Chasing Ice Page #3

the Godfather the knowledge base

about those glaciers in Alaska.

The scope

and the scale of EIS is bigger

than any other project since I've known him.

They would work all day, in our little,

what used to be our garage,

turned into a workshop...

until sometimes, 11, 12 o'clock at night.

James sent

me a gear list of things

that I had never heard... I

mean Ice axes and crampons...

all of this technical climbing gear

that I had never used before.

I remember thinking that I

never want to do ice climbing

or ice related stuff, it's

dangerous, I'm gonna die,

but of course, I still

went with James to Iceland.

Jeez...

What?

I'm

just saying Jesus Christ.

I'm

just emphasizing how bad the

weather is.

Yeah,

I don't need it.

I get it.

The essence

of the camera systems is based

on putting really delicate electronics

in the harshest conditions on the planet.

They have to

withstand hurricane force winds.

Negative

40 degree temperatures.

It's

not the nicest environment

for technology to be sitting out in.

Whatever the

dangers of that boulder are,

that's a better spot than this is.

Well we found a place to hide the camera;

that's the good news.

The bad news is we've got a

major engineering project to try

and get that thing anchored and supported.

This thing is loose.

Look how soft this stuff is.

Yeah it's gotta be this section right here.

Uh... The other way around.

Rock! This is fantastic.

Look at this.

It's exactly what we wanted.

Okay.. Well, here we go.

The first eyeballs on

the glacier... finally.

Let's uh, see what a

couple years brings to us.

We

installed five cameras

in total on that trip.

After that, we went on to Greenland.

When glaciers

break these gigantic icebergs

off into the ocean it's

called calving c-a-l-v-i-n-g.

Ever since glaciers have entered

the ocean, hundreds of thousands

of years ago, ice has always calved off.

But what we're seeing now is the

Greenland ice sheet thinning out

and dumping out ever more

ice and water into the ocean.

and dumping out ever more

ice and water into the ocean.

Okay good.

Yep. Right up here.

JAMES BALOG:

It's sort of like doing

a portrait of people.

You know, uh, Richard Avendan

and Irving Penn spent their

entire careers doing portraits

of faces essential, and

found endless variation

and endless beauty and endless

magic in those faces and for me,

that's the same thing

as what's going on here.

You know you feel this

tension between this huge,

enduring power of these

glaciers and their fragility.

You know, they came from

a great, impassive place,

and they're just, they're crumbling

into these tiny little blocks

of ice going off into the ocean.

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