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