Photographer James Balog and his team were near a glacier when his camera captured something extraordinary. They were in Greenland, collecting time-lapse images they had placed around the Arctic Circle over the past few years. They were also there to film scenes for a documentary. And while they were hoping to capture some interesting moments on camera, no one expected a large chunk of glacier to break off and slide into the ocean right in front of their eyes. It was the largest glacier calving ever filmed. For nearly an hour and 15 minutes, Balog and his team stood by and watched as a chunk of ice the size of lower Manhattan, but with ice-equivalent buildings that were two or three times as tall, simply melted. As far as everyone knows, this was an unprecedented event. geological catastrophe, and they recorded it all on tape. It won’t be the last time something like this happens either. But once upon a time Balog was openly skeptical about this whole “global warming” thing. Balog had a reputation since the early 1980s as a conservationist and environmental photographer. And for nearly 20 years, he had mocked the harbingers of climate change by shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” “I didn’t think humans would be able to change the basic physics and chemistry of this whole huge planet. It didn’t seem likely, it didn’t seem possible,” he explained in the 2012 documentary “Chasing Ice.” planet. As far as he was concerned, these melodramatic doomsayers distracted attention from the real problems. That was then. How Balog Became a Climate Believer It wasn’t until 2005 that Balog became a believer. National Geographic sent him on an Arctic photography expedition, and that first trip north was more than enough to see the damage for himself. “This was real tangible physical evidence that was preserved in the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica,” he said in a 2012 interview with ThinkProgress. “That was really the smoking gun that shows how far away from normal, natural variation the world has become. And that’s when I really started to get the message that this was something important and serious that needed to be addressed.” Part of that evidence may have been the fact that more Arctic land mass has melted in the last 20 years than in the previous 10,000 years. Watch the sensational and alarming video: His work continues to this day. seas, ice sheets and other environmental indicators of climate change and spoke with CBS about his work in 2024. “When I started the study of extreme ice, climate change was still seen as something quite abstract,” Balog said. “It was something that was going to happen 20, 30, 50 years from now and, my God, when you started to realize that no, it’s happening right now, right in front of us. It put a real marker in time to say this is now, this is real.” Balog hopes his photographic record will serve as a record of the present and a message for the future. “I want to be able to tell those people in the far future that not everyone in this time, you know, 2024 was terribly aware or worried about climate change,” he said, “but I want to be able to say that this mind, these eyes, and this heart were paying attention.” Balog is now ‘Chasing Time.’ The Extreme Ice Survey officially concluded in 2022 after 15 years, with more than 1.5 million images now archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The same team behind “Chasing Ice” reunited for a follow-up documentary, “Chasing Time,” which premiered on the PBS series POV and follows Balog and his team as they wrapped up the project. Balog hopes their photographic record will serve as a record of the present and a message for the future. This article originally appeared 11 years ago. The post The most dramatic evidence of our current climate catastrophe ever caught on camera first appeared on Upworthy.
