A new documentary looks at how photographer James Balog captured climate change on film by placing two dozen time-lapse cameras throughout the Arctic and other areas to document melting glaciers. The film chronicles Balog’s work with the Extreme Ice Survey, a long-term photography project that works to preserve a visual legacy of how climate change and other human activity impacts the planet. Balog is an award-winning photographer whose work revolves around the relationship between humans and nature.
James Balog talking:
I’ve been fascinated by glaciers and big mountains for basically my entire adult life, since I started being a mountaineer. And that interest and life experience led me into realizing that ice was the place where you could—you could get a three-dimensional manifestation of climate change. You know, climate change is kind of abstract; a lot of it’s based on statistics and measurements and projections. But in ice, you really see climate change in action. It’s rendered in three dimensions.
So, I had an assignment from The New Yorker, and then that led to a National Geographic assignment, and that in turn led to realizing that if we put time-lapse cameras out, we could make a running record of how the landscape was changing. So, as we sit here this morning, we have 34 time-lapse cameras at 16 glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Montana, in the Northern Rockies, and in Nepal by Mount Everest. And these cameras are just sitting there clicking away. And in about another, you know, 10 minutes or so, we’ll have 34 of our little robot eyes opening and closing and capturing the memory of what’s happening in those places right now.
this glacier is called Columbia Glacier. It’s in south-central Alaska. And it’s deflating due to a combination of climate change and local glacier dynamics. But that glacier is retreated now—since that shot was taken, it’s probably pulled back close to another half-mile or a mile.
And it continues sort of in a rapid retreat, and it will go crawling its way back up the valley. And all that ice that was once there is now part of the Pacific Ocean. It’s melted away, and it’s gone.
These big rivers of ice come flowing down these valleys, and when they meet a body of water, like a lake or like the ocean, they form this big wall that’s called a calving face. And that wall is anywhere from 200-, in a few cases maybe 400-, feet high. It’s between 200- and 400-feet high. And when a calving event happens, these massive icebergs just come toppling off the front face of the glacier, and they become these big things that are bobbing in the water, floating out to sea. What also happens, though, is that if you see 200 feet above water, there’s probably somewhere between eight and 10 times that vertical distance underneath the water. There’s a lot ice that’s under the sea surface. And all of that breaks off in these big chunks and goes floating out. It’s quite dramatic.
Jeff and one of our other field team, Adam LeWinter, were actually there at Ilulissat Glacier.
Jeff Orlowski talking:
I shot that with our other friend, Adam. We knew that these calving events happened every once in a while, but we didn’t know when. And so, we scheduled a month-long trip where we would maintain a 24-hour vigil just to capture something like this. It was in May. We had 24 hours of daylight. The two of us had eight-hour shifts, and we kept—somebody was awake every single minute of every single day for that entire period. And we were just waiting for something big like that to happen. What we caught, it turns out it’s the largest calving event that’s ever been documented, that’s ever been shot like that. And that’s one of the featured scenes in the film.
it’s very interesting having that real boots-on-the-ground experience and seeing how the planet is changing, and then seeing the political commentary around it. You know, the president is in a tough position, and a lot of the politicians are, because they hear two sides of the story. I mean, we’re hearing the science and the scientists and kind of—you know, it’s very unanimous: 97 percent of the climate experts all agree that it’s happening, it’s man-made, we need to do something about it. But in Washington, they’ve got six lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry, at least, for every member of the Senate and the House. So they’re hearing a very, very different skewed story on the reality of the situation. What we were trying to do was to capture evidence, to capture imagery, that takes it away from this bipartisan debate and tries to move the conversation forward.
people kept asking us, “What are the consequences of climate change? So what? Why does it matter if the ice melts? It’s in Greenland, and it’s thousands of miles away.” And we were trying to relate that to people. The scientists have been telling us for decades that because of warming temperatures, because of melting ice, events like Sandy are going to happen with greater frequency, or they’re going to get more violent. And that’s really the end result. That’s what climate change represents, is more events like Sandy.
James Balog talking:
I didn’t particularly believe in climate change decades ago. I thought it was based on computer models, and I really didn’t have it in my psyche that it was possible for humans to change the basic physics and chemistry of this gigantic planet. It just didn’t seem probable.
I’ve been profoundly reshaped in my own mind, in my own mentality and life experience, by this. I am really, really, really concerned for my daughters’ future. I have a 24-year-old daughter, and I have an 11-year-old daughter. And I’m quite concerned that the—that by the time they get to be our age, they’re going to be living in a world that’s so radically different from what we’re living in, and it might be not such a great world. I think they’re certain to be living in much more violent extremes of weather, with unknowable geopolitical consequences from that, from perhaps agriculture stress, drought stress, whatever. I’m very concerned about the stability and security and safety of the world that my kids will be in.
– source democracynow.org
Jeff Orlowski, is the director of Chasing Ice. He began filming on the initial expedition of the Extreme Ice Survey. That winter, the team scouted and filmed glaciers that now appear in the documentary feature film Chasing Ice.
James Balog, is an award-winning photographer whose work revolves around the relationship between humans and nature. He is featured in the new film, Chasing Ice, which follows his work with the Extreme Ice Survey, a long-term photography project that works to preserve a visual legacy of how climate change and other human activity impacts the planet. Balog is the author of seven books, including, most recently, Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers.