In his seminal photography books, Bernhard Edmaier combines his training as a geologist with an exquisite talent for capturing dreamy, colour-saturated, seemingly abstract images of earth from above. In this new volume, Edmaier looks at water-from both the air and the ground-as a source of life and one of the most important landscape-shaping forces on earth. Readers will be enthralled by Edmaier's stunning shots of water in all its forms-rivers and streams, deltas and floodplains, surging on the coasts, frozen in glaciers, as vaporous clouds and the spray over erupting volcanoes. Edmaier covers familiar and far-flung locations on every continent: from Alaska to the American Southwest; Costa Rica in the Caribbean to Chile and Argentina in South America; Canada, Greenland, and Russia; Europe from Germany and Switzerland, to Italy, Croatia, Iceland, and Norway, the African continent from Djibouti to Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo; along with Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica.His pictures not only document the beauty of these places but they also tell an edifying and at times alarming story of the changes our earth and its water systems are undergoing as the result of climate change-from desertification to Arctic thaw and rising sea levels. Presented in an extra-large format that magnifies both the intensity and the detail of Edmaier's work, this extraordinary and important book documents water's power to create and destroy; to give life and take it away.

Text by: Angelika Jung-Huttl