'Chasing Ice' Movie Reveals Largest Iceberg Break-Up Ever Filmed The Guardian UK
go to original December 23, 2012

It's like watching 'Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes', says one of the researchers for filmmaker James Balog. He's describing the largest iceberg calving ever filmed, as featured in his movie, Chasing Ice.

After weeks of waiting, the filmakers witnessed 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland. Chasing Ice, released worldwide this month, follows Balog's mission to document Arctic ice being melted by climate change.

In the above clip from Chasing Ice, James Balog (red) and Adam Lewinter of the Extreme Ice Survey abseil down Survey Canyon on the Greenland ice sheet to capture some startling images of meltwater rushing down a moulin (a vertical shaft within a glacier).

Jeff Orlowski's documentary begins as a straightforward biographical profile, before shifting up into something more urgent, impassioned and compelling. Its subject, James Balog, is a photographer who goes to extremes to prove the existence of global warming: his latest expedition involves descending Arctic cliff faces to fit time-lapse cameras with which to monitor glacial erosion. Orlowski's framing – interspersing field footage with talking heads – is somewhat conventional, but the images he and Balog have collated are consistently breathtaking, and accumulate real power.

The cameras look on in vain as massive icesheets shear off, leaving once-mighty glaciers – characterised in the manner of the endangered species in Attenborough documentaries – to slump into the sea. Behind them, they leave nothing – save colossal insurance premiums for those areas subsequently flooded by displaced waters.

If any film can convert the climate-change sceptics, Chasing Ice would be it: here, seeing really is believing.

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