‘People do not want to believe it is true’: the photographer capturing the vanishing of glaciers

Christian Aslund was shocked at the difference between what he saw in 2002 and what confronted him this summer

Standing in blinding sunlight on an archipelago above the Arctic Circle, the photographer Christian Aslund looked in shock at a glacier he had last visited in 2002. It had almost completely disappeared.

Two decades ago Greenpeace asked Aslund to use photographs taken in the early 20th century, and photograph the same views in order to document how glaciers in Svalbard were melting due to global heating. The difference in ice density in those pictures, taken almost a century apart, was staggering.