{"id":1138,"date":"2012-11-24T13:45:05","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T18:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeofbrian.ca\/?p=1138"},"modified":"2023-10-07T11:34:03","modified_gmt":"2023-10-07T15:34:03","slug":"chasing-ice-lets-you-watch-the-arctic-glaciers-disappear-before-your-eyes-feel-better-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lifeofbrian.ca\/index.php\/2012\/11\/chasing-ice-lets-you-watch-the-arctic-glaciers-disappear-before-your-eyes-feel-better-video\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Chasing Ice\u2019 lets you watch the Arctic glaciers disappear before your eyes. Feel better? (Video)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Effects<\/a>

Fast flowing rivers form on top of melting glaciers<\/p><\/div>\n

In 100 years or so, when Google\u2019s autonomous robo-historians write the book on their fleshy predecessors, they will no doubt try to explain why we blew it on climate change. Why, despite decades of ever-more-definitive evidence, did the human species not take even the most basic of measures to avoid a catastrophe?<\/p>\n

They will find plenty of blame to pass around. Our political systems, they will observe, just weren\u2019t up to the diplomatic challenges of mustering a multinational effort \u2014 we\u00a0couldn’t\u00a0agree on whose fault it was, who should pay to fix it, even whether we should bother trying. Our brains proved ill-equipped\u00a0to process the gravity of a long-range threat until it was too late<\/a>. And our news media, the storytellers to whom this message was entrusted, were too easily distracted by more lurid dramas.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0didn’t\u00a0see it coming, even though, on every other level, we knew it was.<\/p>\n

… Read the full article here on Grist.com<\/a> by David Dudley …<\/p>\n

This, as nature photographer James Balog tells us in the documentaryChasing Ice<\/em>, is essentially a failure of imagination. Unless you have a glacier in your backyard, the earliest effects of a warming planet have so far appeared to most of us only intermittently, a signal lost in the noise of the daily weather.<\/p>\n

Balog\u2019s response to this perceptual disconnect is called the\u00a0Extreme Ice Survey<\/a>: He sets up dozens of stationary cameras aimed at glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and elsewhere. The cameras shoot photos every 30 minutes during daylight hours, some 8,000 pictures a year. It\u2019s the same photo-a-day technique that so many amateur documentarians have used to create those\u00a0viral videos of receding hairlines<\/a>, but on a geological scale.<\/p>\n

The resulting time-lapse movie can condense months and years into a few mesmerizing moments. Now we can watch the canary in the coal mine as it expires.<\/p>\n

\u201cMelt\u201d doesn\u2019t really capture the awesome violence of what we\u2019re seeing. Balog’s cameras look on as the flank of an Icelandic glacier \u201cdeflates,\u201d crumpling into black-puddled nothingness like a giant decomposing animal. A crawling river of ice in Alaska turns into a raging torrent, speeding up before our eyes. Greenland\u2019s Ilulissat ice sheet rolls over the landscape, an endless white blanket sloughing off into the ocean. It is, as the photographer says in the film, a \u201cmagical, miraculous, horrible, and scary thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Chasing Ice<\/em>, which was directed by Jeff Orlowski, saves most of these sequences for the film\u2019s climactic third-act reveal, when we finally see the results of three years of\u00a0labour\u00a0by Balog and his team of young assistants. The first two acts are dedicated to the team\u2019s admirable and occasionally moderately nail-biting efforts, as they scramble over various harsh landscapes installing their cameras, battling bad weather and technical foul-ups.<\/p>\n

\"Chasing

Chasing Ice poster<\/p><\/div>\n

Balog, a veteran environmental photographer well-known for his work in\u00a0National Geographic<\/em>, is now pushing 60 and has a bum knee that\u2019s starting to get in the way of the physical demands of his work. But, perhaps because his photos reveal something enormous and terrifying that\u2019s happening at a planetary scale, it\u2019s hard to get too worked up about the small-scale drama of his knee surgery. He isn\u2019t the sort of obsessive weirdo whose outsize personality can carry a two-hour documentary. Essentially, he\u2019s just a guy doing his job, a photojournalist drawn to the ice by the charge of his profession: to bear witness.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that the whole EIS project\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0really have much to add to the science on Arctic melting (doesn\u2019t satellite imagery reveal essentially the same phenomenon?). The wider arena of climate change policy is glimpsed\u00a0only in passing; there\u2019s a montage of assorted Fox News mockery of global warming, footage of hurricanes and floods, grave promises of extreme weather to come. And\u00a0Chasing Ice<\/em>\u00a0has little to say on solutions, so stow\u00a0your geoengineering schemes<\/a>\u00a0elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s achievement is fundamentally aesthetic. A sequence at the end showing an enormous \u201ccalving event\u201d might be the most astonishing thing you\u2019ll see all year. A lower-Manhattan-sized glacier spontaneously self-destructs into a boiling sea, rumbling and roaring like an angry god as it dies. It\u2019s a triumph of disaster-movie spectacle, all the more haunting for being real.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to marvel at such visuals and wonder if some of that melted ice isn\u2019t soaking someone\u2019s basement in Staten Island now, or whether it\u2019s coming into your basement next year. Balog\u2019s work makes such powerful agit-prop because, unlike the ill portents delivered by other climate Cassandras, it delivers ground truth, not doomy speculation pegged to a deadline that still at least sounds far off.<\/p>\n

As chilling as it is to read, say,\u00a0the newest report from the World Bank<\/a>on how unlivable we will likely render the planet by the end of the century, there\u2019s still that slender thread of reassurance to cling to. Yeah, we\u2019re cutting it close, but\u00a0we’ve\u00a0still got 88 years to get our shit together.\u00a0<\/em>As\u00a0Chasing Ice\u00a0<\/em>shows, however, the clock might be ticking faster than it appears.<\/p>\n

For a glimpse of what\u00a0Chasing Ice<\/em>\u00a0has to offer, check out the trailer below. The film opened at film festivals earlier this month, and rolls out in theaters in major U.S. cities on Thanksgiving Day. (Find a full schedule\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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