OK, I’m probably as sick of the “extreme” this and “extreme” that nonsense as is anyone reading this site. It got old a long time ago. But every once in a while, an example comes along where calling something “extreme” is not only not exaggeration, but it’s about the only reasonable description.
The latest instance of this I’ve seen is ‘Extreme Ice’: Seeing is believing on glacial melting:
Probably no bit of information presented at the Aspen Environment Forum was as sobering as the screening of the film “Extreme Ice” at the Wheeler Opera House Thursday night.
The documentary used time-lapse photography to show how the biggest glaciers in the world are disappearing because of global warming. “Seeing is believing” is the motto for the film and for the Extreme Ice Survey, a research project sponsored by National Geographic.
Photojournalist James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey team installed 27 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and other places to document the dramatic retreat of the ice floes.
The general information wasn’t new for anyone paying attention to climate change issues. It’s well known, for example, that Glacier National Park in Montana will soon be without glaciers.
But “Extreme Ice” provides stunning visual evidence that goes well beyond comparisons of still photographs from different years. The time-lapse photography shows the big glaciers melting away like a plastic bread wrapper on fire.
The site, with a short video and things you can buy to support the work[1], is here.
Speaking as a long time photographer, I have mixed emotions about this project. I love that it’s being done and how much it’s likely to help raise awareness that climate chaos is here and now, not a hundred or more years away. But I hate that people have such a stunning lack of imagination that they have to be shown these kinds of pictures and videos before they understand that this problem isn’t some abstract set of numbers on a computer screen, some ivory tower mental exercise that only a handful of people in universities even know about, and none of them really believe, anyway. It’s settled science, as the saying goes, and the effects have been for decades and still are growing all around us already. If anything, the rate of their manifestation has been accelerating, which only multiplies the urgency.
Anyway–go check the site, and forward the link to your visualization-impaired friends.
[1] Yes, I will be buying one of the 16×20 prints and framing it for my office. How could I not?
