James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss

181,120 views ・ 2009-09-09

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:18
Most of the time, art and science stare at each other
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across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
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There is great confusion when the two look at each other.
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Art, of course, looks at the world through the psyche,
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the emotions -- the unconscious at times -- and of course the aesthetic.
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Science tends to look at the world through the rational, the quantitative --
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things that can be measured and described --
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but it gives art a terrific context of understanding.
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In the Extreme Ice Survey,
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we're dedicated to bringing those two parts of human understanding together,
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to merging the art and science
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to the end of helping us understand nature
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and humanity's relationship with nature better.
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Specifically, I as a person
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who's been a professional nature photographer my whole adult life,
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am firmly of the belief that photography, video, film
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have tremendous powers for helping us understand
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and shape the way we think about nature
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and about ourselves in relationship to nature.
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In this project, we're specifically interested, of course, in ice.
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I'm fascinated by the beauty of it, the mutability of it,
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the malleability of it,
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and the fabulous shapes in which it can carve itself.
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These first images are from Greenland.
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But ice has another meaning.
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Ice is the canary in the global coal mine.
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It's the place where we can see and touch and hear and feel climate change in action.
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Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world.
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Whether or not you believe in it is based on your sense of
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is it raining more or is it raining less?
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Is it getting hotter or is it getting colder?
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What do the computer models say about this, that and the other thing?
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All of that, strip it away. In the world of the arctic and alpine environments,
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where the ice is, it's real and it's present.
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The changes are happening. They're very visible.
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They're photographable. They're measurable.
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95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking.
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That's outside Antarctica.
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95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking,
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and that's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing.
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There is no significant scientific dispute about that.
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It's been observed, it's measured, it's bomb-proof information.
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And the great irony and tragedy of our time
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is that a lot of the general public thinks that science is still arguing about that.
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Science is not arguing about that.
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In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers,
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ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old
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breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk,
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iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.
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So, having seen all of this in the course of a 30-year career,
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I was still a skeptic about climate change until about 10 years ago,
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because I thought the story of climate change was based on computer models.
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I hadn't realized it was based on concrete measurements
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of what the paleoclimates -- the ancient climates -- were,
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as recorded in the ice sheets, as recorded in deep ocean sediments,
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as recorded in lake sediments, tree rings,
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and a lot of other ways of measuring temperature.
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When I realized that climate change was real, and it was not based on computer models,
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I decided that one day I would do a project
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looking at trying to manifest climate change photographically.
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And that led me to this project.
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Initially, I was working on a National Geographic assignment --
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conventional, single frame, still photography.
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And one crazy day, I got the idea that I should --
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after that assignment was finished --
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I got the idea that I should shoot in time-lapse photography,
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that I should station a camera or two at a glacier
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and let it shoot every 15 minutes, or every hour or whatever
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and watch the progression of the landscape over time.
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Well, within about three weeks,
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I incautiously turned that idea of a couple of time-lapse cameras
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into 25 time-lapse cameras.
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And the next six months of my life were the hardest time in my career,
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trying to design, build and deploy out in the field these 25 time-lapse cameras.
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They are powered by the sun. Solar panels power them.
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Power goes into a battery. There is a custom made computer
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that tells the camera when to fire.
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And these cameras are positioned on rocks on the sides of the glaciers,
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and they look in on the glacier from permanent, bedrock positions,
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and they watch the evolution of the landscape.
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We just had a number of cameras out on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
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We actually drilled holes into the ice, way deep down below the thawing level,
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and had some cameras out there for the past month and a half or so.
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Actually, there's still a camera out there right now.
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In any case, the cameras shoot roughly every hour.
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Some of them shoot every half hour, every 15 minutes, every five minutes.
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Here's a time lapse of one of the time-lapse units being made.
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(Laughter)
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I personally obsessed about every nut, bolt and washer in these crazy things.
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I spent half my life at our local hardware store
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during the months when we built these units originally.
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We're working in most of the major glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere.
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Our time-lapse units are in Alaska, the Rockies, Greenland and Iceland,
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and we have repeat photography positions,
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that is places we just visit on an annual basis,
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in British Columbia, the Alps and Bolivia.
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It's a big undertaking. I stand here before you tonight
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as an ambassador for my whole team.
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There's a lot of people working on this right now.
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We've got 33 cameras out this moment.
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We just had 33 cameras shoot about half an hour ago
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all across the northern hemisphere, watching what's happened.
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And we've spent a lot of time in the field. It's been a fantastic amount of work.
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We've been out for two and a half years,
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and we've got about another two and a half years yet to go.
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That's only half our job.
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The other half of our job is to tell the story to the global public.
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You know, scientists have collected this kind of information
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off and on over the years, but a lot of it stays within the science community.
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Similarly, a lot of art projects stay in the art community,
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and I feel very much a responsibility through mechanisms like TED,
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and like our relationship with the Obama White House,
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with the Senate, with John Kerry, to influence policy
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as much as possible with these pictures as well.
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We've done films. We've done books. We have more coming.
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We have a site on Google Earth
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that Google Earth was generous enough to give us,
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and so forth, because we feel very much the need to tell this story,
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because it is such an immediate evidence of ongoing climate change right now.
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Now, one bit of science before we get into the visuals.
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If everybody in the developed world understood this graph,
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and emblazoned it on the inside of their foreheads,
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there would be no further societal argument about climate change
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because this is the story that counts.
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Everything else you hear is just propaganda and confusion.
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Key issues: this is a 400,000 year record.
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This exact same pattern is seen going back now
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almost a million years before our current time.
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And several things are important.
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Number one: temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
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go up and down basically in sync.
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You can see that from the orange line and the blue line.
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Nature naturally has allowed carbon dioxide to go up to 280 parts per million.
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That's the natural cycle.
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Goes up to 280 and then drops
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for various reasons that aren't important to discuss right here.
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But 280 is the peak.
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Right now, if you look at the top right part of that graph,
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we're at 385 parts per million.
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We are way, way outside the normal, natural variability.
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Earth is having a fever.
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In the past hundred years, the temperature of the Earth
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has gone up 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, .75 degrees Celsius,
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and it's going to keep going up
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because we keep dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
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At the rate of about two and a half parts per million per year.
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It's been a remorseless, steady increase.
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We have to turn that around.
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That's the crux, and someday I hope to emblazon that
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across Times Square in New York and a lot of other places.
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But anyway, off to the world of ice.
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We're now at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska.
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This is a view of what's called the calving face.
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This is what one of our cameras saw over the course of a few months.
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You see the glacier flowing in from the right,
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dropping off into the sea, camera shooting every hour.
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If you look in the middle background,
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you can see the calving face bobbing up and down like a yo-yo.
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That means that glacier's floating and it's unstable,
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and you're about to see the consequences of that floating.
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To give you a little bit of a sense of scale,
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that calving face in this picture
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is about 325 feet tall. That's 32 stories.
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This is not a little cliff. This is like a major office building in an urban center.
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The calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off,
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but in fact, it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet.
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So there's a wall of ice a couple thousand feet deep
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going down to bedrock if the glacier's grounded on bedrock,
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and floating if it isn't.
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Here's what Columbia's done. This is in south central Alaska.
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This was an aerial picture I did one day in June three years ago.
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This is an aerial picture we did this year.
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That's the retreat of this glacier.
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The main stem, the main flow of the glacier is coming from the right
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and it's going very rapidly up that stem.
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We're going to be up there in just a few more weeks,
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and we expect that it's probably retreated another half a mile,
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but if I got there and discovered that it had collapsed
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and it was five miles further back, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
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Now it's really hard to grasp the scale of these places,
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because as the glaciers --
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one of the things is that places like Alaska and Greenland are huge,
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they're not normal landscapes --
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but as the glaciers are retreating, they're also deflating,
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like air is being let out of a balloon.
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And so, there are features on this landscape.
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There's a ridge right in the middle of the picture, up above where that arrow comes in,
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that shows you that a little bit.
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There's a marker line called the trim line
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above our little red illustration there.
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This is something no self-respecting photographer would ever do --
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you put some cheesy illustration on your shot, right? --
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and yet you have to do it sometimes to narrate these points.
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But, in any case, the deflation of this glacier since 1984
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has been higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the Empire State Building.
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A tremendous amount of ice has been let out of these valleys
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as it's retreated and deflated, gone back up valley.
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These changes in the alpine world are accelerating.
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It's not static.
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Particularly in the world of sea ice,
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the rate of natural change is outstripping predictions of just a few years ago,
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and the processes either are accelerating
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or the predictions were too low to begin with.
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But in any case, there are big, big changes happening as we speak.
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So, here's another time-lapse shot of Columbia.
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And you see where it ended in these various spring days,
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June, May, then October.
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Now we turn on our time lapse.
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This camera was shooting every hour.
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Geologic process in action here.
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And everybody says, well don't they advance in the winter time?
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No. It was retreating through the winter because it's an unhealthy glacier.
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Finally catches up to itself, it advances.
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And you can look at these pictures over and over again
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because there's such a strange, bizarre fascination in seeing
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these things you don't normally get to see come alive.
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We've been talking about "seeing is believing "
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and seeing the unseen at TED Global.
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That's what you see with these cameras.
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The images make the invisible visible.
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These huge crevasses open up.
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These great ice islands break off --
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and now watch this.
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This has been the springtime this year --
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a huge collapse. That happened in about a month,
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the loss of all that ice.
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So that's where we started three years ago,
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way out on the left, and that's where we were a few months ago, the
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last time we went into Columbia.
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To give you a feeling for the scale of the retreat,
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we did another cheesy illustration,
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with British double-decker buses.
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If you line up 295 of those nose to tail, that's about how far back that was.
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It's a long way.
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On up to Iceland.
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One of my favorite glaciers, the Sólheimajökull.
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And here, if you watch, you can see the terminus retreating.
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You can see this river being formed.
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You can see it deflating.
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Without the photographic process, you would never see this. This is invisible.
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You can stand up there your whole life and you would never see this,
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but the camera records it.
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So we wind time backwards now.
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We go back a couple years in time.
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That's where it started.
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That's where it ended a few months ago.
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And on up to Greenland.
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The smaller the ice mass, the faster it responds to climate.
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Greenland took a little while to start reacting
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to the warming climate of the past century,
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but it really started galloping along about 20 years ago.
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And there's been a tremendous increase in the temperature up there.
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It's a big place. That's all ice.
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All those colors are ice and it goes up to about two miles thick,
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just a gigantic dome that comes in from the coast and rises in the middle.
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The one glacier up in Greenland
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that puts more ice into the global ocean
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than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined
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is the Ilulissat Glacier.
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We have some cameras on the south edge of the Ilulissat,
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watching the calving face as it goes through this dramatic retreat.
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Here's a two-year record of what that looks like.
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Helicopter in front of the calving face for scale, quickly dwarfed.
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The calving face is four and a half miles across,
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and in this shot, as we pull back, you're only seeing about a mile and a half.
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So, imagine how big this is
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and how much ice is charging out.
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The interior of Greenland is to the right.
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It's flowing out to the Atlantic Ocean on the left.
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Icebergs, many, many, many, many times the size of this building, are roaring out to sea.
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We just downloaded these pictures a couple weeks ago,
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as you can see. June 25th,
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monster calving events happened.
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I'll show you one of those in a second.
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This glacier has doubled its flow speed in the past 15 years.
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It now goes at 125 feet a day, dumping all this ice into the ocean.
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It tends to go in these pulses, about every three days,
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but on average, 125 feet a day,
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twice the rate it did 20 years ago.
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Okay. We had a team out watching this glacier,
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and we recorded the biggest calving event that's ever been put on film.
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We had nine cameras going.
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This is what a couple of the cameras saw.
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A 400-foot-tall calving face breaking off.
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Huge icebergs rolling over.
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Okay, how big was that? It's hard to get it.
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So an illustration again, gives you a feeling for scale.
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A mile of retreat in 75 minutes
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across the calving face, in that particular event, three miles wide.
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The block was three-fifths of a mile deep,
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and if you compare the expanse of the calving face
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to the Tower Bridge in London, about 20 bridges wide.
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Or if you take an American reference, to the U.S. Capitol Building
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and you pack 3,000 Capitol Buildings into that block,
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it would be equivalent to how large that block was.
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75 minutes.
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17:51
Now I've come to the conclusion
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after spending a lot of time in this climate change world
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that we don't have a problem of economics, technology and public policy.
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We have a problem of perception.
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The policy and the economics and the technology are serious enough issues,
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but we actually can deal with them.
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I'm certain that we can.
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But what we have is a perception problem
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because not enough people really get it yet.
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You're an elite audience. You get it.
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Fortunately, a lot of the political leaders in the major countries of the world
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are an elite audience that for the most part gets it now.
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But we still need to bring a lot of people along with us.
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And that's where I think organizations like TED,
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like the Extreme Ice Survey can have a terrific impact
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on human perception and bring us along.
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Because I believe we have an opportunity right now.
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We are nearly on the edge of a crisis,
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but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge
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of our generation and, in fact, of our century.
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This is a terrific, terrific call to arms
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to do the right thing for ourselves and for the future.
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I hope that we have the wisdom to let the angels of our better nature
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rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done. Thank you.
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(Applause)
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