On thin ice

We head to the north of Alaska to put the Z 6 Filmmaker’s Kit through its paces for a new global warming documentary

In 2001, when I first visited George Divoky on Cooper Island, which is a deserted barrier island off the northern tip of Alaska, it was a forbidding journey into a frigid world of ice and snow. It was June and the Beaufort Sea was frozen, but just beginning its summer thaw. This made it too dicey for snow machine transit. I had to strap my gear to the pontoons of a small, two-man chopper and be flown by an irascible lug of a pilot to this outpost on the edge of the world to shoot the cover for the New York Times [1]. Even then, as I made this picture of George standing on the endless ice, the big melt was on.

It took me 18 years to get back there. But, finally, with the assistance of Nikon, I returned, this time with a five-man documentary film crew. George and I remained friends all these years, and he would keep me up to date on his yearly returns to Cooper. 45 years ago, as a zoologist with a specialty in Arctic seabirds, he began to study a colony of black guillemot birds who were breeding on Cooper. Over time, though, George’s bird study has become one of the most durable, personally observed, painstakingly documented accounts of global warming in existence.

It may well be the largest repository of directly experiential observance of the warming of the planet in existence. As George notes, “I didn’t want to do a study on climate change. Climate change found me.”

The main intent of my revisit was to place George in the exact same place where I shot the New York Times cover. Except now, 18 years later, he is awash in seawater [2].

The island is no longer wrapped in snow and ice. It is a stretch of monochrome sand, long and skinny, sitting amidst the turbulent liquid sea. The ice is a distant memory and now lives some 300-400 miles off the shores of Cooper. Desperate polar bears now regularly visit the island in a vain search for sustenance, as their traditional hunting grounds have succumbed to warmer and warmer temperatures.

The guillemots also suffer, breeding earlier and earlier and with less success [3]. Extinction is knocking on their door. And George, 45 years and counting, continues documenting. To further understand the scope and importance of George’s work, you can check out the Friends of Cooper Island website: www.cooperisland.org

We shot a short documentary on Nikon Z 6 Filmmaker’s Kit along with S mount lenses, designed for the mirrorless system. The film and the behind-the-scenes of its shooting are available on the Nikon Learn and Explore site: www.bit.ly/cooperisland

The island is no longer wrapped in snow and ice. It is a stretch of monochrome sand, long and skinny

[3] The breeding habits of the guillemots are also negatively affected by the changing climate.

[1] Shot in 2001, this image shows how the frozen tundra looked before the increasing rate of climate change.

[2] Upon returning in 2019, shooting in the exact same location, Joe and co found that the landscape had massively changed.