“Chasing
Ice”
Is
Slippery Slope
Reviewed
by Shirrel Rhoades
We
don’t get much snow here in Key West … well, none to be exact. But living on an
island we should be concerned about water levels being affected by melting
glaciers and ice floes. I’m not looking for my house in the middle of Old Town
to become waterfront property.
“Chasing
Ice” – currently playing at the Tropic Cinema – is the documentary about National
Geographic photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey, a program that charts
climate change. Using time-lapse photography, the haunting images of melting
glaciers and receding ice sheets will remove any doubts you ever had about
global warming’s affect on this planet.
In order to document these
changes, the Extreme Ice Survey was born in the mid-2000s. Balog set up 27
cameras in Alaska, Iceland, Greenland and Montana and took pictures every hour
of daylight for a few years.
“What we saw
right away was ice disappearing. Ice retreating. Ice retreating at a remarkably
fast rate – I mean much, much, much more rapid than I had anticipated. What we
saw in those first downloads to the cameras in 2007 was kind of staggering,”
says Balog. “To be honest with you, six years later when we go and open up
those cameras and play back what happened, it’s still shocking. We’re still
seeing lots of retreat, and in some cases we’re also seeing rivers form and
lakes form where there once was ice.”
He describes glaciers as “the canary in the global
coal mine.” When you see these 3-D manifestations disappearing, you start to
worry.
“I’ve been knocking around the world’s mountain ranges
for 40 years,” says Balog. “It remains shocking to see these large, seemingly
immutable features of the landscape disappearing at this rate.”
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