Chasing Ice

It's hard not to be impressed

when you see entire houses being swept away

by flood waters in the West

Fires stretch from one end

of Texas to the other.

Tornadoes...

a dozen tornadoes have already been spotted

Liberals will

say, well if it's cold,

it's global warming, if it's

snowing it's global warming,

if it's hot it's global

warming... there's nothing

that doesn't prove that

there's... it's global warming.

VO... MSNBC The latest estimates

for rebuilding from Irene,

already seven billion dollars.

CBS:

2011 is now on track

to be the most expensive year

ever for weather related damage.

FEMALE REPORTER:

A drought of historic proportions

has hit Nepal.

The horror

of raging wildfires has

again returned to Russia.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The say it was

like nothing they've ever seen before.

16 of the last 20 years

are the hottest on record.

The science is not in

It is in

No

Stuart quit saying that.

The debate is over.

No, the debate is not over

The globe

is actually cooling

and has been cooling since 2002.

The consensus

is that there is no consensus.

I mean how

do you not... global warming

is real.

You're

about to self implode here.

The ice

caps, the poles, are not going

to melt, the oceans are not

going to flood the coast...

I promise you, 20 years from today,

I'll be the one that's laughing.

The worst

that would happen is

that I'd just get really wet

if I just stood in place.

No.

You fall, you try to run,

you bang your knee on a piece

of ice, and you bust your knee.

Ah, I just...

I have to get this picture.

The first

time I worked with James,

It was obvious how he goes

about things, you know?

Alright quickly!

Cause this light won't last forever.

He pushes

it... he's looking for something.

You do

have rope in the car?

Yeah.

Go back

and get whatever you have.

Okay.

Alright, I'm,

I'm almost certain to get wet, Okay?

In fact, I think I'm so certain to get wet,

I'll take my boots off.

And

it was very interesting

because it was his first real encounter

at looking at ice in that way.

He really did fall in love with it.

There's

this limitless Universe

of forms out there...

That is just, surreal, other worldly.

Sculptural, architectural...

insanely, ridiculously beautiful.

And that's when I though,

okay, the story is in the ice.

Somehow.

I was umm, about 25 or so, I guess.

And I was finishing my master's

degree in Geomorphology.

And um, I loved the science,

but I wasn't interested in

being a scientist.

The modern world of science

was all about statistics

and computer modeling and

that just wasn't me.

I had no contacts in the photo world,

I had no knowledge of the photo world.

But, youthful brashness can

take you a long way,

make things happen, so,

that's how it worked.

I had this idea that

the most powerful issue

of our time was the interaction

of humans and nature.

One of the subjects I started to

look at involved people hunting.

But they were bloody, gory,

horrific pictures, hard to look

at... hard for me to

look at even today.

And so, when I had this idea

to look at endangered wildlife,

I realized that I needed

to show these things

in a more seductive fashion.

I had to look at it in ways

that would engage

people... pull them in.

He's

always taken the big view.

You know? He's not looking

at this little micro slice.

He's really looking at

what humanity is doing

from a very large perspective.

His books... they force you

to regard nature in a way

that you're not accustomed to looking at em.

He's forcing you to think.

He's forcing me to think.

And that's what I love about James' work.

You know,

Ansel Adams was the father

of all landscape photography

and he created a movement

around wilderness that only images could do.

And now you have James

with that same kind of eye.

But being able to do more

with the technology.

It's not just the drive

to climb mountains and hang off cliffs.

He has the ability to capture

it in a way and communicate it.

Observing it and knowing it

is one thing, but sharing it

and sharing it effectively

can change the world.

I did a

couple years of research

on the climate change story,

trying to find what you could

photograph about climate change

that would make interesting photographs.

And I eventually realized that

the only thing that... to me...

sounded right, was ice.

He came

with us with a proposal

to do a profile of one glacier in Iceland.

We essentially countered

to him, we said, well look,

why don't we just do a bigger story.

It was on the cover of the magazine.

Most popular, most wellread

story in the last five years.

As I

was shooting that story,

I started to get the very strong sense

that this was a scouting mission

for something much bigger,

and much longer-term

that was about to unfold.

The Solheim Glacier, the

Sunhouse Glacier in translation,

is where I really first got it.

That glacier had been receding

several hundred feet a year;

which is a lot.

You normally have a little bit

of advance in the winter time,

a little bit of retreat in the summer time;

but when you see huge amounts of change,

that's outside of normal behavior.

There was a real sense of the

glacier just coming to an end;

and like this old, decrepit man,

just, you know,

falling into the earth and dying.

It was very evocative, very emotional.

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

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