Blogs / Local Buzz / Winter 2012 / James Balog and the Extreme Ice SurveyTime-Lapse Photography of a Changing Environment

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James Balog and the Extreme Ice SurveyTime-Lapse Photography of a Changing Environment

When James Balog spoke at the Church of the Big Wood last Thursday, listeners were given much more than just another spiel on global warming. Balog presented his multi-disciplinary project: the Extreme Ice Survey. By using a combination of single-frame and time-lapse photography, the ongoing survey provides a “visual voice” to the planet’s changing landscapes, particularly glaciers. Five years in the making, the EIS is an extensive, worldwide portfolio of images and video, a truly incredible record of nature’s climate canaries and what is happening to them.

Art and science, explained Balog, are not mutually exclusive and his goal is to bring the two closer. The lecture, hosted by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, was aesthetically driven, with Balog’s photography as the visually-stunning center piece. Glaciers were shown as truly beautiful worlds, colorful and enormous beyond imagination. Yet underlying the artistic essence of the photographs is Balog’s scientific desire to document early evidence of climate change. The EIS - by combining art and science - is part of a growing multidisciplinary campaign to inspire the world and solve the climate crisis.

  

All photos courtesy www.extremeicesurvey.org.

 

James Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007, following trips he’d made to Iceland and other glacial regions for the New Yorker and National Geographic. On these assignments Balog couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a large-scale disappearance of ice from almost every site he visited. Recognizing the gravity of these vanishing glaciers, he began a remote photography project, setting up time-lapse cameras across the globe that snap photos every half an hour. Today, Balog has 27 cameras in the field, each one capable of functioning in extreme conditions, and can even turn back on if frozen and powered down. “The camera is an amazing device for preserving time,” said Balog, referencing the precarious condition of glaciers today. Already the EIS has photographed landscapes that no longer exist, lost fields of ice frozen instead as a string of images.

If you’re not familiar with the consequences of global warming, glaciers are important contributors to the planet’s weather and climate dynamics, and their disappearance is dangerous on many levels. Imagine Balog’s horror, then, upon returning to remote EIS sites, replaying the project’s first images and watching glacial ice - in Greenland, Alaska, the Alps, the Andes, the Rockies and Mt. Everest - move like a “conveyor belt” into the water. These canaries were surely dying.

During the lecture Balog presented several clips of his project, some spanning years and others just a week or two. In every case, the time-lapse photography offered glimpses of undeniable movement of glaciers that were literally breathing their last. The most incredible offering, both artistically and scientifically, was taken from the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland, where EIS team members recorded the largest sudden release of ice from a glacier in history. Known as a “calving event,” this break-off lasted 75 minutes with the ice retreating a full mile. There were literally gasps in the audience as icebergs many times the size of the Capitol Building fell and bobbed in the waters.

  

Even though his lecture was series of time-lapsed burials, Balog isn’t trying to use scare tactics. Nothing about the EIS or what it captures is dramatized or exaggerated. To sensationalize would jeopardize the well-deserved credibility of the survey. Yet the project’s findings will make you gasp. It’s clear from the photos that glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. What’s scarier, however, is to hear someone giving the images context. It is the story behind the image that we should fear most, Balog explains, because it is the tragedy of an increasingly warm climate and its first victims. The Extreme Ice Survey takes photos for posterity and awareness. Ultimately, however, James Balog wants his team’s work to inspire. Think of the children, he insisted, who will watch these same clips and ask “What were you doing when all this happened?!”

Be sure to check out the film “Chasing Ice”, which previews at Sundance this month and tells the full story of the Extreme Ice Survey.