- 1 day ago
逐冰之旅
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00:00:07Oh
00:00:45It's hard not to be impressed when you see entire houses being swept away by floodwaters
00:00:51in the west.
00:00:52Fires stretch from one end of Texas to the other.
00:00:55Tornadoes, a dozen tornadoes, have already been spotted.
00:00:59Liberals will say, well, if it's cold, it's global warming, if it's snowing, it's global
00:01:03warming.
00:01:03If it's hot, it's global warming.
00:01:04There's nothing that doesn't prove that it's global warming.
00:01:07The latest estimates for rebuilding from Irene, already $7 billion.
00:01:122011 is now on track to be the most expensive year ever for weather-related damage.
00:01:18A drought of historic proportions has hit Nepal.
00:01:22The horror of raging wildfires has again returned to Russia.
00:01:25They say it was like nothing they've ever seen before.
00:01:2916 of the last 20 years are the hottest on record.
00:01:34The science is not in.
00:01:36It is in.
00:01:36No.
00:01:37Stuart, quit saying that.
00:01:38It's not over.
00:01:39The globe is actually cooling and has been cooling since 2002.
00:01:43The consensus is that there is no consensus.
00:01:47I mean, how do you not?
00:01:48Global warming is real.
00:01:51You're about to self-implode.
00:01:52The ice caps at the poles are not going to melt.
00:01:55The oceans are not going to flood the coast.
00:01:57I promise you, 20 years from today, I'll be the one that's laughing.
00:02:19The worst that would happen is I'd just get really wet if I just stood in place.
00:02:23No, you fall, you try to run, you bang your knee on a piece of ice, and you bust your
00:02:27knee.
00:02:28I just, I have to get this picture.
00:02:32The first time I worked with James, it was obvious how he goes about things, you know?
00:02:37All right, quickly.
00:02:39This light won't last forever.
00:02:42He pushes it.
00:02:43He's looking for something.
00:02:44You do have rope in the car?
00:02:46Yeah.
00:02:46Go back and get whatever you have.
00:02:48Okay.
00:02:50All right, all right, I'm, I'm almost certain to get wet, okay?
00:02:56In fact, I think I'm so certain to get wet, I'll take my boots off.
00:03:01And it was very interesting because it was his first real encounter at looking at ice in that way.
00:03:11He really did fall in love with it.
00:03:38There's this limitless universe of forms out there that is just surreal, otherworldly.
00:03:49sculptural, architectural.
00:03:53Insanely, ridiculously beautiful.
00:03:56And that's when I thought, okay, the story is in the ice.
00:04:02Somehow.
00:04:22I was, um, about 25 or so, I guess, and I was finishing my master's degree in geomorphology.
00:04:31And, um, I loved the science, but I wasn't interested in, in being a scientist.
00:04:37The modern world of science was all about statistics and computer modeling, and that just wasn't me.
00:04:45I had no contacts in the photo world.
00:04:49I had no knowledge of the photo worlds.
00:04:51But youthful brashness can take you a long way, make things happen.
00:04:55So, that's how it worked.
00:04:59I had this idea that the most powerful issue of our time was the interaction of humans and nature.
00:05:09One of the subjects I started to look at involved people hunting.
00:05:14But they were bloody, gory, horrific pictures, hard to look at, hard for me to look at even today.
00:05:21And so, when I had this idea to look at endangered wildlife,
00:05:25I realized that I needed to show these things in a more seductive fashion.
00:05:30I had to look at it in ways that would engage people, pull them in.
00:05:37He's always taken the big view.
00:05:39You know, he's not looking at this little micro slice.
00:05:42He's really looking at what humanity is doing from a very large perspective.
00:05:48His books, they force you to regard nature in a way that you're not accustomed to looking at them.
00:05:54He's forcing you to think.
00:05:55He's forcing me to think.
00:05:56And that's what I love about James' work.
00:06:00You know, Ansel Adams was the father of all landscape photography.
00:06:03And he created a movement around wilderness that only images could do.
00:06:08And now you have James with that same kind of eye,
00:06:11but being able to do more with the technology.
00:06:15It isn't just the drive to climb mountains and hang off cliffs.
00:06:19He has the ability to capture it and weigh and communicate it.
00:06:24Observing it and knowing it is one thing.
00:06:26Sharing it and sharing it effectively can change the world.
00:06:32I did a couple of years of research on the climate change story,
00:06:35trying to find what you could photograph about climate change that would make interesting photographs.
00:06:41And I eventually realized that the only thing that to me sounded right was ice.
00:06:49He came to us with a proposal to do a profile of one glacier in Iceland.
00:06:54We essentially countered to him.
00:06:56He said, well, look, why don't we just do a bigger story?
00:06:59It was on the cover of the magazine.
00:07:01Most popular, most well-read story in the last five years.
00:07:08As I was shooting that story, I started to get the very strong sense that this was a scouting mission
00:07:14for something much bigger and much longer term that was about to unfold.
00:07:22The Solheim Glacier, the Sunhouse Glacier in translation, is where I really first got it.
00:07:29That glacier had been receding several hundred feet a year, which is a lot.
00:07:35You normally have a little bit of advance in the wintertime and a little bit of retreat in the summertime.
00:07:40But when you see huge amounts of change, that's outside normal behavior.
00:07:48There was a real sense of the glacier just coming to an end,
00:07:52and like this old, decrepit man just, you know, falling into the earth and dying.
00:07:57It was very evocative, very emotional.
00:08:05As a guy who's been mountaineering for basically my whole adult life,
00:08:10someone who's trained in earth sciences,
00:08:12I never imagined that you could see features this big disappearing in such a short period of time.
00:08:22But when I did, when I saw that, I realized,
00:08:25my God, there's a powerful piece of history that's unfolding in these pictures,
00:08:30and I have to go back to those same spots.
00:08:35So I set up a whole bunch of camera positions around that glacier
00:08:38where I would just go back and shoot a single frame.
00:08:40You know, one in April, one in October,
00:08:43and we would just see how the glacier changed in six months.
00:09:01That glacier had changed so much that, I'm not kidding,
00:09:05for like three hours, we stood there looking at the prints of six months ago,
00:09:09looking at the glacier going, we must be wrong.
00:09:11We can't be in the right places.
00:09:13Peer to be from over there.
00:09:49And when I saw those, the lights went off for me.
00:09:53I realized the public doesn't want to hear about more statistical studies,
00:09:57more computer models, more projections.
00:09:59What they need is a believable, understandable piece of visual evidence,
00:10:05something that grabs them in the gut.
00:10:12So I created this project called the Extreme Ice Survey, or EIS.
00:10:17The initial goal was to put out 25 cameras for three years,
00:10:21and they would shoot every hour as long as it was daylight.
00:10:24We would download the cameras every so often
00:10:27and turn those individual frames into video clips
00:10:30that would show you how the landscape was changing.
00:10:35I thought that basically you could just buy all this time-lapse equipment off the shelf,
00:10:40slam it together, and put it out there.
00:10:42I was so naive about that.
00:10:45There was a custom computer that needed to be built,
00:10:48and there were a thousand little engineering details
00:10:50that needed to be worked out in a lot of trial and error
00:10:53because people hadn't built this stuff before.
00:10:56And it was clear to me it would have to be a team effort.
00:11:04I wasn't that into photography,
00:11:06but I talked them into letting me come up here
00:11:08and have a look at the system because I was curious,
00:11:10and I really wanted to do whatever I could to get my foot in the door.
00:11:15Spav is the field assistant in Iceland.
00:11:17You ready?
00:11:18As ready as I can be.
00:11:20These are just really attractive
00:11:21because I think they're more picturesque,
00:11:22and they're still big glaciers.
00:11:24Jason had a deep, deep well of experience
00:11:27about Greenland's glaciers, about Greenland logistics,
00:11:31about what the glaciers were doing.
00:11:33Tad's a glaciologist.
00:11:34He's the grandfather, the godfather of the knowledge base
00:11:38about those glaciers in Alaska.
00:11:40The scope and the scale of EIS
00:11:42is bigger than any other project since I've known him.
00:11:45They would work all day in our little, used to be our garage,
00:11:49turned into a workshop until sometimes 11, 12 o'clock at night.
00:11:53James sent me a gear list of things that I had never heard.
00:11:57I mean, ice axes and crampons,
00:11:59all of this technical climbing gear that I had never used before.
00:12:03I remember thinking,
00:12:04I never want to do ice climbing or ice-related stuff.
00:12:07It's dangerous, I'm going to die.
00:12:10But of course, I still went with James to Iceland.
00:12:24I'm just saying, Jesus Christ.
00:12:27I'm just emphasizing how bad the weather is.
00:12:31Yeah, I don't need it.
00:12:34I get it.
00:12:38The essence of the camera systems is based on
00:12:41putting really delicate electronics
00:12:42in the harshest conditions on the planet.
00:12:45They have to withstand hurricane-force winds,
00:12:48negative 40-degree temperatures.
00:12:50It's not the nicest environment for technology to be sitting out in.
00:13:07I'm just saying, I'm not going to die.
00:13:09I'm really sorry, not going to die.
00:13:10I'm aής.
00:13:26whatever the dangers of that boulder are that's a better spot than this is but we found a place to
00:13:31hide the camera that's the good news the bad news is we've got a major engineering project to try
00:13:37and get that thing anchored and supported this thing is loose look how soft this stuff is yeah
00:13:43it's got to be this action right here this is fantastic look at this it's exactly what we wanted
00:14:07oh here we go the first eyeballs on the glacier finally let's uh see what a couple years brings
00:14:15to us we installed five cameras in total on that trip after that we went on to greenland
00:14:55when glaciers break these gigantic icebergs off into the ocean it's called calving c-a-l-v-i-n-g
00:15:08ever since glaciers have entered the ocean hundreds of thousands of years ago ice has always calved off
00:15:16but what we're seeing now is the greenland ice sheet thinning out and dumping ever more
00:15:23ice and water into the ocean okay good yep right up here
00:15:55it's sort of like doing a portrait of of people you know uh richard avidon and irving penn
00:16:02spent their entire careers doing portraits of faces essentially and found endless variation and endless
00:16:09beauty and endless magic in those faces and for me that's the same thing as what's going on here
00:16:17you know you feel the this tension between this huge enduring power of these glaciers and their
00:16:25fragility you know they came from a great and impassive place and now they're just they're crumbling
00:16:32into these tiny little blocks of ice going off into the ocean it's crazy
00:16:49my first trip to greenland we were setting up one of the cameras at store glacier when we got there
00:16:54we
00:16:54saw this really bizarre looking peninsula just kind of perched out at the front of this the calving face
00:17:00of the glacier where the glacier ends this thing is going to break off all summer long man look at
00:17:04this
00:17:04those peninsulas are are just a matter of days at most a couple weeks but it was huge it was
00:17:11five
00:17:11football fields long 1500 feet long and about 300 feet above the surface of the water as we're setting
00:17:19up the cameras we also set up a video camera and had it pointed right there at that peninsula and
00:17:24we just
00:17:24we just had it rolling just in case oh my god giant crack just formed
00:17:40see that that whole island is going away there it goes man
00:18:18we were there for just a one hour period of time
00:18:22and absurdly somehow fortunately captured an event that seldom is caught on film
00:18:31this is really big stuff happening right under our noses right now
00:18:37but i feel like time is clicking you know and we need to get these cameras out here
00:19:13the logistics of things are just like crazy it reminds you how far he's willing to take an idea
00:19:21so
00:19:31Tight, tight, tight.
00:20:04This is tonight's dinner I just found out.
00:20:14Eight, seven, six, five.
00:20:38Oh, this is the way to travel, my friends.
00:20:54We ended up installing about a dozen cameras in Greenland, five in Iceland, five in Alaska,
00:21:00and two in Montana.
00:21:02Frankly, I can't believe that, and we actually managed to pull this off.
00:21:15You know, about 20 years ago, I was a skeptic about climate change.
00:21:19I thought it was based on computer models.
00:21:22I thought maybe there was a lot of hyperbole that was turning this into an activist cause.
00:21:27But most importantly, I didn't think that humans were capable of changing the basic physics
00:21:33and chemistry of this entire huge planet.
00:21:37It didn't seem probable.
00:21:38It didn't seem possible.
00:21:44And then I learned about the record that's in the ice cores.
00:21:47The history of ancient climate that was embedded in those cores.
00:21:52And the story that the glaciers were telling.
00:21:56The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are these giant domes of ice that preserve climate records very much like tree
00:22:04rings.
00:22:06Snow is added to the top, turns into ice, and ice core scientists can drill holes through the ice sheets
00:22:13and pull out a core and examine not only the ice but also bubbles of ancient air that are trapped
00:22:21in the ice.
00:22:22By looking at the chemistry of the ice, we can learn about past temperature.
00:22:27And by looking at the air, we can actually measure the carbon dioxide content.
00:22:31And one of the things that we learn is that past temperature and carbon dioxide vary together.
00:22:35They go up together, they go down together.
00:22:40And over the last 800,000 years or so, atmospheric carbon dioxide was never higher than about 280 parts per
00:22:48million.
00:22:50Until we started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
00:22:54And now it's about 390 parts per million.
00:22:56And that's about 40% higher than it was when carbon dioxide was only varying for natural reasons.
00:23:02But now we're headed for 500 parts per million or more.
00:23:07That pace is a hundred to a thousand times greater than the pace at which things have changed by themselves
00:23:13naturally.
00:23:13The amazing thing to me is that we're already seeing impacts because the change already has been so small, right?
00:23:19It's been 0.8 degrees C, about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1850 or so.
00:23:24And yet we've seen so much stuff, crazy stuff going on already.
00:23:32What counts to me more than the notion of climate changing is that the air is changing.
00:23:39The air that we live in, the air that sustains us, the basic physics and chemistry of that air is
00:23:45changing.
00:23:48This is about the stuff that you and I breathe.
00:23:51And that affects everything in the agriculture, in the water supply, in the biology of all the plants and animals
00:23:57around us.
00:23:59Plants and animals are already going extinct.
00:24:01They're going extinct a hundred times faster now than they did a thousand years ago.
00:24:05And as the climate continues to warm, we're going to lose more and more and more species because we're going
00:24:10to have more surprises happening.
00:24:12We are going to have a mass extinction event that could happen within the next 200 to 300 years.
00:24:17Mass extinction event means that we lose half or maybe three quarters of the number of species that we have
00:24:23on the planet.
00:24:25Are we going to be losing the plants that clean our water, the plants that clean our air?
00:24:30If there's no pollinators out there to pollinate, then we're going to have to do it by hand.
00:24:35And they're already doing that in China, having to go out and pollinate the crops by hand.
00:24:44In the last 20 years, we've lost close to 20% of the forest area in Arizona, New Mexico.
00:24:52And that's high mortality in those forest areas.
00:24:56We have seen increasing in the length of the fire season by more than two months.
00:25:01Larger fires in the western United States in the last 20 years.
00:25:05And we've seen hotter fires, more extreme fires burning.
00:25:09It's not just by chance that I'm seeing many rare events happening all in sequence.
00:25:15There's a reason for that. We're seeing extraordinary changes in our environment.
00:25:24New degree is the world's largest reinsurer, reinsurance company, and our business model is to provide insurance for the insurance
00:25:33companies.
00:25:35As New degree is a major reinsurer for natural perils, natural catastrophes, we need to know the risks as best
00:25:44as we can.
00:25:46We have discovered some trends in the number and in the losses natural perils have caused.
00:25:55And interestingly, for the weather-related events, our activities, primarily greenhouse gas emissions, are already contributing to more intense and
00:26:05more events.
00:26:06It cannot be explained by just better reporting. It has to be explained by changes in the atmospheric conditions.
00:26:16Imagine a baseball player on steroids who steps up to the plate and hits home run.
00:26:21Can you attribute that home run to his taking steroids?
00:26:25Well, steroids occur naturally in very small amounts in your system.
00:26:28But by adding just a little bit to those steroids, you can change your background physical state and increase your
00:26:33chances for enhanced performance.
00:26:35And that's exactly what happens in the climate system.
00:26:37Greenhouse gases occur in very small amounts.
00:26:39But by increasing that just a little bit, you change the background state of the system and make it much
00:26:44more susceptible to increased extremes.
00:26:49If you had an abscess in your tooth, would you keep going to dentist after dentist until you found a
00:26:55dentist who said,
00:26:56Ah, don't worry about it. Leave that rotten tooth in.
00:26:59Or would you pull it out because most of the other dentists told you you had a problem?
00:27:05That's sort of what we're doing with climate change.
00:27:08We'll be arguing about this for centuries.
00:27:12We're still arguing about a minor thing called evolution.
00:27:15A minor thing about whether man actually walked on the moon.
00:27:18Look how huge that is.
00:27:20We don't have time.
00:27:44We have low oil pressure on engine number two.
00:27:47So I'm shot on engine number two.
00:27:52We cannot hover with one engine.
00:27:59You look out that window at that seawater with icebergs floating around in there and you realize we go in
00:28:04there.
00:28:05We'll have five minutes of physical function and in ten minutes we're dead.
00:28:13The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need their help.
00:28:19Uh..
00:28:20типа
00:28:20And I can see that they are coming with the plane, I give it to you.
00:28:51He needs to do his adventures.
00:28:53That's what makes him who he is.
00:28:55That's who the man is, that's who I love, that's who I married.
00:28:59Do I wish sometimes that it was closer and he would come home at night at 5 o'clock?
00:29:05As a wife, yes.
00:29:06As a human being, it needs to continue, so.
00:29:14He's on this never-ending quest for something.
00:29:19He's just going and hoping that something that he's doing is taking him in the right direction.
00:29:26And I think that EIS is it.
00:29:30He's looking to make a global worldwide impact.
00:29:38I've never seen him so passionate about a project before.
00:29:56All right, this is better.
00:29:59It's my job to go out there every couple of months, to visit the cameras, to go over if everything
00:30:04is okay.
00:30:09There was always a possibility that this would happen.
00:30:14This just, this whole piece must have cracked off in one part, flew off into whoever knows where.
00:30:20Yeah.
00:30:21The rock obviously did not read our warning.
00:30:24It's only shot eight pictures in the past 24 hours, which is somewhat weird.
00:30:33Yeah, in fact, it's very weird.
00:30:37It could, could still shoot.
00:30:39Come on, please.
00:30:41Please work.
00:30:42It's dead.
00:30:43It has to be dead.
00:30:47So everything we're trying is, is getting thwarted.
00:30:56Zebras.
00:30:57We're getting the zebras again.
00:31:00Oh.
00:31:03We've had numerous, numerous timer failures.
00:31:07We've had cameras buried under 15 or 20 feet of snow.
00:31:12Ugh.
00:31:13Oh my.
00:31:14We've had plexiglass windows sandblasted.
00:31:18We've had batteries explode inside the camera boxes.
00:31:21I think it's a bird just kind of pecking away at it.
00:31:24This is what a fox does to your cables when you're not looking.
00:31:28He had spent a lot of money from grants, personal money, getting to Alaska, getting to Greenland.
00:31:34And when you go out there, you want it to work.
00:31:35And when something doesn't work, you feel so far from anything and anyone that can help you.
00:31:41I think it's in that voltage regulator.
00:31:52All of that obsession means absolutely nothing if a little electronic piece that big doesn't work.
00:32:00If I don't have pictures, I don't have anything.
00:32:03You know, everything is a failure.
00:32:06No, it's dead. It's not working.
00:32:08Period, flat out, just dead.
00:32:11It's dead.
00:32:13God, after all this, after all this, I just, it makes me insane.
00:32:18It makes me fucking insane.
00:32:26It's so disappointing.
00:32:32It's hard to see somebody that you love chase after something that might not ever happen.
00:32:39You know, the future's disease is really Просто's disease.
00:33:18you see that white dot down there there's a white dot on the on the something's happening inside the
00:33:26timer yeah after months of troubleshooting we realized that the core problem was in the voltage
00:33:31regulator and in this little computer timer this custom-made computer that told the cameras when
00:33:36to fire we worked with these guys at national geographic and we sat down and redesigned the
00:33:42controllers we switched to an entirely different kind of a circuit that used less power is a lot
00:33:48more reliable because it has a simpler electronic circuitry inside it that was the turning point for
00:33:55the whole system we had to replace all the old timers and had to wait for a whole season to
00:34:02check
00:34:03on them again and make sure that they were working
00:34:33so
00:34:57gotta be getting close
00:34:59we'll be able to see it from up here
00:35:04ah yeah
00:35:12okay all right this is a big one
00:35:23okay here goes playback
00:35:31march 11 2008 it just shot it's been working all winter
00:35:42oh man
00:35:43i can't believe that word
00:35:47you know how cold it's been out here for how long i'm unbelievably surprised
00:35:51we have over 2300 frames since june
00:35:58and everything's working
00:36:24it's been shooting the entire time
00:36:29fantastic
00:36:32here's the memory of the camera and this is actually that's an interesting thought
00:36:35this is the memory of the landscape that landscape is gone it may never be seen again in the history
00:36:41of civilization and it's stored right here
00:36:55in 1984 the glacier was down there 11 miles away and today it's back here receded 11 miles
00:37:04the glacier is retreating but it's also thinning at the same time it's like air being let out of a
00:37:10balloon
00:37:10you can see what's called the trim line it's the high water mark of the glacier in 1984.
00:37:17that vertical change is the height of the empire state building
00:37:35you know we're really in the midst of geologic scale change
00:37:39you know our brains are programmed to think that geology is something that happened a long time ago or
00:37:46will happen a long time in the future and we don't think that that can happen during these little years
00:37:51that we each live on this planet but the reality is that it does that things can happen very very
00:37:58very quickly
00:37:59we're living through one of those moments of epochal geologic change right now and we humans are causing it
00:38:06we are living through one of those moments of the universe that we've used to be living through the past
00:38:40Up and down the edges of the ice sheet, there's this zone called the melt zone.
00:38:46This is where the sheet is melting, and that stored water from the ice sheet is running out to sea.
00:39:05Oh. I have to wrap my knees for the day's festivities.
00:39:09This knee has had two surgeries on it already, and it really could use a third.
00:39:18Looks like the surface of the moon. Look at those holes.
00:39:33Oh, my gosh. Look at this stuff. I had no idea it was so thick in here.
00:39:38This stuff, this cryoconite, it's made from a combination of natural dust that blows in from the deserts of Central
00:39:45Asia,
00:39:45mixed with little flakes of carbon, fine particles of soot that come from wildfires, diesel exhaust, and coal-fired bower
00:39:54plants.
00:39:55And on top of it, there's algae that grows out here, and all of that stuff accumulates in these little
00:40:00holes.
00:40:01And because it's black, it absorbs the sun's heat more than the surrounding ice does.
00:40:06And all over the surface of the ice sheet, there's literally billions of these little cryoconite holes melting away and
00:40:14filling up with water.
00:40:16And when you look down on those holes, you can actually see these little bubbles of ancient air being released
00:40:22as the ice sheet melts.
00:40:32The part of Greenland that's melting is out on the edges of the ice sheet.
00:40:37And that area is growing, and it's moving higher up onto the ice sheet as the climate changes in that
00:40:43part of the world.
00:40:44You see all this water melting down through these Swiss cheese holes, and you see it melting down through the
00:40:50channels.
00:40:50It goes from little channels into big channels, and eventually, everything drops vertically down through these big Mulan caverns,
00:40:59goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet, and out to the ocean.
00:41:06Ordinarily, if you make climate a little warmer, the glacier shrinks a little bit.
00:41:10If you make climate a little colder, the glacier grows a little bit.
00:41:13And those two things kind of work to maintain a balance.
00:41:17But if it gets too warm, and the ice gets too thin, it doesn't respond just a little bit.
00:41:21The volume drops.
00:41:23You cross that tipping point, climate no longer matters.
00:41:27It's irreversible. It's just going to keep going.
00:41:30The sea level rise that will happen in my daughter's lifetimes will be somewhere between a foot and a half
00:41:36and three feet, minimum.
00:41:38That doesn't sound like a lot if you live up in the Rocky Mountains.
00:41:41But if you live down in Chesapeake Bay, along the Gulf Coast of the United States, in the Ganges floodplain,
00:41:47that matters a lot.
00:41:49It matters in China. It matters in Indonesia.
00:41:51A minimum of 150 million people will be displaced.
00:41:56That's like approximately half the size of the United States.
00:41:59And all those people are going to be flushed out and have to move somewhere else.
00:42:04It also intensifies the impact of hurricanes and typhoons.
00:42:08It means that there's a lot more high water along the coastline.
00:42:12So when these big storms come, it pushes that much more water that much further inland.
00:42:18That's where our story of Greenland climate change is expressed.
00:42:22It's in that meltwater rushing out to the ocean.
00:42:25That's what we're photographing.
00:42:27That's what I've been up there trying to document.
00:42:29That's what I've been up there trying to document.
00:43:04You know, I've seen this thing from your photos and sat pictures, but to be here is incredible.
00:43:09It's all becoming a little more real.
00:43:13While we're heading over, why don't I walk over there and give you some scale?
00:43:17Sure.
00:43:18Just be careful.
00:43:19Don't get too close to the edge, all right?
00:43:21Stay up where it's flat.
00:43:25This is really something.
00:43:29It's terrifying.
00:43:31This isn't a ten-foot little hole in the ground.
00:43:34It's a hundred feet deep into an abyss.
00:43:37And if you don't have that little dot of a person for scale, then it's lost.
00:43:43That is fabulous.
00:43:45This is a reasonable route right here.
00:43:48Look at that.
00:43:49Oh, yeah.
00:43:49That's like a gift.
00:43:50This is the dangerous spot.
00:43:52Yeah.
00:43:52For sure.
00:43:53Well, and then the other danger is that the whole thing suddenly implodes and the entire
00:43:57thing collapses, but I don't think that's very likely.
00:44:02This Mulan is one of thousands of Mulans all over the melt zone in Greenland.
00:44:07And every day, the ice is cooking down and water is pouring into the ice sheet.
00:44:12It's enormous.
00:44:13You can't wrap your head around how much water is coming off of this place.
00:44:19You got it.
00:44:31Adam, have you ever done something like this before?
00:44:33No.
00:44:34Not at all.
00:44:48It's all calculated risk.
00:44:50It's not like we're just going out there and playing Russian roulette.
00:45:00Piece of cake.
00:45:06Oh, there's all sorts of curious crinkling and crunching effects in my knee.
00:45:16It's not what the doctor ordered.
00:45:21All right.
00:45:31Look down.
00:45:32Look down?
00:45:33Look down.
00:45:37It's just bottomless.
00:45:39Oh, my God.
00:45:43I do not want to go any lower than this.
00:45:46I'm going out here on this broken fin, okay?
00:45:49And I assume it won't collapse.
00:46:09Okay.
00:46:10All done.
00:46:11Oh, thank God.
00:46:28There were audible chunks of gravel-like substances that I could feel rolling around in there.
00:46:37I was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories and painkillers so that I could function in the field, and
00:46:43I would think, oh, that's pretty good, not so bad.
00:46:46But the drugs were masking the symptoms, but the drugs were masking the symptoms way more than I had realized.
00:46:52Oh, my God.
00:46:54I love you.
00:46:55I love you.
00:46:55I love you.
00:46:57I love you.
00:46:59I love you too.
00:47:20This is a myth.
00:47:21The notion that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, caused global warming is probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on
00:47:28the American people.
00:47:28All of this garbage science has been a total fraud and a fake.
00:47:39Jeez.
00:47:40Jim was told after his surgery that hiking is not a form of exercise that they want him to pursue
00:47:46anymore.
00:47:48I'm not sure that's sunken in quite yet.
00:47:59I think when we started out, the glacier was approximately right here.
00:48:03It might have been there, it might have been here, but it's in this zone somewhere.
00:48:12Look, look at this.
00:48:14In, in, in 05, you couldn't even look into the canyon back there.
00:48:18Look, it was all filled up to that point.
00:48:21And look how, look how low it is now.
00:48:32Beautiful.
00:48:38And that's 2007.
00:48:40That isn't even 2005.
00:48:45In 2007, just two years ago, you couldn't see any of that mountain ridge over there.
00:48:51The thing is deflated tremendously.
00:48:53I mean, I don't know what the number of feet is, but it's a lot.
00:48:58If I hadn't seen it in the pictures, I wouldn't believe it at all.
00:49:25If I hadn't seen it in the pictures, I wouldn't believe it at all.
00:49:28You know, we, uh, if a glacier that's been here for 30,000 years or 100,000 years is literally
00:49:35dying in front of my eyes.
00:49:37You're very aware of the fact that, you know, sometime you, uh, sometime you go out over the horizon and
00:49:53you don't come back.
00:50:10James is now doing exactly what his doctors said he shouldn't be doing.
00:50:29Oh, man.
00:50:32Okay.
00:50:34A little more.
00:50:36Okay.
00:50:41Yes.
00:50:42There you go.
00:50:57It feels worse this morning than it has any day since the surgery.
00:51:03It felt better the three days after the surgery than it feels right now.
00:51:07I think the best that can be said about this is, uh, I'm a safety liability.
00:51:15No, I mean, you can maybe limp your way up, but you can't go down that.
00:51:20Unless you're in a wheelchair.
00:51:22I mean, we need to go up there, check on the camera and all of that, but you don't necessarily
00:51:29need to do it.
00:51:30I mean, that's, that's more of a climb than we did in the past two days.
00:51:34I have a hard time letting ideas go, you know.
00:51:36But here's another thing.
00:51:37Here's another thing.
00:51:38That's why your knee's like this.
00:51:41Okay.
00:51:42You guys should at least go and look at one of the cameras, get it downloaded, get the computer changed
00:51:46today.
00:51:47Okay?
00:51:47Yep.
00:51:49All right.
00:51:50Enough.
00:51:56See the route?
00:52:12Okay.
00:52:13Okay.
00:52:13Hold on.
00:52:17Oh.
00:52:18You get in there.
00:52:20Ah!
00:52:22That's it.
00:52:29Let's get out of here.
00:52:40Every once in a while, I get this thing in the back of my head saying, what were you thinking?
00:52:45Maybe that, maybe that office job wasn't so bad.
00:52:49Look.
00:52:50The sandwich isn't better here.
00:52:52The same, after the sandwich, I'm totally happy to be here.
00:52:55All right.
00:52:56This project is, now we're two years in.
00:53:00You have, like, hundreds of thousands of images.
00:53:03It feels like, yeah, he goes to that point where he can't anymore and sometimes you even feel he's going
00:53:08further.
00:53:08Yeah, you hear how he speaks about it.
00:53:09He says, well, so I'll just do a fourth knee surgery, you know.
00:53:13Like, how many, however many it takes to keep him going.
00:53:16Like, most people say, I'm gonna get knee surgery to fix me, you know, kind of, to make it better.
00:53:21But for him, it's to make it better so that he can keep on pushing it, destroying it, basically.
00:53:27And then maybe he'll just have to do it again.
00:53:45Okay, Slav, you ready for another exposure? Do it exactly as you just did it, okay?
00:53:50You're ready?
00:53:51Okay.
00:53:51Low beam.
00:53:53So as quick as I can, I cover it.
00:53:55That's right.
00:53:56Way back early in my career, I discovered that there was really something special about photographing at night.
00:54:02that places your mind on the surface of a planet.
00:54:13You're no longer just a human being walking around in the regular world.
00:54:17You're a human animal striding around on the surface of a planet that's out in the middle of a galaxy.
00:54:28We, as a culture, we're forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep
00:54:35connection and contact with nature.
00:54:38You can't divorce civilization from nature.
00:54:41We totally depend on it.
00:55:11You're letting that to stay within your life.
00:55:24Shortly after that, he sent us on this month-long, massive trip to a place that's really hard
00:55:31to get to, to get a shot that is just, it was such a shot in the dark.
00:55:37The idea spawned from this one glacier called Storr.
00:55:42That event was so spectacular, we decided, okay, we gotta go back and go to the big glacier,
00:55:49Lulisset Glacier, and sit and wait.
00:55:54Gonna try to catch some, some big calving events, you know, kilometer-wide pieces of ice coming
00:56:02off of this massive, massive glacier.
00:56:08The Lulisset Glacier is kind of like the mother of all glaciers in Greenland.
00:56:11It is the most productive glacier in the Northern Hemisphere.
00:56:15It's rumored that this is the glacier that put out the iceberg that sank the Titanic.
00:56:19It flows at 130 feet every day.
00:56:27This is a really, really huge fjord of ice, and it's about five miles wide.
00:56:43That is massive.
00:56:46I totally lost him.
00:56:48You see him still?
00:56:49He's going, he's, he's about to turn and go in front of the peninsula that we think's
00:56:52gonna go.
00:56:53Oh, I see.
00:56:53He's at the base of it.
00:57:04What's up?
00:57:06My boots are frozen, and I'm really tired.
00:57:12And nothing happens for days and days and days.
00:57:17We call it a glacier watching because literally it was just me and Adam for three weeks watching
00:57:25ice.
00:57:40Photography for me has been as much as anything about a raising of
00:57:45awareness.
00:57:46Through that camera, you know, we become vehicles to raise awareness outside my own experience.
00:57:53And in this case, we are the messengers.
00:58:11He is a visionary, and his works are like sacred objects.
00:58:15I present James Balog.
00:58:18Well, thank you so much.
00:58:21Can we dim the house lights a little bit more?
00:58:24That's it.
00:58:25Okay.
00:58:26What I'm here to do tonight is bring to you tangible visual evidence of the immediacy of
00:58:32climate change itself.
00:58:34Glaciers matter because they're the canary in the global coal mine.
00:58:38It's the place where you can see climate change happening.
00:58:41Without further ado, let me tell you what we've been seeing out there.
00:58:45This is a glacier called the Solheim Glacier.
00:58:48We're looking down on it.
00:58:50Now we turn on our time lapse.
00:59:01You can see the terminus retreating.
00:59:03You can see this river being formed.
00:59:05You can see it deflating.
00:59:08Go back a couple of years in time.
00:59:11That's where it started.
00:59:14That's where it ended a few months ago.
00:59:17Now down onto the side of the glacier, looking across the terminus, this is what we see.
00:59:25Look at this.
00:59:26You'll see deflation happening here as the heat takes away the surface of the glacier
00:59:31and the surface drops.
00:59:32At the same time, a stream is undercutting it from a glacier that's melting faster up valley,
00:59:37washing this thing away.
00:59:49The vast majority of glaciers in the world are retreating.
00:59:53Glacier National Park Montana will need a new name.
00:59:56We'll be calling it Glacier-less National Park by the middle of the century because all the
01:00:00glaciers will be gone.
01:00:02There's such a strange, bizarre fascination and seeing these things you don't normally
01:00:08get to see come alive.
01:00:18We're up at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska.
01:00:20This is a view of what's called a calving face.
01:00:23This is what one of our cameras saw over the course of a few months.
01:00:32The action at Columbia is in part due to local glacier dynamics and in part due to climate
01:00:38change.
01:00:40Here's another time-lapse shot of Columbia and everybody says, well, don't they advance
01:00:45in the wintertime?
01:00:46No, it was retreating through the winter because it's an unhealthy glacier.
01:00:51We realized it was retreating so far, we had to turn the camera upstream to follow the retreat.
01:01:08Then we had to pivot it again.
01:01:14And then when we went back this past August, it was so far out of frame, we had to turn
01:01:19the camera one more time so we could still see the glacier.
01:01:30So that's where we started three years ago, way out on the left.
01:01:33That's where we were a few months ago, last time we were into Columbia.
01:01:54We're going to have to collapse it and put rocks over it.
01:01:59It's ripping too.
01:02:01We've got to collapse it now.
01:02:10James Bailog is documenting the melting of glaciers around the world, the most visible
01:02:15manifestations of climate change on the planet, and he's making it possible for scientists
01:02:19to watch too.
01:02:21James Bailog is founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey.
01:02:24He's joining us now from Denver.
01:02:25James, thanks for being with us.
01:02:27My pleasure, thank you.
01:02:27And we'll also have more of our special report on a man who lets his pictures do the
01:02:32talking.
01:02:33As a photographer, it's exciting to see this stuff.
01:02:36But as a citizen of the world, you go, this is horrible.
01:02:39And consider who NASA is sending as a delegate to the climate change summit in Copenhagen,
01:02:44Jim Bailog, a photographer with the group Extreme Ice Survey.
01:02:47James Bailog, A.D.: Prior to 06, the glacier had retreated 10, 11 miles, and now we've added
01:02:53just in the past few years another two and a half miles.
01:02:57James Bailog, A.D.: One of the things you often hear in the debate about glacier change
01:03:00is that there are glaciers around the world which are also getting bigger and advancing.
01:03:04So how can that be?
01:03:06How can that be a response to a global warming signal?
01:03:10What we've done recently on the Yukon Territory in Canada, where we looked at the change in
01:03:14glacier area from 1958 to 2008.
01:03:17And what we found was of the 1,400 glaciers that were there in 1958, four got bigger.
01:03:24Over 300 disappeared completely.
01:03:27And almost all of the rest got smaller.
01:03:30Yes, there is a component of natural variability in the climate change we observe.
01:03:35But it's not enough to explain the full signal.
01:03:40So there has to be a greenhouse gas element to it.
01:03:44Up to the Lulisat Glacier calving phase, a little helicopter is shown for scale.
01:03:49The Atlantic Ocean is on the left side of the frame, covered with icebergs so thick that
01:03:54you could walk across the ocean and never touch the sea.
01:04:02I'm on the phone with Jim on one of our regular check-ins.
01:04:06Jim, just nothing's happening.
01:04:09Hey, Jim.
01:04:10Uh, it's going well.
01:04:12We had some serious bouts of wind, but other than that, things are fairly well set up here.
01:04:18We've got some continuous time-lapse going.
01:04:21It's starting, Adam.
01:04:21I think.
01:04:22Adam, it's starting.
01:04:24Oh wait, Jim.
01:04:25Jim.
01:04:25Jim, this is the big piece of starting the cab.
01:04:28Let me call you back.
01:04:29Call him back.
01:04:31Okay.
01:04:32Bye.
01:04:34Are you still going?
01:04:35Yeah.
01:04:35In that V section right there?
01:04:39Holy shit, look at that big bird rolling.
01:04:43All four running, right?
01:04:44Yeah.
01:04:45Look at that.
01:04:50You see how- look at the whole thing.
01:05:11There it is.
01:06:44The only way that you can really try to put it into scale with human reference is if you imagine
01:06:50Manhattan.
01:06:51And all of a sudden, all of those buildings just start to rumble and quake and peel off and just
01:06:58fall over and fall over and roll around.
01:07:01This whole massive city just breaking apart in front of your eyes.
01:07:17We're just observers.
01:07:18These two little dots on the side of the mouth.
01:07:21We watched and recorded the largest witness calving event ever caught on tape.
01:07:32So how big was this calving event that we just looked at?
01:07:35We'll resort to some illustrations again to give you a sense of scale.
01:07:42It's as if the entire lower tip of Manhattan broke off, except that the thickness, the height of it, is
01:07:50equivalent to buildings that are two and a half or three times higher than they are.
01:08:09That's a magical, miraculous, horrible, scary thing.
01:08:14I don't know that anybody's really seen the miracle and horror of that.
01:08:22It took a hundred years for it to retreat eight miles from 1900 to 2000.
01:08:27From 2000 to 2010, it retreated nine miles.
01:08:31So in 10 years, it retreated more than it had in the previous 100.
01:08:38It's real, the changes are happening.
01:08:41They're very visible, they're photographable, they're measurable.
01:08:45There's no significant scientific dispute about that.
01:08:48And the great irony and tragedy of our time is that a lot of the general public thinks that science
01:08:53is still arguing about that.
01:08:55Science is not arguing about that.
01:08:57One of the really troubling things about climate change is that almost all of the world's prestigious climatologists are much
01:09:05more frightened about all this than the public is.
01:09:09People have a hard time understanding when we talk about climate change.
01:09:14What for me is so powerful and actually unprecedented in the work that he is doing is visualizing the change
01:09:21that allows us to actually see what was and what is becoming.
01:09:27I actually saw his work last spring and that kind of changed my life in the sense that I had
01:09:34to quit what I was doing, which was working for Shell and get involved in this debate in a much
01:09:40more profound way.
01:09:43The Extreme Ice Survey will go down in history as this is the evidence that we knew what was going
01:09:50on.
01:09:52You can't deny it.
01:10:00We don't have a problem of economics, technology, and public policy.
01:10:04We have a problem of perception because not enough people really get it yet.
01:10:09I believe we have an opportunity right now.
01:10:12We are nearly on the edge of a crisis, but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge
01:10:19of our generation and fact of our century.
01:10:49When my daughters, Simone and Emily, look at me 25 or 30 years from now and say, what were you
01:10:55doing?
01:10:58When global warming was happening and you guys knew what was coming down the road, I want to be able
01:11:04to say, guys, I was doing everything I knew how to do.
01:11:21When I was going down the road, I was doing everything I knew how to do.
01:11:21When we were going down the road, I was down the road, I knew how to do it.
01:11:23When I was on the road, I was leaving.
01:11:24So, most of the road was TheseladEm 1972
01:11:53Cold feet, don't fail me now
01:12:01So much left to do
01:12:07If I should run 10,000 miles home
01:12:12Would you be there?
01:12:21Just a taste of things to come
01:12:30I still smile
01:12:35But I don't want to die alone
01:12:40I don't want to die alone
01:12:45Way before my time
01:13:13Keep calm and carry on
01:13:21No words for the wear
01:13:28I don't want to die alone
01:13:32I don't want to die alone
01:13:37Way before my time
01:13:48Is it any wonder
01:13:56All this empty air
01:14:04I'm drowning in the laughter
01:14:10Way before my time
01:14:17Time has come
01:14:32I don't want to die
01:14:33I don't want to die
01:14:46I don't want to die
01:14:54I don't want to die
01:14:54I don't want to die
01:15:04I don't want to die
01:15:04You
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