Chasing Ice documentary shows visual images of climate change
Seven years ago, U.S. photographer James Balog travelled to the Arctic to take pictures of glaciers for National Geographic magazine.
Seeing water running off the massive ice sheets and giant chunks of ice breaking off and floating in the ocean inspired Balog, at the time a climate-change skeptic, to undertake the Extreme Ice Survey, installing dozens of cameras at glaciers in the Arctic to document the changes he was seeing.
The cameras take images every half-hour in daylight, year round. The thousands of images collected since 2007 show what Balog calls “visual evidence” of climate change.
This week Montrealers will get a chance to see Chasing Ice, an award-winning documentary about Balog’s work, featuring some of the dramatic time-lapse images of melting, receding and collapsing glaciers he has created from his photographs.
The presentation of the film, which begins Friday at the Cinéma du Parc, comes as news about the kinds of extreme weather events that may become more common with climate change are making headlines.
Wildfires have burned through more than 300,000 hectares in Australia this week as the country experiences record-breaking high temperatures, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday that 2012 was the warmest year on record in the United States.
Also, 2012 was the year when Arctic sea ice was the smallest it has been since satellite observation begin in 1979, says the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
While Balog’s cameras are pointed at glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska, among others, melting is also taking place in Canada, including in Nunavik, the Arctic region of northern Quebec.
Permafrost soil is melting, putting in jeopardy infrastructure such as airports, ice roads and bridges that were built on what used to be permanently frozen ground, said Patrick Bonin, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada. Melting permafrost in the village of Salluit, at the tip of Quebec’s Ungava peninsula, led to landslides and the relocation of houses.
“The Arctic is the canary in the coal mine of the planet,” said Bonin, who will conduct a discussion at the Cinéma du Parc after Friday’s screening of Chasing Ice. “The acceleration of climate change is happening and soon we could be at the point of losing control.”
Melting glaciers could raise sea levels around the world by as much as one foot by 2050 and three feet by the year 2100, threatening coast- al communities around the world. In November, the journal Science published a study finding global sea levels rose 11.1 millimetres since 1992, mainly because of melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
In southern Quebec, average winter temperatures have increased since 1960 and the number of snowstorms has decreased, reports Quebec’s environment department.
There are solutions that could slow climate change, or even stop it, but the continuing problem is that there is no political will to implement them, Bonin said. The most important step would be to stop carbon emissions as quickly as possible, he said. Instead, the fact that melting ice is making the Arctic more accessible has resulted in increased interest in potential fossil-fuel reserves there, he said.
“The absurdity of that is that by opening up the region for exploration and development, we are running the risk of further increasing the changes to the climate that are making the Arctic melt,” Bonin said.
Documentary Directed by: Jeff Orlowski Duration: 74 minutes
Parental guidance: for all Playing at: Cinéma du Parc
Even fresh off the ravages of hurricane Sandy, it can be tough for the reality of climate change to hit home. Jeff Orlowski offers a unique vantage point of the phenomenon with Chasing Ice, his documentary on the yearslong mission of National Geographic photographer James Balog to capture melting Arctic ice caps.
What began as a 2005 trip to shoot glaciers in Iceland turned into much more than Balog bargained for as the magazine urged him to create a larger-scale project on ice in general.
Once he got out there and saw what was going on, the photographer came up with the Extreme Ice Survey, a time-lapse account showing the disintegration of the world’s ice caps over an extended period.
Flanked by a team of eager young bucks, Balog started with the ambitious goal of installing 25 cameras in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and Montana.
Then came actually doing it — travelling to strategic vantage points in each place, hiking out to remote, sub-zero locales and finding spots to anchor their encased camera gear, which would then take one photo per hour of majestic ice configurations slowly disintegrating over months and years.
Easier said than done. Even after reaching the spots and setting up their gear, Balog and his crew still had to return to see if their plan worked, then contend with some project-threatening snafus.
But while their persistence is remarkable, it is rewarded by the breathtaking yet heartbreaking images obtained. In every location, they find irrefutable evidence of the dramatic degradation of the planet’s glaciers.
The film is as much about the process as the result, which can make it tedious at times as Orlowski turns in circles. But Balog is a charismatic subject, and his commitment is commendable.
He is eloquent in explaining his devotion — a feeling of responsibility to share images of these giant, crumbling ice mountains, “memories of a landscape that will never be seen again in the history of civilization.”