10 images of Iceland’s changing landscape

What happens when your homeland begins to melt? Icelandic poet and author Andri Snær Magnason explores this in Time and Water, a new documentary from National Geographic. Directed by Sara Dosa, archival and family photographs and folktales weave personal history with the story of the land in the face of climate change.

“In a time when the violence of the climate crisis ravages the earth, we need stories that can act as maps for our shifting world,” Dosa says in her director’s statement. “Time and Water is a gesture toward such a map, one that traces the ice of Iceland through the human story of one family, anchored by the first-person perspective and expansive archives of celebrated writer Andri Snaer Magnason.”

Images from the documentary are in the gallery below. (Click to expand images to full screen.)

The story of Andri’s grandparents is woven together with the glaciers and oceans that has sustained generations of Icelanders.

“As Andri’s grandfather Arni’s memory recedes, so too does Iceland’s ice. A story of the earth, which has been frozen for millennia inside glaciers, is rapidly melting away,” says Dosa. “But, through the framing of our film as a time capsule, which is also a nod to Andri’s work as a poet and sci-fi author, we illustrate how the transmission of stories and memories into the future can be an act of not just holding onto our beloved present world, but a way of dreaming up possibilities for a habitable future.”

Time and Water opens in select theaters May 29 and later this year on National Geographic & Disney+.