As climate clock runs out, aviator races to photograph glaciers

By NAT CASTAÑEDA

Published: Dec. 20, 2022

VOSS, Norway (AP) — Chunks of ice float in milky blue waters. Clouds drift and hide imposing mountaintops. The closer you descend to the surface, the more the water roars — and the louder the “CRACK” of ice, as pieces fall from the arm of Europe's largest glacier.

The landscape is vast, elemental, seemingly far beyond human scale. The whole world, it seems, lies sprawled out before you. Against this outsized backdrop, the plane carrying the man who chases glaciers seems almost like a toy.  

“No one’s there,” the man marvels. “The air is virtually empty.”  

This is Garrett Fisher’s playground — and, you quickly realize, his life’s work.

He is traveling the world, watching it from far above, sitting in the seat of his tiny blue-white “Super Cub” aircraft. It’s here that he combines his two longtime passions – photography and flight – in a quest to document every remaining glacier on the face of the Earth.  

On one level, the 41-year-old Fisher does it for a simple reason: “Because I love them.”

But he does it, too, because of weightier things. Because the climate clock is ticking, and the planet’s glaciers are melting. Because Fisher is convinced documenting, archiving, remembering all of this serves a purpose.

Because, in the end, nothing lasts forever – not even ancient glaciers.  

Glaciers aren’t static. In a world that’s getting warmer, they’re getting smaller.

“In 100 or 200 years, most of them will be gone or severely curtailed,” Fisher says. “It is the front line of climate change … the first indication that we’re losing something.”  

According to data from the European Environmental Agency, the Alps, for example, have lost about half their volume since 1900, with the most evident acceleration of melting happening since the 1980s. And the glacier retreat is expected to continue in the future.  

Estimates from the EEA say that by 2100, the volume of European glaciers will continue to decline by between 22% and 84% – and that’s under a moderate scenario. More aggressive modeling suggests up to 89% could be lost.

Sometime in the late 1990s, a friend told Fisher that the world’s glaciers were disappearing. It has haunted him ever since, so much so that it added the third piece of the triangle: the urgency to beat the clock.

He saw them disappearing, and he wanted to make sure these pieces of the world – pieces he saw as indescribably beautiful – were preserved, if only in pixels.

“When I’m high up, I see these forbidden views,” he says. “They’re views you can’t have on the ground, that don’t really exist for anyone else.”

He aims his efforts squarely at posterity. Any documentation he makes of the glaciers before their demise, he believes, could be invaluable to future generations. So, he has launched a glacier initiative and not-for-profit to support and showcase his work, and he plans to open his archive to the public for research – some now, the rest when he is gone.

Fisher is hardly the first to feel the archival instinct when it comes to glaciers. Since the invention of photography in the early decades of the 19th century, glaciers have been documented with fascination by everyone from passing travelers to scientists.  

Norwegian photographer Knud Knudsen, one of his nation’s founding art photographers, delved into the landscape with an obsession similar to Fisher's. He traveled around Norway’s west coast, photographing nature: fjords, mountains, waterfalls … and glaciers.  

But in an era where everything related to photography was heavy, unwieldy, and slow, Knudsen was earthbound, traveling on wagons and boats. On one trip, he brought about 175 pounds in gear – including glass negatives. Unlike Fisher, he could not soar – and could not capture the feeling of looking down upon the vast and magnificent natural formations that he was chronicling in his homeland.  

For Fisher, Norway is only the latest glacier frontier.

He spent years documenting them in other places, including the American West, before shifting his focus to the Alps and Europe. He has photographed thousands of glaciers and is hungry for more.  

Never, though, even amid the silence and beauty of his flights, does Fisher lose the sense of documenting the “decisive moment” – the inflection points of a glacier that is still here but in the process of disappearing.  

He knows, with every flight, that he is documenting a slow-moving tragedy as it unfolds.  

The aircraft’s huge glass windows serve up incredible views. When he’s aloft, the houses start to feel like Monopoly pieces. Anxiety dispels into moments of profound peace. It’s as if the altitude – the distance from the world we know – makes all that’s happening on the planet below seem a little more manageable. And yet he knows: One false move would end all this.  

“The weather’s bad, extremely cold, the winds are very strong and the flying’s extremely technically challenging,” Fisher says. “And to photograph glaciers, we’re getting very close to all of this action. So, it requires a lot of skill, time and determination.”  

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Fisher moves around a lot: The United States, Spain, Norway. He rarely stops.

His wife, Anne, his friend since childhood, drags him to bed most nights; left to his own devices, he says, he would hardly sleep. This is what happens to people so bent on something that everything else starts to fall away.  

Until now, Fisher has paid for his passion with his own money, but it’s not cheap; he is running out of funding and looking for backers.

Associated Press journalists Nat Castañeda and Bram Janssen reported from Voss, Norway.