Glaciers out of balance

The glaciers in the Alps date back to the last ice age.

After growing during the “Little Ice Age,” they reached their last peak around 1850. Today, their ice is melting rapidly. According to measurements and projections by the Austrian Alpine Club, Austria could be largely ice-free within the next 40 to 45 years.

The photography exhibition makes it clear that climate change has long since arrived — including here, in our own region — and that its effects are tangible and profound. In a series of extraordinary paired photographs, Jürgen Merz presents glaciers “before and after”. With meticulous precision, he tracks down the locations where photographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries captured magnificent glacial landscapes.

Decades later, Merz returns to these very same places, encountering landscapes transformed beyond recognition, where the “eternal ice” has long since disappeared. Never before has the scale of glacial retreat across the entire Alpine region been brought so vividly and powerfully into focus as through this comparison of contemporary photographs with their historical counterparts.

Glaciers are sensitive indicators of climate change. More than 99% of the world’s glaciers are melting. Their retreat shows just how rapidly our climate is warming. During warm periods, some glacial retreat is natural, but this process has accelerated dramatically in recent decades. The glaciers in our Alps are also melting rapidly and inexorably. Even at high altitudes, hardly any snow remains on the ground during the summer, so new ice cannot form.

Jürgen Merz is a glacier photographer who approaches these white giants from various perspectives. He creates classic landscape images but also seeks out historic sites where photographers captured the same panoramas over a century ago. Through his comparative images, he aims to show the beauty in the mountains that is disappearing due to climate change and thereby encourage people to reflect on the issue.

Another focus of his work is documenting glacier caves. His search for abstract structures and patterns in the ice - both up close and from a bird’s-eye view using drones - rounds out his portfolio as a photographer.