I finally got around to seeing the film Chasing Ice last night, and I highly recommend going to see it. The film is a gripping and fiercely scary look at the world’s glaciers, and their rapid decline and disappearance. Renowned photographer James Balog spends years of his life and literally destroys his own knees hiking to some of the world’s most remote yet critical glaciers, setting up multi-year timelapse studies. His visual records of swift glacial decline are irrefutable proof of climate change in action. At the same time, he captures images of ice, icebergs and glaciers that are visually astounding. Painfully beautiful and just plain painful, the film is a must-see for anyone that wants to feel invigorated to do something about the climate crisis. Go see it.
What makes Chasing Ice more than a slideshow of striking landscapes is the discipline behind it. Balog, a National Geographic photographer who by his own account started out skeptical that climate change was as urgent as scientists claimed, founded the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007 to settle the question with his own eyes. The idea was almost stubbornly simple: bolt weatherproof, solar-powered cameras to bedrock near glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and the Rockies, and let them shoot a frame every daylight hour, every day, for years at a stretch, no matter the storm or the season. Cameras froze, batteries failed, and Balog himself blew out both knees hauling gear across crevasse fields — the film doesn’t hide any of it. What survived is one of the most complete visual records ever assembled of glaciers retreating in real time, condensed from years of frames into seconds of footage where ice that took millennia to form visibly slides, cracks and calves away.
Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the film premiered at Sundance in January 2012 and went on to win a News & Documentary Emmy for outstanding nature programming; its haunting theme song, “Before My Time,” earned an Academy Award nomination the same awards season. But the honors are almost beside the point. What stays with you is the scale — glaciers the size of Manhattan losing more ice in an afternoon than most rivers move in a year — rendered not as a chart or a statistic, but as something you watch happen, in light and shadow, to a landscape that looks otherworldly even as it disappears. It is exactly the kind of subject our own nature coverage keeps circling back to: places so vast and strange they barely look real, until you realize they are, and that they are changing faster than we planned for.
More than a decade on, the Extreme Ice Survey’s cameras are still running, and the archive Balog started has become one of the reference points scientists and photographers alike return to when they need to show, rather than tell, what a warming planet actually looks like. It sits at an unusually honest intersection of photography and hard science — beautiful because the ice is beautiful, urgent because the ice is disappearing, and neither quality lets you look away from the other.
