Timelapse proof of extreme ice loss James Balog

most of the time

art and science stare at each other

across a gulf of mutual in comprehension

there is great confusion when the two

look at each other art of course looks

at the world through the psyche the

emotions the unconscious at times and of

course the aesthetic science tends to

look at the world through the rational

the quantitative things that can be

measured and described but it gives art

a terrific context of understanding and

in the extreme ice survey were dedicated

to bringing those two parts of human

understanding together to merging the

art in science to the end of helping us

understand nature and humanity’s

relationship with nature better

specifically I as a person who’s been a

professional nature photographer my

whole adult life and firmly of the

beliefs that photography video film have

tremendous powers for helping us

understand and shape the way we think

about nature and about ourselves in

relationship to nature in this project

were specifically interested of course

in ice I’m fascinated by the beauty of

it the mutability of it the malleability

of it and the fabulous shapes in which

it can carve itself these first images

are from Greenland but ice has another

meaning ice is the canary in the global

coal mine it’s the place where we can

see and touch and hear and feel climate

change in action

climate change is a really abstract

thing in most of the world it’s whether

or not you believe in it it’s based on

your sense of you know is it raining

more is it raining less is it getting

hotter is it getting colder do you know

what do the computers models say about

this that and the other thing all of

that strip it away in the world of the

Arctic and Alpine environments where the

ice is it’s real and it’s present the

changes are happening they’re very

visible they’re photographable they’re

measurable 95% of the glaciers in the

world

are retreating or shrinking that’s

outside Antarctica 95% of the glaciers

in the world are retreating or shrinking

and that’s because the precipitation

patterns and the temperature patterns

are changing there is no significant

scientific dispute about that it’s been

observed as measured it’s bomb-proof

information and the great irony and

tragedy of our time is that a lot of the

general public thinks that science is

still arguing about that science is not

arguing about that in these images we

see ice from enormous glaciers ice

sheets that are hundreds of thousands of

years old breaking up into chunks and

chunk by chunk by chunk iceberg by

iceberg turning into global sea level

rise so having seen all of this in the

course of a 30-year career I was still a

skeptic

about climate change until about ten

years ago because I thought this the the

story of climate change was based on

computer models I hadn’t realized it was

based on concrete measurements of what

the paleo climates were the ancient

climates were as recorded in the ice

sheets as recorded in deep ocean

sediments as recorded in lake sediments

tree rings and a lot of other ways of

measuring temperature when I realized

that climate change was real and it was

not based on computer models I decided

that one day I would I would do a

project looking at trying to manifest

climate change photographically and that

led me to this project initially I was

working on a national geographic

assignment conventional single frame

still photography in one crazy day I got

the idea that I should

well after that assignment was finished

I got the idea that I should shoot in

time-lapse photography that I should

station a camera or two at a glacier and

let it shoot every 15 minutes or every

hour or whatever and watch the

progression of the landscape over time

well within about three weeks I in

Kostis Lee turned that idea of a couple

of time-lapse cameras into 25 time-lapse

cameras and the next six months of my

life were the hardest time in my career

trying to design build and deploy out in

the field these 25 time-lapse cameras

they are powered by the Sun

solar panels power them power goes into

a battery there is a custom-made

computer that tells that the camera went

to fire and these cameras are positioned

on rocks on the sides of the glaciers

and they look in on the glacier from

permanent bedrock positions and they

watch the evolution of the landscape we

just had a number of cameras out on the

Greenland ice sheet we actually drilled

holes into the ice way deep down below

the thawing level and had some cameras

out there for the past month and a half

or so actually there’s still a camera

out there right now in any case the

camera shoot roughly every hour

some of them shoot every half hour every

15 minutes every five minutes here’s a

time-lapse of one of the time-lapse

units being made

I personally obsessed about every nut

bolt and washer in these crazy things I

spent half my life at our local hardware

store during the months when we built

these units originally we’re working in

most of the major glaciated regions of

the Northern Hemisphere

our time-lapse units are in Alaska the

Rockies Greenland and Iceland and we

have repeat photography positions that

is places we just visit on an annual

basis in British Columbia the Alps in

Bolivia it’s a big undertaking I stand

here before you tonight as an ambassador

for my whole team there’s a lot of

people working on this right now we’ve

got 33 cameras out this moment we just

had 33 cameras shoot about half an hour

ago all across the Northern Hemisphere

watching what’s happened and we’ve spent

a lot of time in the field it’s been a

fantastic amount of work we’ve been out

for two and a half years we’ve got about

another two and a half years yet to go

that’s only half our job the other half

of our job is to tell the story to the

global public the you know it’s

scientists have collected this kind of

information off and on over the years

but a lot of it stays within the science

community similarly a lot of art

projects stay in the art community and I

feel very much a responsibility through

mechanisms like Ted and like our

relationship with the Obama White House

with the Senate with John Kerry to

influence policy as much as possible

with these pictures as well we’ve done

films we’ve done

we have more coming we have a site on

Google Earth that Google Earth was was

generous enough to give us and so forth

because we feel very much the need to

tell this story because it is such an

immediate evidence of ongoing climate

change right now

now one bit of science before we get

into the visuals if everybody in the

developed world understood this graph

and emblazoned it on the inside of their

foreheads there would be no further

societal argument about climate change

because this is the story that counts

everything else you hear is just

propaganda and confusion key issues this

is a four hundred thousand year record

this exact same pattern is seen going

back now almost a million years before

our current time and several things are

important number one temperature and

carbon dioxide in the atmosphere go up

and down basically in sync you can see

that from the orange line and the blue

line nature naturally has a loud carbon

dioxide to go up to 280 parts per

million that’s the natural cycle goes up

to 280 and then drops for various

reasons that aren’t important to discuss

right here but 280 is the peak right now

if you look at the top right part of

that graph we’re at 385 parts per

million we are way way outside the

normal natural variability earth is

having a fever in the past hundred years

the temperature of the earth has gone up

one point three degrees Fahrenheit 0.75

degrees Celsius and it’s going to keep

going up because we keep dumping fossil

fuels into the atmosphere at the rate of

about two and a half parts per million

per year it’s been a remorseless steady

increase we have to turn that around

that’s the crux and someday I hope to

emblazon that across Times Square in New

York and a lot of other places but

anyway off to the world of ice at the

Columbia glacier in Alaska this is a

view of what’s called the calving face

this is what one of our cameras saw over

the course of a few months and you see

the glacier flowing in from the right

dropping off into the sea camera

shooting every hour if you look in the

in the middle background you can see the

calving face

bobbing up and down like a yo-yo that

means that glacier is floating and it’s

unstable and you’re going you’re about

to see the consequences of that floating

to give you a little bit of a sense of

scale that calving face in this picture

is about 325 feet tall that’s 32 stories

this is not a little cliff this is like

a major office building in an urban

center the calving face is the wall

where the visible ice breaks off but in

fact it goes down below sea level

another couple thousand feet so there’s

a wall of ice a couple thousand feet

deep going down to bedrock if it’s if

the glacier is grounded on bedrock and

floating if it isn’t here’s what

Columbia has done this is in

south-central Alaska this was an aerial

picture I did one day in June three

years ago this is an aerial picture we

did this year that’s the retreat of this

glacier the main stem the main flow of

the glacier is coming from the right and

it’s going very rapidly up that stem

we’re going to be up there in just a few

more weeks and we expect that it’s

probably retreated another half a mile

but if I if I got there and discovered

that it collapsed and it was five miles

further back I wouldn’t be the least bit

surprised now it’s really hard to grasp

the scale of these places because as the

glaciers what one of the things is that

places like Alaska and Greenland are

huge they’re not normal landscapes and

as the but as the glaciers are

retreating

they’re also deflating like air is being

let out of the balloon right and so

there are features on this landscape

there is a ridge right in the middle of

the picture up above where that arrow

comes and that shows you that a little

bit there’s a marker line called the

trim line above our little red

illustration there this is something no

self-respecting photographer would ever

do you put some cheesy illustration on

your shot right and yet you have to do

it sometimes to narrate these points but

in any case the deflation of this

glacier since 1984 has been higher than

the Eiffel Tower

the Empire State Building a tremendous

amount of ice has been let out out of

these valleys as it’s retreated and

deflated gone back up Valley these

changes in the alpine world are

accelerating it’s not static

particularly in the world of sea ice the

rate of natural change is outstripping

predictions of just a few years ago and

the processes either are accelerating or

the predictions were too low to begin

with but but in any case there are big

big changes happening as we speak so

here’s another time-lapse shot of

Columbia and you see where it ended in

these various spring days June May then

October now we turn on our time-lapse

this camera was shooting every hour

geologic process in action here and

everybody says well don’t think advance

in the wintertime no it was retreating

through the winter because it’s an

unhealthy glacier finally catches up to

itself it advances you can look at these

pictures over and over again because

there’s such a strange bizarre

fascination and seeing these things you

don’t normally get to see come alive I

mean we’ve been talking about seeing is

believing and seeing the unseen at this

tEDGlobal

that’s what you see with these cameras

the images make the invisible visible

huge crevasses open up these great ice

islands break off and now watch this

this has been the spring time this year

huge collapse that happened in about a

month the loss of all that ice

so that’s where we started three years

ago way out on the left that’s where we

were a few months ago last time we were

into Columbia to give you a feeling for

scale of the retreat we did another

cheesy illustration London there British

double-decker buses if you line up 295

of those nose-to-tail that’s about how

far back that was it’s a long way on up

to Iceland one of my favorite glacier is

the Sola my yokel and here if you watch

you can see the terminus retreating you

can see this river being formed you can

see it deflating without the

photographic process you would never see

this this is invisible you can stand up

there your whole life and you would

never see this but the camera records it

so we wind time backwards now we go back

a couple years in time that’s where it

started

that’s where it ended a few months ago

and on up to Greenland

the smaller the ice mass the faster it

response to climate Greenland took a

little while to start reacting to the

warming climate of the past century but

it really started galloping along about

20 years ago and there’s been a

tremendous increase in the temperature

up there big place that’s all ice all

those colors are ice and it goes up to

about two miles thick just a gigantic

dome that comes in from the coasts rises

in the middle huh the one glacier up in

Greenland that puts more ice into the

global ocean than all the other glaciers

in the northern hemisphere combined is

the Lucette glacier we have some cameras

on the south edge of the loulou set

watching the calving face as it goes

through this dramatic retreat here’s a

two-year record of what that looks like

helicopter in front of the calving face

for scale quickly Dwarfs the calving

face is four and a half miles across and

in this shot as we pull back you’re only

seeing about a mile and a half so

imagine how big this is and how much ice

is charging out the interior of

Greenland is to the right it’s flowing

out to the Atlantic Ocean on the Left

icebergs many many many many times the

size of this building roaring out to sea

we just downloaded these pictures a

couple weeks ago as you can see June

25th monster calving events happen I’ll

show you one of those in a second this

glacier has doubled its flow speed in

the past 15 years it now goes at 125

feet a day dumping all this ice into the

ocean it tends to go on these pulses

about every three days but on average

125 feet a day twice the rate it did 20

years ago okay we had a team out

watching this glacier and we recorded

the biggest calving event that’s ever

been put on film we had nine cameras

going this is what a couple of the

cameras saw 400 foot tall calving face

breaking off huge icebergs rolling over

okay how big was that it’s hard to get

it so in illustration again gives you a

feeling for scale

my love retreat in 75 minutes across the

calving face in that particular event

three miles wide the block was

three-fifths of a mile deep and if you

compare the expanse of the calving face

to the Tower Bridge in London about 20

bridges wide or if you take an American

reference to the US Capitol building and

you pack 3000 capital buildings into

that block it would be equivalent to how

large that block was 75 minutes now I’ve

come to the conclusion after spending a

lot of time in this climate change world

that we don’t have a problem of

economics technology and public policy

we have a problem of perception the

policy and the economics and the

technology are serious enough issues but

we actually can deal with them I’m

certain that we can but what we have is

a perception problem because not enough

people really get it yet you’re an elite

audience you get it fortunately a lot of

the political leaders in the major

countries of the world are elite or an

elite audience that for the most part

gets it now but we still need to bring a

lot of people along with us and that’s

where I think organizations like Ted

like the extreme ice survey can have a

terrific impact on human perception and

bring us along because I believe we have

an opportunity right now where we are

nearly on the edge of a crisis but we

still have an opportunity to face the

greatest challenge of our generation in

fact of our century and this is a

terrific terrific call to arms to do the

right thing for ourselves and for the

future and I hope that we have the

wisdom to let the angels of our better

nature rise to the occasion and do what

needs to be done thank