran Baxter, University of Dundee)

The study, led by Leeds University and published in European Geosciences Union's journal The Cryosphere, found that the rate of melting had accelerated from 0.8 trillion tons per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tonnes by 2017.

The total ice loss over that period is equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 metres thick covering the whole of the UK.

It has contributed as much as 3.5cm to global sea levels during that time, increasing the risk of flooding in coastal communities and threatening to wipe out fragile habitats.

"Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most," said lead author Dr Thomas Slater, a research fellow at Leeds' Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling.

"The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century."