0:11
Most of the time, art and science stare at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. There is great confusion when the two look at each other. Art, of course, looks at the world through the psyche, the emotions -- the unconscious at times -- and of course the aesthetic. Science tends to look at the world through the rational, the quantitative -- things that can be measured and described -- but it gives art a terrific context of understanding.
0:43
In the Extreme Ice Survey, we're dedicated to bringing those two parts of human understanding together, to merging the art and science to the end of helping us understand nature and humanity's relationship with nature better. Specifically, I as a person who's been a professional nature photographer my whole adult life, am firmly of the belief that photography, video, film have tremendous powers for helping us understand and shape the way we think about nature and about ourselves in relationship to nature.
1:21
In this project, we're specifically interested, of course, in ice. I'm fascinated by the beauty of it, the mutability of it, the malleability of it, and the fabulous shapes in which it can carve itself. These first images are from Greenland. But ice has another meaning. Ice is the canary in the global coal mine. It's the place where we can see and touch and hear and feel climate change in action.
1:47
Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world. Whether or not you believe in it is based on your sense of is it raining more or is it raining less? Is it getting hotter or is it getting colder? What do the computer models say about this, that and the other thing? All of that, strip it away. In the world of the arctic and alpine environments, where the ice is, it's real and it's present. The changes are happening. They're very visible. They're photographable. They're measurable.
2:16
95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking. That's outside Antarctica. 95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking, and that's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing. There is no significant scientific dispute about that. It's been observed, it's measured, it's bomb-proof information. 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. In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.
3:00
So, having seen all of this in the course of a 30-year career, I was still a skeptic about climate change until about 10 years ago, because I thought the story of climate change was based on computer models. I hadn't realized it was based on concrete measurements of what the paleoclimates -- the ancient climates -- were, as recorded in the ice sheets, as recorded in deep ocean sediments, as recorded in lake sediments, tree rings, and a lot of other ways of measuring temperature.
3:32
When I realized that climate change was real, and it was not based on computer models, I decided that one day I would do a project looking at trying to manifest climate change photographically. And that led me to this project. Initially, I was working on a National Geographic assignment -- conventional, single frame, still photography. And one crazy day, I got the idea that I should -- after that assignment was finished -- I got the idea that I should shoot in time-lapse photography, that I should station a camera or two at a glacier and let it shoot every 15 minutes, or every hour or whatever and watch the progression of the landscape over time.
4:11
Well, within about three weeks, I incautiously turned that idea of a couple of time-lapse cameras into 25 time-lapse cameras. And the next six months of my life were the hardest time in my career, trying to design, build and deploy out in the field these 25 time-lapse cameras. They are powered by the sun. Solar panels power them. Power goes into a battery. There is a custom made computer that tells the camera when to fire. And these cameras are positioned on rocks on the sides of the glaciers, and they look in on the glacier from permanent, bedrock positions, and they watch the evolution of the landscape. We just had a number of cameras out on the Greenland Ice Sheet. We actually drilled holes into the ice, way deep down below the thawing level, and had some cameras out there for the past month and a half or so. Actually, there's still a camera out there right now. In any case, the cameras shoot roughly every hour. Some of them shoot every half hour, every 15 minutes, every five minutes.