The footage featured above is an excerpt from the documentary “Chasing Ice”. It is so incredibly impressive that it had to be posted by itself. For the first time a glacier calving event of this massive scale is recorded by the filmmakers.
On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic breakup at the Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland. The calving event lasted for 75 minutes and the glacier retreated a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. The height of the ice is about 3,000 feet, 300-400 feet above water and the rest below water.
Our planet is warming fast. Much faster than we can imagine. Glaciologists have been measuring mass balance of glaciers now from the land and from space. However in order to draw public attention to the urgency and scale of the problem an expedition was necessary. This is when veteran nature photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey comes into play and he does a successful job of communicating climate science throug his time-lapse photography:
In 1958, a young geochemist Charles Keeling began measuring atmospheric CO2 atop a Hawaiian volcano regularly. His pioneering measurements are still continuing across stations worldwide. The data collected until today makes it alarmingly clear that our planet is warming due to excessive carbon emissions caused by human activities.
Chasing Ice won the award for Excellence in Cinematography at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and the Best Documentary from the International Press Association. It has won over 30 awards at festivals worldwide.
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