What this award-winning photo says about climate change and the loss of polar ice
The current12:57A crack in the ice and a changing climate
Last summer on the Milne Fiord, photojournalist Dustin Patar captured an image of two people peering into a deep crevice in the ice as they studied the impact of climate change on the Arctic.
“What they’re actually doing in that photo is to see if that crack goes all the way through the water, under the ice,” says Patar, who took the photo as a freelance journalist but now works for CBC North.
“Below the surface, something else was happening that essentially says that this climate, this environment, this ecosystem is very limited in time,” he said. The current Matt Galloway.
The Milne Ice Shelf on northern Ellesmere Island collapsed in 2020. Considered Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf, it was nearly 4,000 years old. Patar traveled to the Milne Fiord last summer to document the work of scientists investigating the effects of the collapse.
After the Milne Ice Shelf on the north coast of Ellesmere Island collapsed in 2020, a lake supporting it disappeared. Scientists returned north this summer to try and understand what that might mean for the island’s glaciers.
That works, originally published in The Narwhal in Sept. 2022, won a Digital Publishing Award two weeks ago. This week, a particular image — showing an Ellesmere Island resident and a researcher in a large crack in the ice — won the inaugural CJF-Edward Burtynsky Award for Climate Photojournalism.
Here are some pictures of Patar from ‘the top of the world’.
