india is home to some of the highest mountains in the world. in a warm sauna, we humans can sweat a few pounds of fluid off — and similarly, the sauna we’ve created for earth has india’s great glaciers sweating off a few cubic meters every single minute. these images, created by dillon marsh, combine photography with CGI, to visualize that loss.



all images courtesy of dillon marsh

7.06 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on naradu glacier every minute

dillon marsh captions each of his images with the name of each glacier, and the amount of cubic meters they melt off every minute, half-hour, hour. ‘I’ve compiled data from scientific reports to calculate the rate at which certain glaciers are losing mass. using CGI, I’ve then created accurately scaled ice models and placed them within typical human environments,’ says marsh of his photo series, titled, ‘counting the costs.’



18.64 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on chhota shigri glacier every minute

‘counting the costs,’ isn’t marsh’s first series like this. his three part series, ‘for what it’s worth,’ visualizes the cost of a different human phenomenon — mining. like the balls of melted ice shown on street corners here, marsh has visualized giant spheres of copper, gold and platinum as well. each series shows sacrifice, gain, loss, and reveals that the amount we are losing may be more than what we are getting from certain behaviors. cough. cough. greenhouse gas. people can turn their heads from abstract numbers, but hopefully sweat runs down their necks when they imagine 2 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days worth of melted ice raining down on the market below.



2.55 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on dunagiri glacier every minute



176.6 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on gara glacier every hour



4.78 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on dokraini glacier every minute



92.58 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on neh nar glacier every hour



18.64 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on chhota shigri glacier every minute



62.15 cubic meters – the average volume of ice lost on tipra bank glacier every half hour