For years, photographer Jon McCormack has travelled from the blue depths of Icelandic ice caves to the pink shores of Kenya's Lake Magadi, capturing the intricate patterns that underpin Earth's natural systems. His new book, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, published on Earth Day 2026, presents these images as both beautiful and urgent—a visual record of a planet under accelerating stress.
“What these images suggest is that the natural world is not random. It is structured, responsive, and deeply interconnected,” McCormack tells European Pulse. “When one system shifts, many others move with it.”
Europe's accelerating climate crisis
The past three years—2024, 2023, and 2025—were the hottest ever recorded globally, the first time a three-year period has exceeded the 1.5°C threshold, according to Copernicus data. Europe, the fastest-warming continent, is feeling the effects acutely. Alpine glaciers are on track to nearly vanish by century's end; half of the continent's wetlands have been destroyed over the past 300 years; and forest damage could double by 2100 due to wildfires and storms.
McCormack's work focuses on the quiet systems that sustain life: ice, water, plankton, soil, forests, tidal zones, and migratory cycles. “They are so foundational that we tend to experience them as background rather than as living structures under pressure,” he says.
In southern Iceland, where he photographs ice caves at Vatnajökull—Europe's largest glacier—the transformation is stark. “Scenes that feel ancient reveal themselves to be alarmingly temporary. You see caves collapse, surfaces thin, melt patterns intensify. The pace of transformation is what stays with you. It is not theoretical. It is physical and immediate.” Iceland has lost roughly 50 glaciers since 1890, retreating at an average of 40 to 50 metres per year.
This mirrors a broader European pattern: winter snowfall hitting record lows while summer temperatures soar. Extreme river flooding has doubled in frequency since 1990, with central and western countries facing the most dramatic increases. Last summer, parts of the Rhine, Danube, and Po ran at historically low levels—the same rivers that flooded catastrophically just years earlier.
Beauty as a warning
McCormack's photographs reveal the hidden geometry of these systems: braided rivers writing sediment across volcanic sand, algae turning lakes into abstract fields of colour, microscopic diatoms forming glass-like shells. But he insists their beauty can be deceptive. “A glacier does not simply melt; it alters water flow, habitat, temperature and timing downstream. A forest does not simply burn; it changes regeneration cycles, soil, moisture, and the species that depend on it.”
What unsettles him most is the cumulative nature of change. “You begin to sense that entire systems are being pushed out of the conditions that shaped them. This is changing faster than we realise. Not because the change is always spectacular, but because it is cumulative.”
The fallout from stressed natural systems already bleeds into daily life across Europe—from agriculture to transport. As McCormack puts it, “Many of the patterns I photograph are beautiful, but they are also precarious. Their beauty can disguise how contingent they are, and how quickly the conditions that formed them can disappear.”
For those interested in the broader context of environmental fragility, recent events such as the drone footage of lava rivers from Mount Etna offer a reminder of the continent's volatile geology. Meanwhile, the discovery of a 159-million-year-old bear-dog skull in Catalonia underscores how much we still have to learn about Earth's deep history—even as its present systems unravel.
