Chasing Ice Page #2

As a guy who's been mountaineering

for basically my whole adult

life, uh, someone whose trained

in the earth sciences, I never imagined

that you could see features

this big disappearing

in such a short period of time.

But when I did... when I saw

that... and I realized, my God,

there's a powerful piece

of history that's unfolding

in these pictures and I have

to go back to those same spots.

So, I set up a whole

bunch of camera positions

around that glacier where

I would just go back

and shoot a single frame.

You know, one in April, one in October,

and we would just see how the

glacier changed in six months.

Right there where Svav is.

Right there.

That's exactly where the ice was.

Right there.

Right? Over.

Uhh,

correct, this is where...

That glacier

had changed so much, that,

I'm not kidding, for like

three hours, we stood there,

looking at the prints of six months ago,

looking at the glacier going,

we must be wrong,

we can't be in the right places.

They appear to be from over there.

And when I

saw those, the lights when off

for me, I realized, the

public doesn't wanna hear

about more statistical

studies, more computer models,

more projections... what

they need is a believable,

understandable piece

of visual evidence...

something that grabs them in the gut.

So I created this project called

the Extreme Ice Survey... or EIS.

The initial goal was to put

out twenty five cameras for three years.

And they would shoot every hour

as long as it was daylight.

We would download those

cameras every so often

and turn those individual

frames into video clips

that would show you how

the landscape was changing.

I thought that basically,

you could just buy all this time

lapse equipment off the shelf,

slam it together and put it out there.

I was so naive about that.

Uh, there was a custom

computer that needed to be built

and there were a thousand little

engineering details that needed

to be worked out and

a lot of trial and error,

because people hadn't

built this stuff before.

And it was clear to me, it

would have to be a team effort.

I wasn't

that into photography,

but I talked him into me coming

up here and having a look.

Cause I was curious and I really

wanted to do whatever I could

to get my foot in the door.

Svav is the

field assistant in Iceland.

You ready?

As ready as I can be.

These

are more attractive

because I think they're more pictureeqse,

and they're still big glaciers.

Jason has a

deep, deep well of experience

about Greenland's glaciers,

about Greenland logistics,

about what the glaciers were doing.

Tad's a glaciologist he's

really the grandfather,

Rate this script:4.0 / 1 vote