Daniel Schwartz has spent twenty years travelling the globe - from Uganda to the Swiss Jura - to document glaciers and the fascinating stories locked within their ice.
In the Ruwenzori Mountains in Uganda, Schwartz thinks of the Greek geographer Ptolemy, who wondered in ancient times whether the source of the Nile lay there. On Nanga Parbat, he finds the remains of the failed Nazi expeditions of the 1930s in the thawing ice. At the southern foot of the Swiss Jura, he not only traces the millennia-long journey of erratic boulders, but also accompanies his nearly 90-year-old father on his last hike to one of them. He photographs the Birch Glacier from a helicopter at the last possible moment – the next day, it crashes into the valley and buries the village of Blatten.
He combines these personal experiences with literary sources from antiquity to the present day and showcases glaciers in all their diversity: as a dwindling archive of climate history, an archaeological site and an intangible repository of memories.
