R E V I E W
The Ultimate Game Changer
Chasing Ice
Ice melt on the Birthday Glacier, Greenland Ice Sheet. A person is at upper center for scale. The film Chasing Ice documents the earth’s ice caps are melting at a rate never before known. Most of the consequences therefore can only be speculated on. James Balog photo
Climate change has been publicly acknowledged as a problem for at least the last 43 years. Every U.S. college and university of any stature had a major event for the first Earth Day in April 1970. The focus of these events was climate change. Climate change was not something discovered that previous winter. Evidence had been collected and studied by a range of scientific disciplines for decades before 1970.
How could something so critically important to human survival be so vehemently disputed by some after what may be 100 years or more of observation? That question needs to be addressed to the oil, coal and energy companies that supported the deniers. These companies were making unprecedented fortunes and stood to gain the most if the effects of their products on the planet could be masked.
This slow evolution of reality is both apart of the propaganda machine to preserve the income of the most profitable industry in the history of the world, but it is also a function of the way climate change develops. We humans cannot see it, the changes are very incremental, scattered evidence is more easily dismissed and it is just difficult to grasp that this huge billions of years old planet may be made uninhabitable as we have known it in less than 200 years.
One American photographer decided to make a documentary about one of the most visible and possibly dramatic effects of climate change, the melting of the earth’s ice caps.
In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.
Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.
As the debate polarizes America and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Balog finds himself at the end of his tether. Battling untested technology in subzero conditions, he comes face to face with his own mortality. It takes years for Balog to see the fruits of his labor. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. Chasing Ice depicts a photographer trying to deliver evidence and hope to our carbon-powered planet.
Interested viewers will need to seek out showings of this film as it will not likely be seen at the local multi-plex.
For a list of U.S. Theaters showing Chasing Ice go to: http://www.chasingice.com/see-the-film/showtimes-2/ OR click on the the link at fishermensvoice.com/chasingice.