By NAT CASTAÑEDA
VOSS, Norway (AP) — Chunks of ice float in the milky blue waters. Clouds drift in and hide towering peaks. The further you descend to the surface, the louder the water roars – and the louder the “CRACK” of the ice, as chunks fall from the arm of Europe’s largest glacier.
The landscape is vast, elemental, seemingly far beyond human scale. The whole world, it seems, is spread out before you. In this oversized setting, the plane carrying the man in pursuit of the glaciers almost looks like a toy.
“There is no one”, marvels the man. “The air is practically empty.”
This is Garrett Fisher’s playground – and, you soon realize, his life’s work.
He travels the world, looks at it from very high, sitting in the seat of his small blue-white “Super Cub” plane. It is here that he combines his two lifelong passions – photography and flying – in a quest to document every remaining glacier on the Earth’s surface.
On one level, the 41-year-old Fisher does it for one simple reason: “Because I love them.”
But he also does it because of heavier things. Because the climate clock is ticking and the planet’s glaciers are melting. Because Fisher is convinced that documenting, archiving, remembering all this serves a purpose.
Because in the end, nothing lasts forever, not even ancient glaciers.
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Glaciers are not static. In a warming world, they are getting smaller.
“In 100 or 200 years most of them will be gone or severely reduced,” says Fisher. “This is the front line of climate change…the first indication that we are losing something.”
According to the data from the European Environment Agency, the Alps, for example, have lost about half their volume since 1900, with the most obvious acceleration of melting occurring since the 1980s. And the retreat of the glacier is expected to continue in the future.
EEA estimates indicate that by 2100, the volume of European glaciers will continue to shrink by 22% to 84% – and this under a moderate scenario. More aggressive modeling suggests that up to 89% could be lost.
“We have a record of sightings of small glaciers in populated areas, particularly in the Alps, Norway and New Zealand,” says Roderik van de Wal, a glacier expert at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Low. This record, he says, shows that the glaciers are retreating even further. It is a consequence of climate change.
The slow disappearance of glaciers, of course, is a problem that transcends aesthetics or even the glaciers themselves. A rise in sea level of about 15 centimeters around the globe over the past century is largely due to the melting of glaciers.
Which defines this countdown. And who made Garrett Fisher move.
For Fisher, it started – like so many things for so many people – in childhood.
He grew up in a quiet rural community in upstate New York, the child of local business owners and the grandson of a scrappy pilot who introduced him to aviation at an early age. He lived near a private airport.
Fisher was just a toddler when his grandfather Gordon put him in the back of his plane. The boy wasn’t happy about it, but dismay quickly turned to delight. At the age of 4, he had become addicted to flying.
Fisher remembers endless hours spent staring out his bedroom window, waiting for the barn door of his grandfather’s aircraft hangar to open. The older man would tell him, “Whatever you decide, you can do it.
Then, young, he launched into photography. Two of the three parts of his obsession were in place.
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In the late 1990s, a friend told Fisher that the world’s glaciers were disappearing. She has haunted him ever since, so much so that she added the third piece of the triangle: the urgency of beating the clock.
He saw them disappear, and he wanted to make sure that those pieces of the world – pieces he considered indescribably beautiful – were preserved, if only in pixels.
“When I’m up there, I see these forbidden views,” he says. “These are views that you can’t have on the pitch, that don’t really exist for anyone else.”
He aims his efforts squarely at posterity. Any documentation he does of glaciers before they disappeared, he thinks, could be invaluable for future generations. So he started a glacier initiativea non-profit organization to support and present his work, and he plans to open his archives to the public for research – some now, the rest when he is gone.
Fisher isn’t the first to feel the archival instinct when it comes to glaciers. Ever 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 country’s founding fine art photographers, dove into landscape with a similar obsession to Fisher. He traveled the west coast of Norway, photographing nature: fjords, mountains, waterfalls… and glaciers.
But at a time when everything about photography was cumbersome, unwieldy, and slow, Knudsen was terrestrial, traveling on wagons and boats. On one trip he brought about 175 pounds of equipment – including glass negatives. Unlike Fisher, he couldn’t soar – and couldn’t capture the feeling of looking down on the vast and beautiful natural formations he chronicled in his homeland.
For Fisher, Norway is just the last glacial frontier. He spent years documenting them in other places, including the American West, before focusing on the Alps and Europe. He has photographed thousands of glaciers and always wants more.
Never, however, even amidst the silence and beauty of his flights, does Fisher lose his sense of documenting the “decisive moment” – the inflection points of a glacier that is still there but disappearing.
He knows, with each flight, that he is documenting a slowly unfolding tragedy.
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The Piper Super Cub is a small two-seater. Fisher sneaks out. He is about to soar into crystal and cotton skies in hopes of photographing Nigardsbreen.
“There’s about a 30% chance we’ll be lucky enough to see the glacier,” he says. “There’s a bunch of clouds sitting right there.”
The Piper feels – and rumbles – like an old car. It smells of oil and diesel and everything is manual. Fisher brings his iPad for navigation, but his aviation software doesn’t have GPS glacier information. So he flies using a mix of instinct, observation and Google Maps.
The plane’s huge glass windows offer incredible views. When it’s in the air, the houses start to look like Monopoly pieces. Anxiety dissipates in moments of deep peace. It’s as if the altitude – the distance from the world we know – makes everything on the planet below a little more manageable. And yet he knows: one wrong move would put an end to it all.
“The weather is bad, extremely cold, the winds are very strong and the flight is technically extremely difficult,” says Fisher. And to photograph the glaciers, we get closer to all this action. So it takes a lot of skill, time and determination.
Many people are afraid to fly, especially in small planes. When news hits an aircraft, it’s usually a small craft.
He adds: “Many pilots have told me that I am crazy.”
Many glaciers are remote and difficult to reach or document – except by satellite or plane, which makes the tiny Super Cub the perfect vehicle for this photographic journey. It is built to navigate the high winds and hazardous environments required for its work.
Why risk it? Fisher thinks satellite images will never capture glaciers effectively — neither aesthetically nor scientifically. The glow of a glacier at the “magic hour”. The way the shadow falls on the ice, revealing an endless, indefinable blue. The sheer epic presence of these ice goliaths who are in a constant state of unworthiness.
Will the engine stop? He has detailed plans in the event of a crash on a glacier. He calculated that he can survive for about 24 hours if he breaks down and measured the tail of the plane to be sure he can fit in there and stay out of the elements while waiting for l ‘aid. Not for the faint of heart.
Fisher travels a lot: United States, Spain, Norway. He rarely stops. His wife, Anne, his childhood friend, drags him to bed most nights; left to himself, he said, he would hardly sleep. This is what happens to people so determined for something that everything else starts to fall apart.
So far, Fisher has paid for his passion with his own money, but it’s not cheap; it is short of funding and is looking for backers.
He positions the work carefully. It is, in many ways, science. In other respects, it is a public service. But it always comes down to one thing: beauty.
Science has all the data we need. They have tons of datasets, which will be available in the future,” says Fisher. “The problem is, it’s not pretty.”
What he does, he says, is something that not only looks aesthetically pleasing but could encourage people to change their ways.
He adds: “It is not a dataset. It’s a very motivating and emotionally compelling rendition of these glaciers while they’re here. Because those views are not coming back.
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Glaciers are a window to our past. Photography, too, is a window on our past. Garrett Fisher has combined these activities to ensure that many views of this moment are available – and that whatever disappears will be remembered.
Ultimately, much of his work is about memory. But what about the here and now? Can a photograph communicate the profound experience of being in front of something that will soon be lost forever? In many ways, this is what his work tries to understand.
The archive is the thing he poured it all into, devoting countless hours to it. And beyond archival dreams, he dares to hope for change.
If he finds the right light, the right angle, the right time, then maybe people will care more. He pursues the perfect image; one so beautiful that it can get people and policy makers to act. And if it’s not an image, then maybe a whole archive convinces people to come, to look, to approach, to pay attention.
We can live without them. We will live without them,” says Fisher. “However, it hurts us to lose them.”
Everything disappears. But not yet. There’s still time, and Garrett Fisher has a plane and a camera and isn’t turning away.
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Associated Press reporter Bram Janssen reported from Voss.
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