Chasing Ice Page #6

You'll see deflation happening here

as heat takes away the surface

of the glacier, the surface drops.

At the same time,

a stream is undercutting it

from a glacier that's

melting faster up valley,

washing this thing away.

The vast majority of glaciers

in the world are retreating.

Glacier National Park

Montana will need a new name.

We'll be calling it glacier-less

national park by the middle

of the century because all

the glaciers will be gone.

There's such a strange, bizarre fascination

in seeing these things

you don't normally get

to see... - come alive.

We're up at the Columbia glacier

in Alaska, this is a view

of what's called a calving face.

This is what one of our cameras saw

over a course of a few months.

The action at Columbia is in part,

due to local glacier dynamics

and in part due to climate change.

Here's another time-laps

shot of Columbia.

And everybody says well don't

they advance in the wintertime?

No, it was retreating through the winter

because it's an unhealthy glacier.

We realized it was retreating

so far we had to turn the camera

up stream to follow the retreat.

Then, we had to pivot it again.

And then, when we went back

this past August, it was so far

out of frame we had to turn

the camera one more time

so that we could still see the glacier.

So that's where we started three

years ago way out on the left,

that's where we were a few

months ago last time we were

into Columbia.

We're going to have

to collapse it...

put rocks over it.

It's ripping too.

We got to collapse it now.

James

Balog is documenting the melting

of glaciers around the world.

The most visible manifestations

of climate change on the planet.

And he's making it possible

for scientists to watch too.

CNN FEMALE REPORTER

James Balog is founder

and director of the Extreme

Ice Survey he's joining us now

from Denver, James,

thanks for being with us.

My

pleasure, thank you.

BRIAN WILLIAMS We'll also have

more on our special report

on a man who lets his

pictures do the talking

As a

photographer, it's exciting

to see this stuff, but as

a citizen of the world,

you go, this is horrible.

And

consider who NASA is sending

as a delegate to the climate

change summit in Copenhagen.

Jim Balog, a photographer with

the group Extreme Ice Survey.

Prior to '06...

This glacier had retreated 10, 11 miles.

And, now we've added just

in the past few years,

another two and a half miles.

One of

the things you often hear

in the debate about glacier change is

that there are glaciers around the world

which are also getting bigger

and advancing, so, how can that be?

How can that be a response

to a global warming signal?

What we've done recently on the

Yukon territory in Canada...

where we looked at the change in

glacier area from 1958 to 2008.

And what we found was, of the

1,400 glaciers that were there

in 1958, four got bigger.

Over 300 disappeared completely,

and almost all

of the rest got smaller.

Yes, there is a component

of natural variability

in the climate change we

observe, but, it's not enough

to explain the full signal.

So there has to be a

greenhouse gas element to it.

Up to the

Ilulissat Glacier calving face.

A little helicopter is shown for scale.

The Atlantic Ocean is on

the left side of the frame,

covered with icebergs so thick,

that you could walk across the ocean...

I'm

on the phone with Jim,

on one of our regular check-ins,

Jim, just, nothing's happening.

ADAM LEWINTER:

Hey Jim!

Uh... it's going well.

We had some serious bouts of wind.

But other than that, things

are fairly well set up here.

We've got some continuous time lapse going.

It's

starting Adam, I think.

Adam it's starting.

Oh wait, Jim, Jim...

The big piece is starting to calve.

Let me call you back.

Call him back.

Okay.

Bye.

Is

it still going?

Yeah.

In that V-section right there.

Holy sh*t, look at that big berg rolling.

All four are running, right?

Yeah...

Look at that!

Do you see how...

look at the whole thing!

ADAM LEWINTER:

The calving face was 300

sometimes 400 feet tall.

Pieces of ice were shooting

out of the ocean 600 feet and then falling.

The only way you can

try to put it into scale

with human reference is

if you imagine Manhattan.

All the sudden, all those

buildings just start to rumble

and quake and peel off and just fall over,

fall over and roll around.

This whole massive city, just breaking apart

in front of your eyes.

We're just observers.

These two little dots on

the side of the mountain

and we watched and recorded the largest,

witnessed calving event ever caught on tape.

So how

big was this calving event

that we just looked at?

We'll resort to some illustrations again

to give you a sense of scale.

It's as if the entire lower

tip of Manhattan broke off,

except that, the thickness...

the height of it... is equivalent

to buildings that are two and a half

or three times higher than they are.

That's a magical, miraculous,

horrible, scary thing.

I don't know that anybody's

really seen the miracle

and horror of that.

It took a hundred years for it

to retreat eight miles

- from 1900 to 2000.

From 2000 to 2010, it retreated nine miles.

So in 10 years, it retreated more

than it had in the previous 100.

It's real.

The changes are happening;

they're very visible,

they're photographable, they're measurable.

There's no significant

scientific dispute about that.

And the great irony and tragedy

of our time is that a lot

of the general public thinks

that science is still arguing about that.

Science is not arguing about that.

One of

the really troubling things

about climate change is that almost all

of the world's prestigious

climatologist are much more

frightened about all this

than the public is.

People have

a hard time understanding

when we talk about climate change.

What for me is so powerful

and actually unprecedented

in the work that he is doing,

is visualizing the change

that allows us to actually see

what was and what is become.

I actually

saw his work last spring

and that kind of changed my

life in the sense that I had

to quit what I was doing,

which was working for Shell,

and get involved in this debate

in a much more profound way.

The

Extreme Ice Survey will go

down in history as this is the evidence

that we knew what was going on.

You can't deny it!

We don't have

a problem with economics,

technology and public policy.

We have a problem with perception.

Because not enough people really get it yet.

I believe we really have

an opportunity right now.

We are nearly on the edge of a crisis,

but we still have an opportunity

to face the greatest challenge

of our generation, and in fact,

of our century.

Thank you.

When my daughters, Simone and

Emily, look at me 25 or 30 years

from now and say, what were

you doing when, when...

global warming was happening

and you guys knew what was

coming down the road.

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