Ice Melter: A Q&A with the Makers of 'Chasing Ice'

While a handful of researchers, scientists and naturalists have all watched enormous glaciers calve off into the oceans, no one seems to have the same intimacy with ice like James Balog. The acclaimed nature photographer became the focus of a young filmmaker, Jeff Orlowski, who asked a few years back if he could tag along on his “Emergency Ice Survey.” EIS is Balog’s project to put automated cameras—with elaborate all-weather housing and fortification—next to glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and Montana, and watch the suckers melt away.

The slowly-disappearing ice is given a depressing immediacy as Balog’s two to three year time-lapses expedite the process for you. While they’re some of the most incredible time-lapses I’ve ever seen, the team wasn’t ready to stop with Planet Earth-style stop-moition bloom animations. Deciding at one point to camp out for weeks perched above the gargantuan Ilulissat glacier in Greenland, they hoped to possibly capture a massive calving event (when a chunk breaks off). On their 17th day, one of the biggest calving events ever witnessed on the planet made it into Chasing Ice. It took 75 minutes for a piece of glacier the size of lower Manhattan to cease movement once it broke off of Ilulissat.

Having screened all over the festival circuit this year, Chasing Ice has yielded some momentum and praise, not dissimilar to the buzz around Louie Psihoyos’ seminal anti-whaling documentary, The Cove. Psihoyos, who is in the midst of putting together an elaborate new documentary about mass extinction also appears in Chasing Ice, commenting on the bleak consequences of glacial melting.

I went with a friend to see the film recently during its early cinematic push. After an end credits sequence featuring one of those wow-they’re-connected-or-have-money moments (check this chill track by Scarlett Johansson and Joshua Bell), Balog and Orlowski walked up front of the puny Cinema Village theatre for an extended Q&A. I started recording it on my phone a couple minutes deep.

Man in audience: First off, congratulations on the fantastic film. In a perfect world, ya know, bureacracy, politics, skeptics, all the BS that goes along with it, if everyone woke up tomorrow and said, 'You know what, we’re going to fix it,' what could we do to fix it? And how quickly would that be impact be felt?

Balog: I have an impact that you can start exercising about the time you walk out that door, actually. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the answer to thie question because everyone wants to know, 'What can I do? I’m overwhelmed, what can I do?'

What you have to do is the same thing you do with any problem. Let’s say the lights in your apartment have gone out, and you say, 'What am I going to do about that?' You don’t just sit there thinking about all the consequences of it, you say, 'Ok, what’s the first thing? The food is going to go bad in the refrigerator because I don’t have power.' Then you have to figure out, 'How do I get light? How do I get this?' In other words, you slice it into a series of smaller problems that you can handle.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.