MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Global warming damage illustrated

Breaking away â€Ã‚¦ scientists now believe it takes only 10 seconds for melting to begin at the base of ice sheets

Melting glaciers, vanishing forests and urban sprawl are transforming the world around us, photographs illustrating the impact of environmental changes such as global warming show.

Natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, and the effects of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami are also featured among the pictures in Earth, Then and Now, by environmental writer Fred Pearce. Transformations caused by human activity such as industrialisation, war, travel and tourism are illustrated in the pairs of photographs, each of which show the same place in the world and how it has changed over the years. In some cases, the alterations are quick and dramatic - in 2003 the Trift Glacier in the Swiss Alps was largely turned to open water in just a year. In a decade, sandy beaches on the Maldives have been eroded by rising sea levels, while satellite photographs of Rondonia, Brazil, show how rainforest that was pristine in the 1970s has been stripped away by logging. Other changes, such as the disappearance of the impressive Upsala glacier in Patagonia, have been slower but no less extreme. The pictures also show attempts by Saudi Arabia to "green" its desert, the effects of major infrastructure projects such as bridges, as well as the impact of flooding, drought and urban development. While many of the photographs show only too clearly the negative consequences of climate change and other environmental problems, there is some good news. Shots of Mexico City show how pollution has been tackled, while closer to home it is possible to see how a clay pit in Cornwall has been famously transformed into the Eden Project.