In 2009, a hunter shot a polar bear and carried it by dogsled about 750 meters to the town of Ittoqqortoormiit on the eastern coast of Greenland. Typically, the town’s hunters encounter polar bears on distant sea ice a couple of hours or even days from town. They skin their catches and leave behind the heavy bones. But as climate change melts more sea ice—the bear’s preferred hunting grounds—polar bear encounters closer to human settlements are becoming more common. When this hunter arrived with an entire bear in tow, the Danish photographer Carsten Egevang was there to capture the awe-struck reactions.

In one photograph, the hand of a boy, about 12 years old, rests on the giant palm of the polar bear’s paw (Fig. 1). Roughly a dozen townspeople sized their palms up against the bear’s, Egevang recalls. “It acted very much like a magnet to them,” he says. The image suggests the people’s deep connection to the polar bear. It also highlights their practice of hunting a species threatened by climate change, a juxtaposition that Egevang says is what his photography is all about.

Fig. 1. When a hunter brought his polar bear kill back to a small Greenland town, photographer Carsten Egevang watched as townspeople sized up their palms against the bear’s. He captured one such encounter in “Paw & Hand.” Image courtesy of Carsten Egevang.

Egevang is one of a growing number of photographers drawn to the Arctic, a region on the front lines of climate change. The area has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average. Scientists believe this trend, known as Arctic amplification, is caused in part by the loss of sea ice. As this reflective surface melts, it leaves behind darker water that absorbs more heat (1). Photographers are documenting the effects of this warming on landscapes, wildlife, and people (Movie S1). Many share the same end goal: to convince audiences unmoved by scientific data that climate change is happening now.

Capturing Change Egevang began his Arctic career as a scientist. For his doctoral research at the University of Copenhagen, he attached geolocators to Arctic terns and tracked them from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean and back. He discovered that these birds can cover more than 80,000 kilometers each year, a distance nearly twice as long as previously estimated and the longest known migration of any animal (2). In the course of research at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Egevang took photographs as well as data points on seabird population numbers. Gradually, his photography habit became a profession, although he still spends about 20% of his time studying seabirds. Egevang’s transition to artist was prompted largely by his desire to share observations. He felt frustrated that his research didn’t reach much beyond the scientific community. “With photography, I really feel that I get the attention of a very large crowd,” he says. Climate projections may not move people, he says. “But when you show the local hunters, how they can’t do what they usually do because there is no sea ice and it is happening so rapidly, it is much easier to understand.” Egevang focuses on the people of Greenland, whose livelihoods are threatened as animals react to a warming landscape by changing their patterns of movement. In many cases, hunters can’t reach hunting grounds. “With global climate change, the sea ice doesn’t get thick enough to ride sleds over,” he says. The photographer’s images endeavor to bring daily life of Greenlandic towns to the attention of a global audience. His work shows, for example, a hunter, binoculars in hand, scanning the terrain for polar bear; an elderly woman harvesting a chick from a colony of auk; a child biking down a street as another runs behind, plowed snow reaching high over their heads.

The Arctic’s Pull Practicing photography in an Arctic climate comes with unique challenges. First, there’s the cold, which Egevang considers a mental hurdle. “You can decide that you’re cold and then for sure you will be.” Then, there’s the travel. Egevang often treks by dogsled with hunters for 3 to 6 days at a time. “I do not dictate where we go and what we do,” he says. “They will do their hunting as if I wasn’t there.” He’s not the only intrepid photographer forced to catch a ride in hopes of capturing the unfolding drama of climatic changes. For New York City-based photographer Diane Tuft, capturing the melting ice in the Arctic Ocean meant traveling to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. And snapping aerial views of the mountain glaciers of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, meant chartering a helicopter from the Norwegian Polar Institute. She included her work from these and other journeys in a recently published monograph The Arctic Melt: Images of a Disappearing Landscape (3). [These works will also be on display September 1, 2017, through February 20, 2018, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC (www.cpnas.org/exhibitions/archive/arctic-melt-images.html).] To capture the effects of climate change through time-lapse photography, photographer James Balog launched the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) program as part of his Earth Vision Institute, a Colorado-based organization dedicated to integrating art and science in an effort to reveal environmental change. He and his EIS team anchored cameras to cliff faces. To service the cameras, which can be 80 miles from the nearest village, they travel by foot, horseback, dogsled, skis, boat, or helicopter. EIS installed their first cameras in 2007 and now have 43 cameras positioned over 24 glaciers, each snapping images of the changing landscape during every daylight hour (see Extreme Ice Survey at extremeicesurvey.org/about-eis/). From the Solheimajokull Glacier in Iceland to the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, the photos from each camera viewed in time-lapse videos show glaciers’ stunning retreats. Despite the logistical challenges, a growing number of photographers are heading for the Arctic. Kerry Koepping, another Colorado-based photographer, has traveled from the glaciers of Northern Greenland to the Holuhraun Volcano in Iceland to the foothills of Denali, Alaska. With the consequences of climate change on full display, he feels a sense of urgency to tell the landscape’s story. “Most really good photographers are storytellers,” he says. “With that there is an inherent need and a responsibility to communicate what we see with the rest of the world.”

A Visual Message As a research affiliate with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), Koepping is finding ways to not only capture stunning images of change, but inform Arctic research along the way. Scientists at the institute keep Koepping up to date on climate change research. He, in turn, reports back on his own observations from the field, and creates a body of work that often underscores the scientists’ findings. And as the founder and project director of the Arctic Arts Project, Koepping has teamed up with other photographers to do the same (see arcticartsproject.com/index.shtml). These seven photographers, including Egevang, are committed to using their art to help the public understand the science of climate change. In addition to the collaboration with INSTAAR, the group also works with scientists from the University of Copenhagen, Grenoble University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others. Whether focused on atmospheric studies or ice core samples, scientist and photographer collaborators strive to visually represent the subject of study, says Koepping. “There is not always an easy answer to that,” he adds. The Arctic Arts Project is currently working with INSTAAR’s director, paleoclimatologist Jim White, to decide how best to visually document methane, a greenhouse gas, being released from natural sources as the Arctic warms. With White’s input, the team is now capturing images of frozen methane bubbles rising from lake bottoms, as well as polygon hummocks: mounded structures that form in a pattern across the tundra as permafrost thaws and then refreezes. “The [Arctic Arts Project] pictures are just drop dead gorgeous,” says White. “And at the same time they convey a really difficult message, which is that all of this beautiful blue ice is going to become beautiful blue ocean, and when it does, it is going to raise the sea level.” When White gives talks on climate change to the public, he often follows Koepping’s striking photographs of Arctic ice with pictures of flooded Miami streets, a reminder that the city is already experiencing the consequences of rising oceans. Exactly how to convey such a stark message in beautiful frames is a challenge that all Arctic photographers are grappling with. “Greenland is extremely beautiful,” says Egevang. “You can just shoot from the hip and get some really nice images.” To go deeper, to show the fragility of that beauty and the harshness of the landscape, requires careful aesthetic choices. “If I just wanted to show the beauty, I would do color photography,” says Egevang. Instead, he works mostly in black and white. “It’s a very pure form of communicating life in the Arctic because you can’t use bright colors in order to impress the viewer. You sort of force the viewer to concentrate on the image more.” Tuft approaches landscapes as though they are living sculptures, often zooming in to the point of abstraction. In her photograph “Relics, Isfjorden, Norway,” she presents a view from a helicopter of cracked ice in a fjord in the Greenland Sea (Fig. 2). But because she frames the shot without features that provide scale, the viewer could easily mistake the scene for a close-up. “My whole idea is just to bring something beautiful to people so they notice it and then they ask questions,” she says. In “Relics,” she’s inviting viewers to question scale. For other works, they may question color, why a particular feature is blue. “Then I can go from there to attract attention to an issue that is difficult,” she says. Fig. 2. Photographer Diane Tuft often zooms in, to the point of abstraction. Taken from a helicopter, this photo, “Relics, Isfjorden, Norway,” shows cracked ice in a Greenland Sea fjord. Without features to provide scale, viewers may mistake the scene for a close-up. Image courtesy of Diane Tuft.