‘Chasing Ice,’ and searching for solutions
“Sometimes you go out over the horizon and you don’t come back,” says photographer James Balog in the award-winning documentary “Chasing Ice,” as he reflects on his work documenting breathtaking footage of the world’s disappearing glaciers. In a project dubbed the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog and his team worked over a series of years in extreme conditions to place time-lapse cameras on remote locations in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and Montana. Balog said he wanted to “capture the memory of the landscape” and “provide tangible visible evidence of climate change.” The result: a stunning set of images that show enormous glaciers retreating at record pace and breaking off into the ocean in a process called “calving.” In one dramatic scene, the team filmed the historic breakup of the Ilulissat Glacier in western Greenland. The calving lasted for 75 minutes and resulted in the glacier retreating a full mile across a face three miles...