Chasing the melting ice

Susanne Janssen

From Living City

Is it worth it to live 17 days and nights in a tent in the Arctic’s freezing climate in western Greenland, fighting bone-chilling wind gusts, eating canned food and staring at a shiny white glacier, from dawn until dusk just waiting for it to calve? For Jeff Orlowski, director of the documentary Chasing Ice, the answer is a resounding yes. The vigil was worth it. Jeff and his co-cameraman were ready with cameras poised when a huge piece of the Ilulissat glacier, similar in size to the lower tip of Manhattan with ice higher than its skyscrapers — broke off and floated into the ocean. The photographers filmed the largest calving of a glacier so far. “It was an amazing, miraculous, horrible event,” says Orlowski. For five years, he accompanied photographer James Balog on the Extreme Ice Survey project. What started as a student project for YouTube videos and promotional material, ended up as a documentary that won an award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. The final song “Before My Time,” sung by Scarlett Johansson, was an Academy nominee for best original song at the Oscars this year.

Chasing Ice causes the same reaction in the audience: Amazing! Miraculous! Horrible! It documents the melting of 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, Canada and the Rocky Mountains over a five-year period, from 2007 to 2012. James Balog, a Colorado-based photographer and environmentalist, had the ambitious idea of installing cameras that would shoot pictures every half hour as long as it was daylight to document the changes over the years as part of the Extreme Ice Survey sponsored by National Geographic and other entities. He encountered a lot of difficulties — some cameras didn’t work in the cold or were destroyed by storm gusts. New techniques had to be improvised, not to mention struggling with a knee injury. In spite of the obstacles he held on to his idea of giving visual proof of the change in the glacier system which in turn would be an indicator of the change in the global climate, considered no longer a normal fluctuation, but a man-made deviation that may be irreversible.

Jeff Orlowski needed tenacity, too. “It took me a year and a half to persuade James Balog to make the movie,” he remarked during a presentation of Chasing Ice at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. When he started in 2007, he was still a student at Stanford University in San Francisco, 24 years old and without experience. But his first trailer on the project convinced Balog, and both shared in the mission to show the beauty and the fragility of this unique landscape, which in part is already gone forever. The time-lapse pictures shot by the installed cameras show that within five years the glaciers have retreated at a dramatic rate. Year round ice-covered hills are now bare rocks in the summer, and the1,000-year-old ice structure is melting.

With its message, Chasing Ice takes a stand, but that was not the primary intention of Jeff Orlowski: “I wanted to create a portrait of James Balog as an artist,” he recalls. He did not want his first movie branded as an “environmental” work, “because then everybody puts you in the drawer.” But the amazing, miraculous and horrible scenes changed his mind. Now he wants to show the truth. He wants to stand up against the thinking that there is no proof that climate change is caused by our lifestyle: the increase in CO2 levels due to emissions from fossil fuel combustion; the imbalance in the atmosphere due to emissions from animal agriculture and deforestation. “Now 97% of the scientists agree that climate change is man-made,” affirms Orlowski. He is convinced that people should think about it — and work together to reverse the negative impact of their lifestyle on our world.

For information about show times or the possibility of hosting a screening, go to chasingice.com