As a photographer, James Balog is to me as I am to a cockroach, although I have done a little bit of glacier photography. So it is not surprising that he has worked for National Geographic and has made the movie, "Chasing Ice". I recently traveled some distance to Chicago to see this movie, which contains the most stunning glacier images imaginable.
Early in the movie he wades barefoot into freezing surf full of iceberg chunks to obtain pictures of water breaking over the ice. Right there I was hooked into this movie on the basis of the photography even before we get to shrinking glaciers and what they say about global warming.
The centerpiece is the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the project he established to provide dramatic documentation of the shrinking glaciers. He and his coworkers placed cameras with automatic timers overlooking glaciers in the far north to take several years of time-lapse pictures of these moving rivers of ice.
He also clambers over difficult, icy surfaces to photograph the melting itself. Rivers of melt-water flow down the glaciers and into gigantic holes, where the ice has been eaten away, providing a path to the bottom. To photograph this, he needs to climb down difficult, dangerous, icy cliffs that would be nearly inaccessible even to someone with two healthy knees, which he does not have.
There are several dramatic scenes showing his tribulations with his nasty knee and balky equipment. They remind us that such struggles are part of the adventure of understanding nature. There is a darkly amusing scene showing his fight just to walk (to get the facts) juxtaposed with the talking heads of the usual gang of global warming deniers (accusing scientists of fakery).
The payoff is the parade of the glaciers, the moving (in more ways than one) images of rivers of ice charging forward while the glacier fronts crumble even faster, eating the glacier from front to back. Other images show glaciers shrinking top to bottom so rapidly that it looks as if they are deflating. My only criticism is that these images went by too fast, hence only a 9 rating instead of 10.
Shrinking glaciers are natural thermometers, which help document the reality of global warming. I hope that the widest possible audience will be able to see this. It is not, nor was it intended to be, a systematic scientific survey. There have been many such surveys showing, for example, that we are not just cherry-picking the glaciers that are losing mass. Balog's intent was to provide the most riveting possible observation, and he has succeeded. Looking at a thermometer will never be the same.
Early in the movie he wades barefoot into freezing surf full of iceberg chunks to obtain pictures of water breaking over the ice. Right there I was hooked into this movie on the basis of the photography even before we get to shrinking glaciers and what they say about global warming.
The centerpiece is the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the project he established to provide dramatic documentation of the shrinking glaciers. He and his coworkers placed cameras with automatic timers overlooking glaciers in the far north to take several years of time-lapse pictures of these moving rivers of ice.
He also clambers over difficult, icy surfaces to photograph the melting itself. Rivers of melt-water flow down the glaciers and into gigantic holes, where the ice has been eaten away, providing a path to the bottom. To photograph this, he needs to climb down difficult, dangerous, icy cliffs that would be nearly inaccessible even to someone with two healthy knees, which he does not have.
There are several dramatic scenes showing his tribulations with his nasty knee and balky equipment. They remind us that such struggles are part of the adventure of understanding nature. There is a darkly amusing scene showing his fight just to walk (to get the facts) juxtaposed with the talking heads of the usual gang of global warming deniers (accusing scientists of fakery).
The payoff is the parade of the glaciers, the moving (in more ways than one) images of rivers of ice charging forward while the glacier fronts crumble even faster, eating the glacier from front to back. Other images show glaciers shrinking top to bottom so rapidly that it looks as if they are deflating. My only criticism is that these images went by too fast, hence only a 9 rating instead of 10.
Shrinking glaciers are natural thermometers, which help document the reality of global warming. I hope that the widest possible audience will be able to see this. It is not, nor was it intended to be, a systematic scientific survey. There have been many such surveys showing, for example, that we are not just cherry-picking the glaciers that are losing mass. Balog's intent was to provide the most riveting possible observation, and he has succeeded. Looking at a thermometer will never be the same.