Editor’s Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.
Swedish photographer Christian Aslund is riding a small boat along the coast of Spitsbergen, an island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Here, deep into the Arctic Circle and midway between Norway and the north pole, he is investigating the health of the glaciers, by comparing them to what they looked like in archival photos.
He takes a picture, trying to place his boat in the exact position occupied by an explorer who took a similar photograph over 100 years ago. But the difference is striking: in the shot from 1918, the boat is heading towards a massive glacier. In the image Aslund took in 2024, he is heading toward what looks like almost bare land.
The comparison is part of a series that Aslund worked on in collaboration with the Norwegian Polar Institute and Greenpeace, to document the retreat of Svalbard’s glaciers over the last century. He visited the area twice — in 2002 and in 2024 — and picked which sites to photograph based on historical images that he found in the institute’s archives.
“In 2002, the widespread knowledge, or acceptance, of climate change wasn’t as broad as it is now,” Aslund says. He published the first set of photos over 20 years ago to create awareness of how much the glaciers were receding. But to his surprise, he received some comments suggesting that the images had been “Photoshopped,” that the glaciers were just expanding and contracting naturally, or that he had taken the pictures in the summer and compared them to archival shots taken in the winter: “But they are not — if you look at at the archive photos, you see that they don’t have any sea ice and not enough snow on the mountains (for it to be winter). And also, in the winter, it’s permanently dark.”
In the summer of 2024, he decided to return, taking pictures at the exact same locations as before. “I had a feeling that the glaciers would have receded even more,” he says, “and that was confirmed. We wanted to show that these glaciers are not going back and forth. They are constantly being pulled back by a warming climate. It’s a major difference.”
The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world since the year 2000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but according to other estimates it has warmed even more — four times faster than the global average since 1979. NASA says summer Arctic sea ice is shrinking by 12.2% per decade due to warming temperatures.
As sea ice melts, it reflects much less heat back into space, and that heat is instead absorbed by the seawater. The melting of glaciers, on the other hand, contributes to a rise in the global sea level, which carries the risk of submerging inhabited areas. “Both are melting in response to warming temperatures,” says Julienne Stroeve, a professor of Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London, who adds that the fresh water that goes into the ocean can also disrupt global ocean currents and have disruptive biological implications for marine life.
“Over the last century we have seen a reduction of the overall amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean, reducing in area and thickness,” Stroeve continues. “Today’s end-of-summer ice cover is 40-50% less than it was 100 years ago and all climate models and observationally based studies suggest the first ice-free summers will occur by 2050.” This, she adds, will create a profound transformation and is something that hasn’t occurred for at least 130,000 years. It will further warm the Arctic, leading to enhanced ice melt from places like Greenland, and thaw permafrost, destabilizing communities all around the Arctic Ocean.
Aslund says that when he released the latest pictures from his 2024 series, he faced some of the same criticism that he received in 2002. “I’m amazed how in 2024 people are still not believing what they see. The whole point of this project is that an image shows more than a thousand words, and that this is real, but still people have problems believing in it,” he says.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years from now, most of what we documented will completely disappear. Unfortunately, if we don’t pull any major handbrake very soon, I think that will be that will be the case.”
