Aliens exist on Earth, but they arrived by not invasion but by invention. Climate change is turning our landscapes otherworldly. And the more unfamiliar they appear, the greater alienation from them. This estrangement is dangerous and perhaps nowhere more evident than melting glaciers.
This series of images was depicts melting, melted, and altered glaciers in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago that's warming six times faster than the rest of the world. The muddy land pictured in many of them are untouched ground. These are the parts recently exposed by the glacier's rapid retreat. They look otherworldly and not quite real. But encountering them is likely just as unnerving as a first contact with the extraterrestrial.
Ryder Kimball is a landscape photographer and writer exploring the uncanny properties of the Anthropocene.
