- 10 hours ago
James Balog and his team on the Extreme Ice Survey assemble a multi-year chronicle of the planet's rapidly melting glaciers. Across the Arctic as he deploys time-lapse cameras designed for one purpose: to capture a multi-year record of the world's changing glaciers.
影片核心信息 :--
• 主角人物：美国《国家地理》杂志著名生态摄影师詹姆斯·巴洛格（James Balog）。他原本对全球气候变暖持怀疑态度，但通过长期的实地考察彻底改变了看法.
• 核心项目：记录了由巴洛格发起的“极地冰川调查”（Extreme Ice Survey, EIS）项目。团队在北极和全球多地的冰川架设了特制的缩时摄影（Time-lapse）相机，进行长达数年的不间断拍摄，用视觉证据记录冰川的消融与退缩。
• 经典震撼片段：影片记录并捕捉到了人类有史以来在地面上拍摄到的最大规模冰川崩塌事件（历时75分钟的格陵兰岛伊卢利萨特冰川崩塌）
• 所获荣誉：荣获2014年艾美奖“杰出自然纪录片”等多个国际奖项。
影片核心信息 :--
• 主角人物：美国《国家地理》杂志著名生态摄影师詹姆斯·巴洛格（James Balog）。他原本对全球气候变暖持怀疑态度，但通过长期的实地考察彻底改变了看法.
• 核心项目：记录了由巴洛格发起的“极地冰川调查”（Extreme Ice Survey, EIS）项目。团队在北极和全球多地的冰川架设了特制的缩时摄影（Time-lapse）相机，进行长达数年的不间断拍摄，用视觉证据记录冰川的消融与退缩。
• 经典震撼片段：影片记录并捕捉到了人类有史以来在地面上拍摄到的最大规模冰川崩塌事件（历时75分钟的格陵兰岛伊卢利萨特冰川崩塌）
• 所获荣誉：荣获2014年艾美奖“杰出自然纪录片”等多个国际奖项。
Category
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TVTranscript
00:00:06Oh
00:00:45It's hard not to be impressed when you see entire houses being swept away by floodwaters in the west
00:00:51Fires 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
00:01:01If it's snowing, it's global warming
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
00:01:112011 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
00:01:21The 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
00:01:33The science is not in
00:01:35It is in
00:01:36Stuart, quit saying that
00:01:37The debate is 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
00:01:46I mean, how do you not?
00:01:48Global warming is real
00:01:50You'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
00:01:56I 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
00:02:22No, you fall, you try to run, you bang your knee on a piece of ice
00:02:26And you bust your knee
00:02:28I just, I have to get this picture
00:02:32The first time I worked with James
00:02:33It was obvious how he goes about things, you know
00:02:37All right, quickly
00:02:39This light won't last forever
00:02:41He pushes it, he'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, 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
00:03:41That is just surreal, otherworldly
00:03:48Sculptural, architectural
00:03:53Insanely, ridiculously beautiful
00:03:56And that's when I thought, okay
00:03:58The story is in the ice
00:04:01Somehow
00:04:21I was about 25 or so, I guess
00:04:26And I was finishing my master's degree in geomorphology
00:04:30And I loved the science
00:04:33But I wasn't interested in being a scientist
00:04:37The modern world of science was all about statistics and computer modeling
00:04:42And that just wasn't me
00:04:45I had no contacts in the photo world
00:04:49I had no knowledge of the photo world
00:04:51But youthful brashness can take you a long way
00:04:53Make things happen
00:04:54So that's how it worked
00:04:59I had this idea
00:05:01That the most powerful issue of our time
00:05:05Was the interaction of humans and nature
00:05:10One of the subjects I started to look at
00:05:12Involved people hunting
00:05:14But they were bloody, gory, horrific pictures
00:05:17Hard to look at
00:05:18Hard 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
00:05:33Pull 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
00:05:45From a very large perspective
00:05:48His books, they force you to regard nature
00:05:50In 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
00:06:05That only images could do
00:06:07And 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
00:06:18He has the ability to capture it in a way and communicate it
00:06:24Observing it and knowing it is one thing
00:06:26Sharing it and sharing it effectively
00:06:28Can change the world
00:06:32I did a couple years of research on the climate change story
00:06:35Trying to find what you could photograph about climate change
00:06:38That would make interesting photographs
00:06:40And I eventually realized that the only thing
00:06:43That to me sounded right was ice
00:06:49He came to us with a proposal
00:06:51To do a profile of one glacier in Iceland
00:06:54We essentially countered to him
00:06:55He 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
00:07:10I started to get the very strong sense
00:07:12That this was a scouting mission
00:07:14For something much bigger and much longer term
00:07:17That was about to unfold
00:07:22The Solheim Glacier, the Sunhouse Glacier in translation
00:07:25Is where I really first got it
00:07:29That glacier had been receding several hundred feet a year
00:07:32Which is a lot
00:07:35You normally have a little bit of advance in the wintertime
00:07:38And a little bit of retreat in the summertime
00:07:40But when you see huge amounts of change
00:07:42That'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
00:07:55Just, 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
00:08:09Someone who's trained in earth sciences
00:08:12I never imagined that you could see features this big
00:08:16Disappearing 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
00:08:34So 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, for like three hours we stood there
00:09:06Looking 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
00:09:12I appear to be from over there
00:09:38Thank you
00:09:49And when I saw those, the lights went off for me, I realized the public doesn't want
00:09:54to hear about more statistical studies, more computer models, more projections.
00:09:59What they need is a believable, understandable piece of visual evidence, something that grabs
00:10:06them 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, and they would shoot every
00:10:22hour as long as it was daylight.
00:10:24We would download the cameras every so often and turn those individual frames into video
00:10:29clips that 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, and there were a thousand little
00:10:49engineering details that needed to be worked out and a lot of trial and error because people
00:10:53hadn'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, but I talked them into letting me come up here and have a look
00:11:09at the system, because I was curious.
00:11:10And I really wanted to do whatever I could to get my foot in the door.
00:11:14Spav 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 because I think they're more picturesque, and they're
00:11:23still big glaciers.
00:11:24Jason had a deep, deep well of experience about Greenland's glaciers, about Greenland logistics,
00:11:30about what the glaciers were doing.
00:11:33Tad's a glaciologist.
00:11:34He's the grandfather, the godfather of the knowledge base about those glaciers in Alaska.
00:11:40The scope and the scale of EIS is 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, turned into a workshop,
00:11:50until 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, all of this technical climbing gear that I had never used before.
00:12:02I remember thinking, I never want to do ice climbing or ice related stuff.
00:12:07It's dangerous.
00:12:08I'm gonna die.
00:12:09But 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.
00:12:30Yeah, I don't need it.
00:12:34I get it.
00:12:38The essence of the camera systems is based on putting really delicate electronics in the harshest conditions on the planet.
00:12:45They have to withstand hurricane force winds, negative 40 degree temperatures.
00:12:50It's not the nicest environment for technology to be sitting out in.
00:13:07That's a big dealà.
00:13:09The tip is of getting 20 miles an hour.
00:13:14One or two of them.
00:13:20I've just been able to dive into this.
00:13:21The azul impersonal 뭐가 goes 18%.
00:13:23Yeah, that I could improve any sort of terrain.
00:13:24Of course you don't want to mortise him to film all образ открыty.
00:13:24Right here, if I hate you now that this, this map actually depends on your 방.
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.
00:13:51The other way around.
00:13:57Rock.
00:13:59This is fantastic. Look at this.
00:14:02It's exactly what we wanted.
00:14:04Okay.
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.
00:14:29We've been on the east coast now, during the seaside forest.
00:14:33The first size of the land is now.
00:14:42The first rocket is closer to the sea.
00:14:44The Operatingkatrin is focused on the sea.
00:14:44Those glacier herum acid, the ocean is headed by the sea.
00:14:44And he knows that he knows that the sea is better than this island.
00:14:45He knows about this land.
00:14:45So, the cave is now under the sea.
00:14:51The Arctic Ocean's tree is now under the sea to the sea.
00:14:55The first mountain is around the glacier.
00:14:55But if it's early spring in the sea.
00:14:55From the sea to the sea.
00:14:56The earth is here is now under the sea.
00:14:57gigantic 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,
00:15:13ice has always calved off.
00:15:16But what we're seeing now is the Greenland ice sheet thinning out
00:15:21and dumping ever more ice and water into the ocean.
00:15:40Okay, good. Yep, right up here.
00:15:55It's sort of like doing a portrait of people.
00:15:59You know, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn spent their entire careers doing portraits of faces,
00:16:06essentially, 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.
00:16:17You 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,
00:16:30and now they're just crumbling into these tiny little blocks of ice going off into the ocean.
00:16:36It's crazy.
00:16:49When I 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
00:16:57just kind of perched out at the front of the 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,
00:17:13and about 300 feet above the surface of the water.
00:17:18As we're setting up the cameras, we also set up a video camera
00:17:21and had it pointed right there at that peninsula, and we just had it rolling, just in case.
00:17:33Oh my god, a giant crack just formed.
00:17:39You can see that whole island is going away.
00:17:43There 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
00:18:26that 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,
00:18:39and we need to get these cameras out here.
00:18:41And then we need to get these cameras into the station.
00:18:43Ooh.
00:18:56Ooh.
00:19:00Ooh.
00:19:02Ooh.
00:19:03Ooh, yeah.
00:19:04Ooh.
00:19:07Ooh, ooh.
00:19:10Ooh, ooh.
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.
00:19:20Heads up! Heads up!
00:19:31Tight, tight, tight.
00:19:40Heads up!
00:20:04This is tonight's dinner I just found out.
00:20:14Eight, seven, six, five.
00:20:37Oh, this is the way to travel my friend.
00:20:54We ended up installing about a dozen cameras in Greenland,
00:20:57five in Iceland, five in Alaska, and two in Montana.
00:21:02Frankly, I can't believe that 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 and chemistry of this
00:21:35entire huge planet.
00:21:37It didn't seem probable. It 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.
00:21:51And 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.
00:22:05Snow 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.
00:22:26And by looking at the air, we can actually measure the carbon dioxide content.
00:22:30And 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
00:22:47million.
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
00:23:12naturally.
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.
00:23:50And that affects everything in the agriculture and the water supply and the biology of all the plants and animals
00:23:56around 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.
00:24:04And 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?
00:24:30If 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.
00:25:04And 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.
00:25:16We're seeing extraordinary changes in our environment.
00:25:19The new achtateness Market Theme
00:25:24Munigree is the world's largest reinsurers, reinsurance company.
00:25:29And our business model is to provide insurance for the insurance companies.
00:25:35As Munigree is a major reinsurer for natural perils, natural catastrophes,
00:25:41we need to know the risks as best as 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,
00:26:01are already contributing to more intense and more events.
00:26:06It cannot be explained by just better reporting.
00:26:08It 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
00:26:32and 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 operation engine number two.
00:27:51We cannot hover 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 in ten minutes, we're dead.
00:28:13The fire brigade will be on standby in case we need their help.
00:28:18The one in the delta on the ground, I want to see,
00:28:20I can see that they come with the ground.
00:28:22I want to see that they are OK.
00:28:24I want to see that they are OK.
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.
00:28:56That's who I love.
00:28:57That's who I married.
00:28:59Do I wish sometimes that it was closer and he would come home at night at five o'clock?
00:29:05As a wife, yes.
00:29:06As a human being, it needs to continue.
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 way.
00:29:58It's my job to go out there every couple of months to visit the cameras,
00:30:02to go over if everything is OK.
00:30:09There was always a possibility that this would happen.
00:30:14This whole piece must have cracked off in one part,
00:30:17flew off into whoever knows where.
00:30:20The rock obviously did not read our warning.
00:30:24It's only shot eight pictures in the past 24 hours, which is somewhat weird.
00:30:32Yeah, in fact, it's very weird.
00:30:37It could still shoot.
00:30:39Come on, please.
00:30:40Please work.
00:30:41It's dead.
00:30:43It has to be dead.
00:30:46So everything we're trying is getting thwarted.
00:30:56Zebras.
00:30:57We're getting the zebras again.
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.
00:31:20I 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.
00:32:05No, 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.
00:32:25It's so disappointing.
00:32:32It's hard to see somebody that you love.
00:32:34Chase after something that might not ever happen.
00:33:18You see that white dot down there?
00:33:20There's a white dot on the, on the, something's happening inside the timer.
00:33:26Yeah.
00:33:27After months of troubleshooting, we realized that the core problem was in the voltage regulator
00:33:31and in this little computer timer, this custom-made computer that told the cameras when to fire.
00:33:37We worked with these guys at National Geographic and we sat down and redesigned the controllers.
00:33:43We switched to an entirely different kind of circuit that used less power, is a lot more reliable because it
00:33:49has a simpler electronic circuitry inside it.
00:33:53That was the turning point for the whole system.
00:33:57We had to replace all the old timers and had to wait for a whole season to check on them
00:34:03again and make sure that they were working.
00:34:05No.
00:34:07No.
00:34:18No.
00:34:20No.
00:34:20No.
00:34:29Oh, my God.
00:34:57I've got to be getting close.
00:34:59We'll be able to see it from up here.
00:35:05Yeah.
00:35:11Okay.
00:35:13All right.
00:35:13This is a big one.
00:35:22Okay, here goes.
00:35:24Playback.
00:35:31March 11, 2008.
00:35:34It just shot.
00:35:36It's been working all winter.
00:35:45I can't believe that word.
00:35:47Do you know how cold it's been out here for how long?
00:35:50I'm unbelievably surprised.
00:35:51We have over 2,300 frames since June.
00:35:56Let me see this.
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.
00:36:36This is the memory of the landscape.
00:36:38That landscape is gone.
00:36:39It may never be seen again in the history of 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's retreating, but it's also thinning at the same time.
00:37:08It's like air being let out of a balloon.
00:37:10You can see what's called the trim line.
00:37:13It'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
00:37:45or will happen a long time in the future.
00:37:47And we don't think that that can happen during these little years that we each live on this planet.
00:37:54But the reality is that it does, that things can happen very, very, very quickly.
00:37:59We're living through one of those moments of epochal geologic change right now.
00:38:04And we humans are causing it.
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.
00:39:03Oh, 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.
00:39:20Look at those holes.
00:39:33Oh, my gosh, look at this stuff.
00:39:35I had no idea it was so thick in here.
00:39:37This stuff, this cryoconite, it's made from a combination of natural dust
00:39:42that blows in from the deserts of Central Asia,
00:39:45mixed with little flakes of carbon, fine particles of soot
00:39:50that come from wildfires, diesel exhaust, and coal-fired power plants.
00:39:55And on top of it, there's algae that grows out here.
00:39:58And all of that stuff accumulates in these little holes.
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
00:40:12melting away and filling up with water.
00:40:16And when you look down on those holes,
00:40:18you can actually see these little bubbles of ancient air being released as the ice sheet melts.
00:40:32The part of Greenland that's melting is out on the edges of the ice sheet.
00:40:36And that area is growing, and it's moving higher up onto the ice sheet
00:40:41as the climate changes in that part of the world.
00:40:44You see all this water melting down through these Swiss cheese holes,
00:40:48and you see it melting down through the channels.
00:40:50It goes from little channels into big channels,
00:40:52and 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,
00:41:19it doesn't respond just a little bit.
00:41:21The volume drops.
00:41:23You cross that tipping point, climate no longer matters.
00:41:26It's irreversible.
00:41:27It's just going to keep going.
00:41:30The sea level rise that will happen in my daughter's lifetimes
00:41:34will be somewhere between a foot and a half and 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,
00:41:43along the Gulf Coast of the United States,
00:41:46in the Ganges flood plain, that matters a lot.
00:41:48It matters in China.
00:41:49It 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.
00:41:58And all those people are going to be flushed out and have to move somewhere else.
00:42:03It also intensifies the impact of hurricanes and typhoons.
00:42:08It means that there's a lot more high water along the coastline.
00:42:11So when these big storms come,
00:42:13it 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.
00:42:30Day 4
00:42:30You are存在.ی
00:43:03You 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.
00:43:12While we're heading over, why don't I walk over there and give you some scale?
00:43:17Sure. Just be careful. Don't get too close to the edge, alright?
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. It'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. Look at that.
00:43:49Oh, yeah. That's like a gift.
00:43:50This is the dangerous spot. Yeah. For sure.
00:43:52Well, and then the other danger is that the whole thing suddenly implodes and the entire thing collapses, but I
00:43:58don'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. It'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?
00:44:34No. Not at all.
00:44:48It's all calculated risk. It's not like we're just going out there and playing Russian roulette.
00:45:00It's a piece 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.
00:45:32Look down?
00:45:33Look down.
00:45:37It's just bottomless.
00:45:39Oh, 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.
00:45:48Okay? And I assume it won't collapse.
00:46:09Okay.
00:46:10Look.
00:46:10All done.
00:46:11Oh, thank God.
00:46:12Fantastic.
00:46:28There were audible chunks of gravel-like substances that I could feel rolling around in there.
00:46:35Bionic man.
00:46:37I was covering up the soreness with anti-inflammatories and painkillers so that I could function in the field.
00:46:43And I would think, oh, that's pretty good.
00:46:45Not so bad.
00:46:46But the drugs were masking the symptoms way more than I had realized.
00:46:52Good bye, dear.
00:46:53Bye-bye.
00:46:54Love you.
00:46:55Love you.
00:46:55Love you too.
00:46:55Bye-bye.
00:46:56Bye-bye.
00:46:57Bye-bye.
00:46:59Bye-bye.
00:46:59Bye-bye.
00:47:08Bye-bye.
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.
00:47:18There is no consensus.
00:47:20No.
00:47:20This is a myth.
00:47:20The notion that man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, cause global warming is probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on
00:47:27the American people.
00:47:28All of this garbage science has been a total fraud and a fake.
00:47:39Geez.
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.
00:48:02It 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.
00:48:44In 2007, just two years ago, you couldn't see any of that mountain ridge over there.
00:48:50The 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 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-
00:49:29But if a glacier that's been here for 30,000 years or 100,000 years is literally dying in front
00:49:36of my eyes, you're very aware of the fact that, you know, sometime you go out over the horizon and
00:49:53you don't come back.
00:50:10James is now doing exactly what his doctor said he shouldn't be doing.
00:50:42Yes, there you go.
00:50:56It feels worse this morning than it has any day since the surgery.
00:51:02It felt better the three days after the surgery than it feels right now.
00:51:06I think the best that can be said about this is I'm a safety liability.
00:51:14No, 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 that, but you don't necessarily need
00:51:29to do it.
00:51:29I mean, that's more of a climb than we did in the past two days.
00:51:33I had a hard time letting ideas go, you know.
00:51:36But here's another thing.
00:51:37That'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.
00:51:55See the root?
00:52:11Okay.
00:52:13Hold on.
00:52:17No, I'm gonna get in there.
00:52:20Ah!
00:52:21Come on.
00:52:22That's it.
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
00:52:42saying, what were you thinking?
00:52:45Maybe that office job wasn't so bad.
00:52:49What?
00:52:50The sandwich isn't better here.
00:52:52After the sandwich, I'm totally happy to be here.
00:52:55This project is...
00:52:57Now we're two years in.
00:52:59We have hundreds of thousands of images.
00:53:03It feels like, yeah, he goes to that point where he can't anymore
00:53:06and sometimes you even feel he's going further.
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?
00:53:12Like, 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?
00:53:20Kind of, to make it better.
00:53:21But for him, it's to make it better so that he can keep on pushing it,
00:53:26destroying it, basically.
00:53:27And then maybe he'll just have to do it again.
00:53:45Okay, Slav, you ready for another exposure?
00:53:47Do it exactly as you just did it, okay?
00:53:50You're ready?
00:53:50Okay.
00:53:51Low beam.
00:53:52So as quick as I can, I cover it.
00:53:54That's right.
00:53:55Way back early in my career, I discovered that there was really something special
00:54:00about photographing at night that 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.
00:54:27We, as a culture, we're forgetting that we are actually natural organisms
00:54:33and that we have this very, very deep connection and contact with nature.
00:54:38You can't divorce civilization from nature.
00:54:41We totally depend on it.
00:54:43We, as massive as I've already beenMaimo, we look to be deep.
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 got to go back and go to the big glacier,
00:55:49Lulisset Glacier, and sit and wait.
00:55:53Going to try to catch 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.
00:56:48Do you see him still?
00:56:49He's going, he's about to turn and go in front of the peninsula that we think's gonna 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.
00:57:08I'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.
00:57:45Through 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.
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?
00:58:23Yeah, I said better.
00:58:25Okay.
00:58:25What I'm here 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.
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.
00:58:47We'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.
00:59:04You can see it deflating.
00:59:08Go back a couple 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 and the surface drops.
00:59:32At the same time, a stream is undercutting it from a glacier that's melting faster up valley, washing this thing
00:59:38away.
00:59:48The vast majority of glaciers in the world are retreating.
00:59:53Glacier National Park Montana will need a new name.
00:59:55We'll be calling it Glacier-less National Park by the middle of the century because all the glaciers will be
01:00:01gone.
01:00:02There's such a strange, bizarre fascination in seeing these things you don't normally get 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 the 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 change.
01:00:40Here's another time-lapse shot of Columbia.
01:00:43And everybody says, well, don't they advance in 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
01:01:18the 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. We've got to collapse it now.
01:02:09James Balog is documenting the melting of glaciers around the world, the most visible manifestations of climate change on the
01:02:16planet.
01:02:17And he's making it possible for scientists to watch too.
01:02:20James Balog is founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey.
01:02:24He's joining us now from Denver. James, thanks for being with us.
01:02:26My pleasure, thank you.
01:02:27And we'll also have more of our special report on a man who lets his pictures do the talking.
01:02:32As 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.
01:02:43Jim Balog, a photographer with the group Extreme Ice Survey.
01:02:47Prior to 2006, the glacier had retreated 10, 11 miles, and now we've added, just in the past few years,
01:02:55another two and a half miles.
01:02:57One of the things you often hear in the debate about glacier change is that there are glaciers around the
01:03:02world which are also getting bigger and advancing.
01:03:04So how can that be? How can that be a response to a global warming signal?
01:03:09What we've done recently on the Yukon Territory in Canada, where we looked at the change in glacier area from
01:03:151958 to 2008.
01:03:17And what we found was that the 1400 glaciers that were there in 1958, four got bigger.
01:03:24Over 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.
01:03:35But it's not enough to explain the full signal.
01:03:39So there has to be a greenhouse gas element to it.
01:03:43Up to the Lulisat Glacier calving face, 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 you could walk
01:03:55across the ocean and never...
01:04:02I'm on the phone with Jim on one of our regular check-ins. Jim, just nothing's happening.
01:04:08Hey Jim. It's going well. We had some serious bouts of wind. But other than that, things are fairly well
01:04:17set up here. We've got some continuous time lapse going.
01:04:20It's starting, Adam. I think. Adam is starting.
01:04:23Oh wait, Jim. Jim. Jim, this is... the big piece is starting. The cab. Let me call you back.
01:04:29Call him back.
01:04:31Okay. Bye.
01:04:34It's still going? Yeah. In that V section right there.
01:04:39Holy shit. Look at that big bird rolling. All four are running, right? Yeah. Look at that.
01:04:50You see how... look at the whole thing.
01:05:15Okay.
01:06:28The calving face is 300, sometimes 400 feet tall.
01:06:32Pieces of ice were shooting up out of the ocean 600 feet and then falling.
01:06:44The only way that you can really try to put it into scale with human reference is if you
01:06:49imagine Manhattan.
01:06:51And all of a sudden, all of those buildings just start to rumble and quake and peel off
01:06:57and just fall over and fall over and roll around.
01:07:01This whole massive city just breaking apart in front of your eyes.
01:07:16We're just observers, these two little dots on the side of the mountain.
01:07:21We watched and recorded the largest witness calving event ever caught on tape.
01:07:31So 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.
01:08:21It 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.
01:08:39The changes are happening, they're very visible, they're photographable, they're measurable.
01:08:44There'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
01:08:52that science is still arguing about that.
01:08:54Science 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.
01:09:08People 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
01:09:20the change that 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
01:09:39a 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
01:09:49going on.
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.
01:10:11We are nearly on the edge of a crisis, but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest
01:10:18challenge of our generation, in fact, of our century.
01:10:49When my daughters, Simone and Emily, look at me 25 or 30 years from now and say, what
01:10:54were you doing?
01:10:58When global warming was happening and you guys knew what was coming down the road, I want
01:11:03to be able to say, guys, I was doing everything I knew how to do.
01:11:49And I thought, Wales, there'd be.
01:11:50I'd do all these fears.
01:11:50But I did not want to leave or need to.
01:11:51I was doing everything, huh?
01:11:51Okay, I'd still be able to refresh those who wanted to win.
01:11:52I'd still think I had to.
01:11:53But he said I had to.
01:11:54Cold feet.
01:11:57Clear essay you had to guess more we don't take southern leaves what makes it nice.
01:12:01So much left to do
01:12:07If I should run 10,000 miles home
01:12:14Would 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 home
01:12:40I don't want to die home
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 home
01:13:32I don't want to die home
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
01:14:44I don't want to die home
01:14:58I don't want to die home
01:14:59I don't want to die home
01:14:59I don't want to die home