Photos taken 30 years apart reveal alarming retreat of giant glacier

Photographs taken by a father and son in 1989 and 2020 have revealed how one of Europe's largest glacier has shrunk by 400 square kilometres due to climate change.

British scientist Kieran Baxter literally followed his father's footsteps to Vatnajökull in Iceland more than 30 years later to capture the scale of retreating ice.

At 7700 sq km, Vatnajökull is one of the biggest glaciers in Europe and spans about 8 per cent of Iceland's landmass in the country's south-east.

READ MORE: Big spike in glaciers' rate of melting

The before and after images show the dramatic effect of climate change on one of the world's most fragile environments.

In the three decades that have elapsed since 1989, Vatnajökull ice cap, has lost up to 200 sq km of ice and its area has been reduced by more than 400 sq km, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.

In September, 1989, Scottish landscape photographer Colin Baxter visited the glacier during and took a picture of the frozen landscape.

Last August his son Kieran Baxter, a lecturer at the University of Dundee in Scotland and who was also there with his father in 1989, took a set of photographs of the glacier.

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The photographs reveal the retreat of five of Vatnajökull's outlet glaciers – Fláajökull, Heinabergsjökull, Hoffellsjokull, Hólarjökull and Skaftafellsjökull.

"I remember being in absolute awe of the stunning natural landscape and overwhelmed by the beauty of the glaciers tumbling down from the icecap up there in the distance," Kieran Baxter said.

"It is a bittersweet experience to relive those memories and witness the glacial landscapes that we visited that have now changed so radically.

"Now in 2020 it is equally overwhelming and extremely alarming, to see the disappearance of all that ice after only 30 years."

Last year Australian and New Zealand research found human-influenced climate change and greenhouse emissions are rapidly melting the world's glaciers and could lead to extreme climatic events globally.

Annual glacial melts were found to have been 10-times as likely in 2018 as a result of climate change caused by human emissions, a study conducted by Dr Lauren Vargo from Wellington's Victoria University and assisted by Monash University's Professor Andrew Mackintosh.