The Time That Changed the Climate Skeptic—and the Snowfall That Followed

James Balog is a conservation artist and nature photographer with a long history of skepticism. Since the 1980s, he has been making fun of people who talk about the negative effects of climate change. After many years of these strongly held beliefs, his mind suddenly changed. In the early 2000s, he and his team were in the Arctic when they were given an assignment from National Geographic. Seeing glaciers up close, Balog’s world view turned upside down. He began writing about the rise and fall of glaciers around the world.

What is Glacial Calving?

The North and South Poles are surrounded by huge glaciers made of compacted ice. Calving is a process where large chunks of ice break off to form glaciers. This is a natural phenomenon, as glaciers tend to retreat and grow with the seasons. But scientists show that glaciers are shrinking at an increasing rate around the world. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the collapse of glaciers is the second largest contributor to sea level rise.

Heavy calving also threatens the supply of clean water to people living downstream. It can also cause floods and similar natural disasters. “The preservation of glaciers is not only an environmental, economic and social need,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo in a press release. “It’s a matter of survival.”

The Largest Engraved Glacier

It all started with an assignment from National Geographic. James Balog and his colleagues were sent to the Arctic to photograph the ice for the June 2007 cover story. “The Great Thaw” Until that trip, Balog thought people were exaggerating the effects of climate change. “I didn’t think that humans could change the physical and chemical sciences on this vast planet.” Balog said in his 2012 film “Chasing Ice.”

The glacier is collapsing, and the loss of ice was not the only piece of evidence that convinced Balog of climate change. He was also shocked by the level of carbon monoxide trapped in the ice bubbles. These bubbles contain samples of atmospheric temperatures from past times. They showed how temperatures are increasing compared to previous generations.

While on assignment with National Geographic, he and his team photographed glaciers in Iceland and marked the locations. After six months, they returned to those places, but the landscape had changed so much that they thought they marked the wrong places. Their images captured the dramatic loss of snow in the area. This inspired Balog to create the Extreme Ice Survey.

Extreme Ice Survey

For three years, Balog and his team of glaciologists, photographers, and geologists used time-lapse cameras to document melting glaciers in real time. His goal was to provide irrefutable, painful evidence of the climate change crisis. They put twelve cameras in Greenland, five in Alaska, five in Iceland, two in Montana. The cameras, custom-made by the workers, take pictures of the same area every hour during the day.

“The amazing thing is that you can see dramatic changes in these large areas in a surprisingly short time, sometimes days or weeks,” said Balog in an interview with National Geographic in 2009.As a non-professional and technically educated person, you walk between these places and think: Well, okay, whatever changes are going to happen here are going to happen slowly and incrementally. But these cameras record changes… they happen quickly and suddenly. That revelation…”

Ilulissat Glacier Collapse

Caption: The Ilulissat Glacier, also known as the Jakobshavn Glacier, is where the EIS team captured a record-breaking avalanche.

The team has been traveling to locations to film and do maintenance work. During this visit, they saw many snow spawning events. However, the most notable is the massive collapse of Glaci Ilulissat in West Greenland. The 2016 Guinness Book of World Records called this the largest ice spawning event ever captured on film.

On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Jeff Orlowski were snowmobiling when they saw a large chunk of ice begin to calve. Large pieces dove in and out of the water. Within two hours, the iceberg had completely melted. In “Chasing Ice,” Balog describes it as if the entire lower tip of Manhattan melted in just 75 minutes.

Read more: First Of Its Kind Meltwater Explosion Breaks Out Of Greenland Ice Sheet

Chasing Progress

After the success of the documentary “Chasing Ice”, Balog brought the campaign to the Southern Hemisphere. There, the group set up cameras to photograph glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia Island. The Extreme Ice Survey officially wraps up in 2022, and includes 1.5 million images showing ice change over 15 years. The collection is archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

“This project was a challenge. But I think it’s important to put these images out there in the public…” said Donna Scott, NSIDC’s programs and projects lead, in a featured interview. “Predicting the details of glacier retreat can be difficult for computer models, and this is an important resource for improving our understanding. It helps people to understand climate change when you can visualize the change happening.”

Read more: Stunning Before and After Photos Show a Swiss Village Buried by a Glacier