How quickly can you melt an iceberg with a blowtorch? Swiss artist Julian Charrière’s The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories 2013 began with this simple question. Scientists report that global warming has already reached 1°C above pre-industrial levels. As temperatures creep ever higher, the frozen parts of the planet – the cryosphere — are deeply compromised, with polar ice caps receding at an accelerating pace; ice shelves fragmenting; and sea levels rising as ice melts into the ocean. To illustrate this unfolding crisis, Charrière travelled to Iceland in 2012, where he climbed an iceberg and torched its surface for eight hours straight.

Despite the dark humour of his performance, Charrière points to the prospect of glacier extinction. Like a global thermometer, dwindling ice cover measures the speed and severity of the planet’s warming. In August 2019 the Okjokull glacier in Iceland was declared ‘dead’ after losing so much ice that it no longer qualified as a glacier. Charrière’s image is a dramatic reminder of the cumulative impact — both positive and destructive — of individual action.