THE EXTREME ICE SURVEY, A PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDY OF GLACIAL RETREAT

Public perception of extraordinary nature has always been shaped by images brought back from Odyssean photographic missions. Now, with digital technology and the convergence of video sequencing with traditional photography, we have the ability to go a step further. With the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), now in its eighth year, we are striving to illustrate the effect of climate change by documenting the rapid pace of glacial loss. The project came about after I was commissioned by National Geographic and The New Yorker to produce photo essays on the health of glaciers in 2005 and 2006. I discovered places where extraordinary amounts of ice were vanishing in just a few months—not the decades or centuries that most people associate with glacier retreat. These findings became the catalyst for EIS.

EIS uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography and video to illustrate the effects of climate change on the earth’s glacial ice. The project is a collaborative effort of photographers, filmmakers, engineers, scientists and educators, all devoted to documenting and communicating the changes transforming arctic and alpine landscapes.

We have installed 43 time-lapse cameras at 24 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, Austria, Antarctica, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia. Collected images are used for scientific evidence and as part of a global outreach campaign aimed at educating the public about the effects of climate change. I believe that the immediacy of the photographic evidence can break down barriers of mental resistance in a way that nothing else can. Time-lapse photographic sequences have the ability to summarize dramatic changes in the physical world in stunning sequences. It’s easy to take a picture of where a glacier used to be. It’s quite another thing to illustrate how the glacier has receded and dissolved over the matter of a few months—a geological blink of an eye.

Communicating the depth and intricacy of scientific knowledge to the general public can be a daunting task. The work of EIS has been conveyed to a wide-range of public, educational, corporate, and political institutions including The White House, the U.S. Congress, the U.K. House of Commons, and the United Nations. It was the subject of the award winning 2012 feature documentary Chasing Ice and the 2009 PBS/NOVA special Extreme Ice.