Like the icebergs depicted in Dan Kowalski’s photographs, much of the “weight” of the work lies below the surface.

Don’t get me wrong: the images are stunning – otherworldly in their crystalline luminescence.

The organic shapes, an azure blue that seems lit from within and a “haunting beauty,” as Kowalksi puts it, are mesmerizing – but then the left brain kicks in, overlaying a schematic notation of scientific facts: 10,000 years-old. Muir Inlet. Global warming.

They are indeed silent harbingers.

“The glacial movement is unprecedented, and science now has consensus as to why,” Kowalski said.

And while scientists are poking and prodding like ER doctors, all returning with the same diagnosis, Kowalski is the guy in the waiting room holding photos of his beloved bergs, which are, by all accounts, slipping away. If these were photos of an actual family member, we might look at him with sympathy — but in this case, the icy feeling, and subsequent goosebumps take a while to register: this is the brother breaking the bad news to the rest of the family. Which just happens to be us.

Were it not for, aesthetically, the mind-boggling buoyancy and the ethereal prismatic quality of light, the images and their implications might send us crashing to the floor like – well, like a glacial shelf plunging into the deep.

Luckily, Kowalski is not a sensationalist.

“Explorers, scientists, film makers and artists are bearing witness and bringing back news of something that is otherwise fairly abstract,” he said. He and printmaker Art Grice, in whose Arts Gallery/Studio the 17-piece exhibit is hung, spent hours laboring over the precise blue that would capture the true essence of the actual formations.

“I told Art, ‘People will never believe this,’” he said of the hyper-intense blue that floats against a misty gray backdrop. Even so, they dialed in to replicate it as accurately as possible. In that regard, the work is expansive: introducing us intimately with something that, for the most part, we have taken for granted — they’re glaciers, for pete’s sake. They’re not going anywhere. Or so we thought.

In his artist’s statement, Kowalski tries to distill his 35-year relationship with the glaciers in eastern Alaska to which he is “irresistably drawn.”

“My relationship ranges from the sublime to the fatal,” he wrote alluding to a time when a falling shelf swamped his boat, dumping him into the frigid water.

Recently, he returned to those icy waters to shoot film footage for a profile of naturalist John Muir for the American Masters series on PBS.

To learn more about Kowalski’s work, go to www.rollingbayworks.com.