- 14 hours ago
Join an indefatigable photographer on an expedition spanning multiple continents, revealing the impact of climate change through hundreds of breathtaking photographs of glaciers.
呈現了冰河以空前速度退縮的情景，以及冰層大片崩落入海的經過...
呈現了冰河以空前速度退縮的情景，以及冰層大片崩落入海的經過...
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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.
00:12:57Any thoughts on the weather?
00:13:06It's not the best.
00:13:09It's not the best.
00:13:12It's not the best.
00:13:14It's not the best.
00:13:15It's a natural system.
00:13:15It's not the best.
00:13:26Whatever the dangers of that boulder are, that's a better spot than this is.
00:13:30But we found a place to hide the camera.
00:13:32That's the good news.
00:13:33The bad news is we've got a major engineering project to try and get that thing anchored and supported.
00:13:39This thing is loose.
00:13:41Look how soft this stuff is.
00:13:43Yeah, it's got to be this action right here.
00:13:51Uh, the other way around.
00:13:57Rock!
00:13:59This is fantastic. Look at this.
00:14:02It's exactly what we wanted.
00:14:05Okay.
00:14:07Well, here we go.
00:14:09The first eyeballs on the glacier, finally.
00:14:12Let's see what a couple years brings to us.
00:14:21We installed five cameras in total on that trip.
00:14:25After that, we went on to Greenland.
00:14:27...
00:14:31...
00:14:52...
00:14:53...
00:14:55When glaciers break these gigantic icebergs off into the ocean, it's called calving, C-A-L-V-I-N-G.
00:15:09Ever since glaciers have entered the ocean, hundreds of thousands of years ago, ice has always calved off.
00:15:17But what we're seeing now is the Greenland ice sheet thinning out and dumping ever more ice and water into
00:15:25the ocean.
00:15:40Okay, good. Yep, right up here.
00:15:55It's sort of like doing a portrait of people, you know. Richard Avedon and Irving Penn spent their entire careers
00:16:04doing portraits of faces, essentially, and found endless variation and endless beauty and endless magic in those faces.
00:16:11And for me, that's the same thing as what's going on here.
00:16:18You know, you feel this tension between this huge, enduring power of these glaciers and their fragility.
00:16:27You know, they came from a great and impassive place, and now they're just crumbling into these tiny little blocks
00:16:34of ice going off into the ocean.
00:16:37It's crazy.
00:16:49My first trip to Greenland, we were setting up one of the cameras at Storr Glacier.
00:16:53When we got there, we saw this really bizarre-looking peninsula just kind of perched out at the front of
00:16:59the calving face of the glacier, where the glacier ends.
00:17:01This thing is going to break off all summer long, man. Look at this.
00:17:04Those peninsulas are just a matter of days, at most a couple weeks.
00:17:10It was huge. It was five football fields long, 1,500 feet long, and about 300 feet above the surface
00:17:16of the water.
00:17:18As we're setting up the cameras, we also set up a video camera and had it pointed right there at
00:17:23that peninsula, and we just had it rolling, just in case.
00:17:33Oh my god, giant crack just formed.
00:17:40See that whole island? It's going away.
00:17:44There it goes, man.
00:17:45End of the island.
00:18:18We were there for just a one hour period of time and absurdly somehow, fortunately, captured
00:18:25an 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.
00:18:42I'm sorry.
00:18:56I'm sorry.
00:18:59I'm sorry.
00:19:11Okay, onward.
00:19:13The logistics of things are just like crazy.
00:19:17It reminds you how far he's willing to take an idea.
00:19:21Head up, head up!
00:19:31Tight, tight, tight.
00:19:32I'm sorry.
00:19:45I'm sorry.
00:19:47I'm sorry.
00:19:54I'm sorry.
00:20:04This is tonight's dinner I just found out.
00:20:13Eight, 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.
00:21:02And two in Montana.
00:21:03Frankly, 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.
00:21:21I thought maybe there was a lot of hyperbole that was turning this into an activist cause.
00:21:27And, but 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.
00:21:39It 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.
00:22:30And one of the things 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, atmosphere of carbon dioxide was never higher than about 280 parts
00:22:47per million.
00:22:49Until 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.
00:23:14The 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.
00:24:11We 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?
00:24:31If 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 their 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.
00:25:15You know, there's a reason for that. We're seeing extraordinary changes in our environment.
00:25:19at the end of the year.
00:25:25Munigree is the world's largest reinsurer, reinsurance company, and our business model is to provide insurance for the insurance companies.
00:25:35As Munigree is a major reinsurer for natural perils, natural catastrophes, we need to know the risks as best as
00:25:44we 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,
00:26:02are already contributing to more intense and more events.
00:26:06It cannot be explained by just better reporting.
00:26:09It 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
00:26:33and increase your chances 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
00:26:43and make it much more susceptible to increased extremes.
00:26:49If you had an abscess in your tooth, would you keep going to dentist after dentist
00:26:54until you found a dentist 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 engine number two, so I'm shot on engine number two.
00:27:52We cannot power with one engine.
00:27:59You look out that window at that seawater with icebergs floating around in there
00:28:03and you realize we go in that, we'll have five minutes of physical function
00:28:08and then in ten minutes we're dead.
00:28:13The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need their help.
00:28:22The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need their help.
00:28:33The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need to be on standby.
00:28:42The fire brigade will go up to the center side right now.
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. As a human being, it needs to continue.
00:29:14He's on this never-ending quest for something.
00:29:20He's just going and hoping that something that he's doing is taking him in the right direction.
00:29:26I 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.
00:30:21The 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. Please work.
00:30:42It's dead.
00:30:43It has to be dead.
00:30:46So 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.
00:31:08We've had cameras buried under 15 or 20 feet of snow.
00:31:12Oh.
00:31:13Oh, my.
00:31:15We'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.
00:31:36And 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.
00:32:01If I don't have pictures, I don't have anything.
00:32:03You know, everything is a failure.
00:32:06No, it's dead.
00:32:07It's not working.
00:32:08Period.
00:32:09Flat out.
00:32:09Just dead.
00:32:11It's dead.
00:32:13God, after all this.
00:32:15After all this, I just, it makes me insane.
00:32:18It makes me fucking insane.
00:32:32It's hard to see somebody that you love chase after something that might not ever happen.
00:32:41And I don't want to listen to it.
00:32:42It makes me insane.
00:32:42Yeah.
00:33:09It makes me insane.
00:33:18you see that white dot down there there's a white dot on the on the so something's happening inside
00:33:25the timer yeah after months of troubleshooting we realized that the core problem was in the
00:33:30voltage regulator and in this little computer timer this custom-made computer that told the
00:33:35cameras went to fire we worked with these guys at National Geographic and we sat down and redesigned
00:33:42the controllers we switched to an entirely different kind of a circuit that used less
00:33:47power is a lot more reliable because it has a simpler electronic circuitry inside it that was
00:33:54the turning point for the whole system we had to replace all the old-timers and had to wait for
00:34:01a
00:34:02whole season to check on them again and make sure that they were working
00:34:57you've got to be getting close we'll be able to see it from up here
00:35:04oh yeah okay 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
00:35:47here for how long I'm unbelievably surprised we have over 2300 frames since June and 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
00:37:15in 1984 that 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
00:37:45ago or will happen a long time in the future and we don't think that that can happen during these
00:37:50little years that we each live on this planet but the reality is that it does that things can happen
00:37:57very very very quickly we're living through one of those moments of epochal geologic change
00:38:03right now and we humans are causing it
00:38:40up and down the edges of the ice sheet there's this zone called the melt zone this is where the
00:38:47sheet is melting and that stored water from the ice sheet is running out to sea
00:39:18it's 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
00:39:37this stuff this cryoconite it's made from a combination of natural dust that blows in from
00:39:43the deserts of central asia mixed with little flakes of carbon fine particles of soot that come
00:39:51from wildfires diesel exhaust and coal-fired bower plants and on top of it there's algae that
00:39:57grows out here and all of that stuff accumulates in these little holes and because it's black it
00:40:02absorbs the sun's heat more than the surrounding ice does and all over the surface of the ice sheet
00:40:08there's literally billions of these little cryoconite holes melting away and filling up with water
00:40:16and when you look down on those holes you can actually see these little bubbles of ancient air
00:40:21being released as the ice sheet melts
00:40:32the part of greenlands that's melting is out on the edges of the ice sheet and that area is growing
00:40:38and it's moving higher up onto the ice sheet as the climate changes in that part of the world
00:40:44you see all this water melting down through these swiss cheese holes and you see it melting down
00:40:50through the channels it goes from little channels into big channels and eventually everything drops
00:40:54vertically down through these big mulan caverns goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to
00:41:05the ocean ordinarily if you make climate a little warmer the glacier shrinks a little bit if you make
00:41:10climate a little colder the glacier grows a little bit and those two things kind of work to maintain a
00:41:16balance but if it gets too warm and the ice gets too thin it doesn't respond just a little bit
00:41:21the volume
00:41:22drops you cross that tipping point climate no longer matters it's irreversible it's just going to keep
00:41:28going the sea level rise that will happen in my daughter's lifetimes will be somewhere between a
00:41:36foot and a half and three feet minimum that doesn't sound like a lot if you live up in the
00:41:41rocky mountains
00:41:41but if you live down in chesapeake bay along the gulf coast of the united states in the ganges flood
00:41:47plain
00:41:47that matters a lot it matters in china it matters in indonesia a minimum of 150 million people will be
00:41:55displaced that's like approximately half the size of the united states and all those people are going
00:42:00to be flushed out and have to move somewhere else it also intensifies the impact of hurricanes and
00:42:07typhoons it means that there's a lot more high water along the coastline so when these big storms come
00:42:13it pushes that much more water that much further inland that's where our story of Greenland climate change
00:42:21is expressed it's in that melt water rushing out to the ocean that's what we're photographing that's
00:42:27what i've been up there trying to document
00:43:04you know i've seen this thing from your photos and snap pictures but to be here it's incredible
00:43:09it's all becoming a little more real while we're heading over why don't i walk over there and give
00:43:16you some scale sure just be careful don't get too close to the edge all right stay up where it's
00:43:22flat
00:43:25this is really something
00:43:29this is terrifying this isn't a 10-foot little hole in the ground it's 100 feet deep into an abyss
00:43:37and if you don't have that that little dot of a person for scale then it's lost
00:43:43that is fabulous this is a reasonable route right here look at that oh yeah that's like a gift this
00:43:51is
00:43:51the dangerous spot yeah for sure well and then the other danger is that the whole thing suddenly
00:43:55implodes and the entire thing 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 and every day
00:44:08the ice is cooking down and water is pouring into the ice sheet it's enormous you can't wrap your head
00:44:14around 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 no not at all
00:44:48it's all calculated risk it'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
00:45:20all right
00:45:31look down look down look down
00:45:37it's just bottomless oh my god
00:45:42i do not want to go any lower than this
00:45:46i'm going out here on this broken fin okay and i don't i assume it won't collapse
00:46:09okay
00:46:27there were audible chunks of gravel-like substances that i could feel rolling around in there
00:46:35bionic man i was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories and painkillers
00:46:42so that i could function in the field and i would think oh that's pretty good not so bad
00:46:46but the drugs were masking the symptoms way more than i had realized
00:47:09more and more people are becoming increasingly skeptical about the existence of climate change
00:47:14the so-called climate scientists are hoodwinking the entire world community there is no consensus
00:47:20this is a myth the notion that man-made gases anthropogenic gases co2
00:47:24cause global warming is probably the greatest hoax
00:47:26ever perpetrated on the american people
00:47:28all of this garbage science has been a total fraud and a fake
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 i'm not sure that's sunken in quite yet
00:47:59i think when we started out the glacier was approximately right here it might have been there
00:48:03it might have been here but it's in this zone somewhere
00:48:12look look at this in in in 05 you couldn't even look into the canyon back there look it was
00:48:18all
00:48:19filled up to that point and look how look how low it is now
00:48:32beautiful
00:48:38and that's 2007 that isn't even 2005
00:48:44in 2007 just two years ago you couldn't see any of that mountain ridge over there
00:48:50the thing is deflated tremendously i mean i don't know what the number of feet is but it's a lot
00:48:59i haven't seen it in the pictures i wouldn't believe it at all
00:49:25when i saw that glacier dying it was like wow you know we uh if a glacier that's been here
00:49:31for
00:49:32thirty thousand years or a hundred thousand years is literally dying in front of my eyes
00:49:37you're very aware of the fact that
00:49:47you know sometime you uh sometime you go out over the horizon and you don't come back
00:50:10james is now doing exactly what his doctors said he shouldn't be doing
00:50:29oh man
00:50:33a little more
00:50:36okay
00:50:41yes there you go
00:50:57it feels worse this morning than it has any day
00:51:01since the surgery it felt better the three days after the surgery than it feels right now
00:51:07i think that the best that can be said about this
00:51:12is uh i'm a safety liability no i mean you can maybe limp your way up but you can't go
00:51:19down that
00:51:20unless you're in a wheelchair i mean we need to go up there
00:51:25check on the camera and all that but but you don't necessarily need to do it i mean that's
00:51:30that's more of a climb than we did in the past two days i have a hard time letting ideas
00:51:35go you know
00:51:36but here's another here's another that's why your knees like this
00:51:41okay you guys should at least go and look at one of the cameras get it downloaded get the computer
00:51:46the computer change today okay yep all right enough
00:51:56see the route
00:52:12okay hold on
00:52:30let'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
00:52:50look the sandwiches are better here the same after the sandwich i'm totally happy to be here
00:52:55all right this project is now we're two years in you have like hundreds of thousands of images
00:53:02it feels like yeah he goes he goes to that point where he can't anymore and sometimes you even feel
00:53:07he's going further yeah you hear how he speaks about he says well so i'll just do a fourth knee
00:53:12surgery you
00:53:12know like how many however many it takes to keep him going like most people say i'm going to get
00:53:18knee surgery to fix me you know kind of to make it better but for him it's to make it
00:53:23better so that
00:53:24he can keep on pushing it destroying it basically and then maybe he'll just have to do it again
00:53:45okay
00:53:45okay so i'll be ready for another exposure do it exactly as you just did it okay you're ready okay
00:53:51low
00:53:51yellow beam so as quick as i can i cover it that's right way back early in my career i
00:53:58discovered
00:53:58that there was really something special about photographing at night that places your mind
00:54:04mind on the surface of a planet you're no longer just a human being walking around in the regular
00:54:16world you're a human animal striding around on the surface of the planet that's out in the middle of a
00:54:23galaxy we as a culture we're forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this
00:54:34very very deep connection in contact with nature you can't divorce civilization from nature we totally depend
00:55:11on it
00:55:12and that's what we're trying to do to get to get to get to get a shot that is just
00:55:34it was such a shot in the dark
00:55:37the idea spawned from this one glacier called store that event was so spectacular we decided okay we
00:55:46got to go back and go to the big glacier lulissette glacier and sit wait gonna try to catch some
00:55:55some
00:55:56big calving events you know kilometer wide pieces of ice coming off of this massive massive glacier
00:56:08the lulissette glacier is kind of like the mother of all glaciers in greenland it is the most
00:56:12productive glacier in the northern hemisphere it's rumored that this is the glacier that put out the
00:56:17iceberg that sank the titanic it flows at 130 feet every day
00:56:27this is a really really huge fjord of ice and it's about five miles wide
00:56:43this is massive
00:56:46i totally lost him
00:56:48you see him he's going he's he's about to turn and go in front of the peninsula that we think
00:56:52is
00:56:52going to go oh i see he's at the base of it
00:57:04what's up my boots are frozen i'm really tired
00:57:12and nothing happens for days and days and days
00:57:17we call it glacier watching because literally it was just me and adam for three weeks watching ice
00:57:40photography for me has been as much as anything about a raising of awareness
00:57:46through that camera you know we become vehicles to raise awareness outside my own experience
00:57:52and in this case we are the messengers
00:58:11he is a visionary and his works are like sacred objects i present james balog
00:58:18so thank you so much can we dim the house lights a little bit more that's it better okay what
00:58:26i'm
00:58:26here to do tonight is bring to you tangible visual evidence of the immediacy of climate change itself
00:58:34glaciers matter because they're the canary in the global coal mine it's the place where you can see
00:58:40climate change happening without further ado let me tell you what we've been seeing out there this is
00:58:46a glacier called the solheim glacier we're looking down on it now we turn on our time lapse
00:59:01you can see the terminus retreating you can see this river being formed you can see it deflating
00:59:08go back a couple years in time that's where it started that'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 you'll see deflation happening here as the heat takes away the surface of the glacier and
00:59:31the surface drops at the same time a stream is undercutting it from a glacier that's melting
00:59:36faster up valley washing this thing away the vast majority of glaciers in the world are retreating
00:59:53glacier national park montana will need a new name we'll be calling it glacier less national park by
00:59:59the middle of the century because all the glaciers will be gone there's such a strange bizarre fascination
01:00:05and seeing these things you don't normally get to see come alive
01:00:18we're up at the columbia glacier in alaska this is a view of what's called the calving face
01:00:22this 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 change
01:00:40here's another time-lapse shot of columbia and everybody says well don't they advance in the
01:00:45winter time no 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
01:01:19one 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 that's where we were a few months
01:01:34ago
01:01:34last time we were into columbia
01:01:54we're gonna have to collapse it put rocks over it
01:01:59it's ripping too we gotta collapse it now
01:02:09james balog is documenting the melting of glaciers around the world the most visible manifestations
01:02:15of climate change on the planet and he's making it possible for scientists to watch too james balog is
01:02:22founder and director of the extreme ice survey he's joining us now from denver james thanks for being
01:02:26with us my pleasure thank you and we'll also have more of our special report on a man who lets
01:02:31his
01:02:31pictures do the talking as a photographer it's exciting to see this stuff but as a citizen of
01:02:37the world you go this is horrible and consider who nasa is sending as a delegate to the climate
01:02:42change summit in copenhagen jim balog a photographer with the group extreme ice survey prior to 06 the
01:02:49glacier had retreated 10 11 miles and now we've added just in the past few years another two and a
01:02:56half
01:02:56miles one of the things you often hear in the debate about glacier change is that there are glaciers
01:03:02around the world which are also getting bigger and advancing so how can that be how can that be a
01:03:06response to a global warming signal what we've done recently on the yukon territory in canada where we
01:03:13looked at the change in glacier area from 1958 to 2008 and what we found was of the 1400 glaciers
01:03:20that
01:03:20were there in 1958 four got bigger over 300 disappeared completely and almost all of the rest got smaller
01:03:30yes there is a component of natural variability in the climate change we observe but it's not enough
01:03:37to explain the full signal so there has to be a greenhouse gas element to it
01:03:44up to the luluset glacier calving face a little helicopter shown for scale the atlantic ocean is
01:03:50on the left side of the frame covered with icebergs so thick that you could walk across the ocean
01:04:02i'm on the phone with jim on one of our regular check-ins jim just nothing's happening
01:04:10it's going uh it's going well we had uh some serious bouts of wind but other than that things
01:04:16are fairly well set up here we've got some continuous time lapse it's starting adam i think adam it's
01:04:22starting oh wait jim jim this is the the big piece of starting the cab let me call you back
01:04:29all that
01:04:31okay bye
01:04:34you're still going yeah in that v section right there
01:04:39holy look at that big bird rolling all four running right yeah look at that
01:04:50you see how look at the whole thing
01:05:11you see how look at the whole thing
01:05:18you
01:05:18I don't know.
01:05:54I don't know.
01:06:31I don't know.
01:07:08I don't know.
01:07:17We're just observers.
01:07:18It's 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
01:07:49of it, is equivalent to buildings that are two and a half or three times higher than they
01:08:07are.
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.
01:08:39It's real.
01:08:39The changes are happening.
01:08:41They're very visible.
01:08:42They're photographable.
01:08:44They're measurable.
01:08:45There is 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
01:08:52that science is 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
01:09:04climatologists are much more 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
01:09:20change that allows us to actually see what was and what is becoming.
01:09:27I actually saw his work last spring.
01:09:31And that kind of changed my life in the sense that I had to quit what I was doing,
01:09:35which was working for Shell, and get involved in this debate in a much more 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, in fact, of our century.
01:10:44Thank you very much.
01:10:50and it's all right. Thank
01:10:52happy to do it. Thank you
01:10:53five or thirty years from now and say what were you doing when when when global warming was
01:10:59happening and you guys knew what was coming down the road I want to be able to say guys
01:11:04I was doing everything I knew how to do
01:11:33you
01:11:53Cold feet, don't fail me now
01:12:01So much left to do
01:12:07If I should run ten thousand miles home
01:12:12Would you be there?
01:12:17Yeah, just a taste of things to come
01:12:30I still smile
01:12:36But 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
01:13:27I 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 has come
01:14:21I don't want to die alone
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