Glacial Melting (Week 7) - Post 1

Chasing Ice - Documentary Notes

Main People Involved:

Lead Scientist- James Balog

James is a world-renowned photographer with a particular love for ice and ice photography. He has a masters degree In geomorphology. He has helped with National geographic stories on climate change. He is the founder of the Extreme Ice Survey, or EIS. The Extreme Ice Survey, based in Boulder, Colorado, uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography and video to document the effects of global warming on glacial ice. He was the NASA representative at the global climate change conference.

Lead Technician- Jeff Orlowski

He served as director, producer, and cinematographer on the Sundance Award-Winning film, Chasing Ice. Orlowski’s feature length documentary was invited to screen at the White House, the United Nations and the United States Congress and has captured over 40 awards from film festivals around the world. It went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, and has screened on all seven continents.

As founder of Exposure Labs, a production company geared toward socially relevant filmmaking, Orlowski, 32, has served as director and producer of short film projects and online/broadcast commercial work. He has worked with Apple, National Geographic, Netflix, Stanford University, and the Jane Goodall Institute among many others. His work has aired on the National Geographic Channel, CNN and NBC and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, NPR and Popular Mechanics. He has traveled on tour representing the Sundance Institute, President Obama's Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment of the Arts.  Orlowski most recently produced the award-winning film Frame by Frame and earlier this year received the inaugural Sundance Institute | Discovery Impact Fellowship for environmental filmmaking. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Documentary Notes:

-“The most powerful interactions of our time is the interaction between humans and nature”

-Glaciers are having huge amounts of change which is not normal behavior. Usually they recede small amounts in the summer and grow small amounts in the winter.

-“The public doesn’t need more statistics, more computer models, more projections, what they need is a believable, understandable piece of visual evidence”

-Calving – when glaciers break off BIG ice sheets into the ocean

-Time lapse Cameras:

Iceland - Solheim Glacier (2007) / 5 cameras + Greenland – Store Glacier (2007) / 12 cameras + Alaska – 5 cameras + Montana – 2 cameras

-Ice cores keep record of the history of ancient climate, they observe climate a lot like tree rings. Each year more snow is added to the top of ice caps and ice core scientists can drill holes through ice sheets to pull out a core and examine not only the ice, but also the bubbles of ancient air that are trapped in the ice. By looking at the chemistry of the ice we can learn about past temperature and by looking at the air we can actually measure carbon dioxide content. One of the things we learned is that past temperature and carbon dioxide vary together.

Going back 800,000 years ago atmospheric carbon dioxide was never higher then about 280 parts per million, until we started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And now its about 390 parts per million, and now were headed for 500 parts per million. 40% higher then when it only varied for natural reasons. Pace is 100 to 1000 times greater than when things changed naturally. 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1800s. the basic chemistry of the air is changing.

Increasing in length of fire season, larger fires, hotter more extreme fires – reason for that is climate change

Weather Disasters Visual Notes-

Speaker

“greenhouse gas emotions are already contributing to more intensive and more occurrences of events”

“It can’t be explained by just better reporting, it has to be explained by changes in the atmospheric conditions”

Speaker

“Greenhouse gases occur in very small amounts, but by increasing that just a little bit, you change the background state of the system. And make it much more susceptible to increased disasters.”

-“We’re in the midst of geologic scale change”

-“epochal geologic change right now, and we humans are causing it”

-“The glacier is not only receding, but it’s also receding at the same time”

“Up and down the edges of the ice sheet, there’s this zone called the melt zone, this is where the sheet is melting and that stored water from the ice sheet is running out to sea.”

“Cryoconite is made from a combination of natural dust that blows in from the deserts of central Asia, mixed with little flaked of carbon, fine particles of soot that come from wildfires, diesel exhaust and coal-fired power plants. Then on top of it, there’s algae that grows out there. All that stuff accumulates in these little holes, and because its black it absorbs the sun’s heat more then the ice surrounding it. There’s literally billions of these little cryoconite holes melting away and filling up with water. And when you look down on those holes you can actually see these little bubbles of ancient air being released as the ice sheet melts.

“All this water melting down through these holes, you see it melting down through channels, it goes from little channels into big channels. And eventually everything drops vertically, down through these big moulin caverns. It goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to the ocean.” -James Balog








 

"Everyday all this melt water is rushing down moulins out into the ocean, it is an incredible amount of water. The vast moulin’s are shown in the images below. You can see the melt water rushing down through these holes in the middle of the ice in the images."

 

"The part of Greenland that’s melting is out on the edges of the ice sheet. And that area is growing, and it’s moving higher up onto the ice sheet as the climate changes in that part of the world."

“Ordinarily if you make climate a little warmer, the glacier shrinks a little bit. If you make climate a little colder, the glacier grows a little bit. And those two things work to maintain a balance. But if it gets too warm and the ice gets too thin, it doesn’t respond just a little bit, the volume drops. You cross that tipping point, climate no longer matters. It’s irreversible, its just going to keep going.” - Dr. Tad Pfeffer (Glaciologist, University of Colorado)

“The sea level rise that will happen in my daughters’ lifetimes will be somewhere between 1 ½ and 3 feet, minimum. That doesn’t sound like a lot if you live up in the Rocky Mountains, but if you live down in Chesapeake Bay, along the Gulf Coast of the US, in the Ganges flood plain that matters a lot. It matters in China, it matters in Indonesia. A minimum of 150 million people will be displaced, that’s like approximately half the size of the US. And all those people are going to be flushed out and have to move somewhere else… It also intensifies the impact of hurricanes and typhoons. It means that there’s a lot more high water along the coast lines, so when these big storms come, it pushes that much more water that much further inland.” -James Balog

Ice Calving Event

- Iluissat Glacier, Greenland – Most productive glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. Its rumored that this is the glacier that put out the ice berg that sank the Titanic. It flows at a 130 ft per day.  Just one section, a fjord, is about 5 miles wide

-Two of the team members watched and caught on tape the largest calving event ever caught on tape in history. The duration was 75 minutes. 

 -“In 10 years this glacier retreated more than it had in the previous 100”

“Tangible, visible evidence of climate change itself. Glaciers matter because they’re the canary in the global coal mine. It’s the place where you can see climate change happening. 

Solheim Glacier: ( Over 4 years and 6 months)

 Colombia Glacier, Alaska:

“Its such an unhealthy glacier that is was actually still receding through the winter”

Dr. Martin Sharp (Glaciologist, University of Alberta, Canada) on the growing glaciers:

“Yes, there is a component of natural variability in the climate change we observe, but its not enough to explain the full signal. So there has to be a greenhouse gas element to it. 

“It’s real, the changes are happening, they’re very visible, they’re photographable, they’re measurable. There is no significant scientific dispute about that. And the great irony and tragedy of our time is that a lot of the general public thinks that science is still arguing about that. Science is not arguing about that.” -James Balog

“We don’t have a problem with economics, technology and public policy. We have a problem of perception because not enough people really get it yet. I believe we have an opportunity right now. We are nearly on the edge of a crisis, but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge of our generation, in fact, of our century.” -James Balog