Catherine Brahic, environment news editor
You?ll feel it in your gut when the gigantic mass of ice breaks off from its parent glacier and takes what seems an age to flip. Imagine an island the size of Manhattan being ripped from the continental crust, lifted into the air and turned upside down. Except that this is the Arctic, so the cinema screen is filled with the roiling, foaming whites, greys and blues of gritty snow and ice in turmoil. It?s an awesome sight, one you?re not likely to forget.
The sequence is the crowning jewel of Chasing Ice, the new documentary film about the work of environmental photographer James Balog. Back in 2005 and 2006, The New Yorker and National Geographic sent Balog to the Arctic for two photo assignments on ice. Those projects, his first venture into the far north, inspired him to start the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS). Balog and his collaborators painstakingly staked dozens of time-lapse cameras to rock faces, aimed at moving glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, the Himalayas and the US Rocky Mountains, and left them there to record history.
(Image: 2008 James Balog/Extreme Ice Survey)
Chasing Ice is just one part of the EIS, born of Balog's burning desire to show the world what the death throes of glaciers in our unparalleled environment look like. The film - I hope the first of several - is a sort of "making of" documentary which follows Balog and his small team of scientists-cum-adventurers as they head into the Arctic to set up the equipment. The freezing temperatures, gale-force winds, ruined knees (we see Balog tackle frozen climbs on crutches while his assistants shake their heads in despair), days of waiting, bitter disappointments when electronics are defeated by the elements, and, finally, the images. Strung together in time-lapse sequences, they bring the ice to life. And paired in "now you see the glacier, now you don't" comparisons, they also record its demise.
Balog's story is just as integral to the film as that of the ice. He confesses that, in spite of his scientific training, once upon a time he was a climate sceptic. His desperate desire to commit the ice to digital celluloid before it is too late almost feels like penance.
In one scene, he holds up a memory chip that he has just pulled out of one of his cameras, a year after leaving it to do its job. "This is the memory of the camera," he says, and then something occurs to him. "And this is the memory of the landscape. That landscape is gone, it may never be seen again in the history of civilisation and it's stored right here."
The film delivers visual beauty in spades. Balog's images manage to distil something intangible about our relationship with nature, but the sounds that accompany them in Chasing Ice transport you more than any photography exhibition could. Ice groans as it expires, wind lashes at the technical fabrics that ensure the team's survival, torrents of water crash into bottomless cracks in the ice. To paraphrase Robert Redford's remarks about the film, it deserves to be not just seen but also felt on the big screen.
I've been waiting for years for a feature-length film about climate change that would go beyond a lecture about science or a trite sci-fi attempt at narrative. Is this it? Nearly. It is so good to finally have someone show, not tell. I only wish the film-makers had not been tempted to include the graphs, science explanations, and the opening sequence in which excerpts from newscasts on natural disasters are stacked in rapid succession. We've seen those before and know they only preach to the converted.
In between, though, Chasing Ice engulfs you in the magnificence of a world most of us will never see. Which only leaves the question, "Why?"
Chasing Ice, directed by Jeff Orlowski, is showing at select cinemas in the US, Canada and the UK. You can also request a screening near you.
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