James Balog vividly illustrates the rapid retreat of ice sheets and glaciers on Earth. His work, which has appeared on the cover of National Geographic and on PBS, turns climate-change skeptics into believers, he says.
Balog’s time-lapse photography compresses months of ice retreat into a few minutes of dramatic footage, wherein viewers can watch glaciers shrink more than a mile in a year. Balog says he’s given presentations to many conservative groups, with positive results.
Balog mentions a retired Texaco official who’s “my new buddy.” Balog adds, “He saw a show I did in January. He says, ‘You’re telling it like is.’”
“It’s a decisive moment in geologic history and, for that matter, human history,” Balog says. “As a human being, I feel horrified to be here watching this. As a guy who is a scientist, it’s exhilarating.”
A decade ago, however, Balog viewed himself as a skeptic.
“I thought there was more question about it. And I know way more than the average person does about ice science, polar science, the atmosphere,” says Balog, who earned a graduate degree in geomorphology from the University of Colorado in 1977.
"It’s a decisive moment in geologic history and, for that matter, human history.”
As a scientist, he had “an inherited, deep-seated belief that people lacked the ability to change big pieces of the Earth quickly.” Additionally, he was skeptical of environmental rhetoric.
“I thought this was just another fund-raising shenanigan to motivate the base, as (former White House adviser) Karl Rove would say.” Finally, Balog thought climate science was based on more computer models than on empirical observations.
Then he learned more about the data upon which climate science is based. His opinion began to change. “The thing I’m stunned by over and over again is that these scientists have a huge amount of information, and it’s persuasive. But the knowledge kind of sits behind the ivory tower wall.”
Balog aims to breach that wall. Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey were featured on a one-hour NOVA/PBS documentary in March. That documentary followed Balog to Alaska, Greenland and Iceland, three of 15 sites where his team collects time-lapse images of glacial retreat.
In this film clip, Balog describes the Extreme Ice Survey and displays time-lapse photographic records of retreating glaciers.
The Extreme Ice Survey is described as the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography. (See video.)
Balog describes his work as a bridge between science and the public, and between art and science. In 2006, Balog says, he had a “eureka” moment. Maybe the satellite pictures (and their associated charts and graphs) wasn’t the best way to tell the story.
Satellite data abound. Last September, for instance, the National Snow and Ice Data Center at CU (directed by geography Professor Mark Serreze) announced that Arctic sea-ice cover reached its second-lowest extent since the dawn of the satellite record. Last year, minimum Arctic sea-ice extent was 2.24 million square kilometers below the 1979-2000 average.
Between winter 2005 and 2007, NSIDC and NASA reported, Arctic sea-ice extent shrank by an area equivalent to Texas and California combined. The shrinkage is seen in NASA satellite images.
But the satellite’s perspective, which most humans never experience, lacks the impact of ground-based images.
“The human animal lives anywhere from two feet to seven feet above ground,” Balog says. That’s the human point of view. “It’s how we see things.” And it’s how we understand things.
Using ground-based cameras that snap one photograph per hour (during daylight) for up to two years, Balog’s films show breathtaking changes. Between May 15, 2007, and Sept. 21, 2008, the Columbia Glacier in Alaska retreated by 1.25 miles.
Balog’s images show the boundaries of each year’s retreat. Then, to give a human scale to the sweeping view of the glacier and the mountains behind, Balog’s film shows the extent of retreat on another human scale: 165 school buses, lined up end to end.
Even with all that context, it’s still boggling, he says. “Frankly, when you’re standing there, it’s hard to grasp the scale of it.”
Balog says the EIS has been “way more successful” than he’d imagined. “I never thought I’d have EU [EU Envionmental Ministers] calling, asking for pictures to be displayed at [their] annual meeting.”
“I’ve got the BBC pounding at the door for time-lapse images,” he adds. “I knew that the cameras were going to see things in a fresh and provocative way. But I didn’t really anticipate how much people would be knocked on their heels.”
“The most skeptical skeptic and the most ignorant person in the audience can look at that and say holy ___,” Balog says, adding that the rate of climate change today is 180 times faster than when Earth emerged from the last ice age.
Balog says the media have not reported the climate-change story well enough. That’s one reason he does a lot of outreach. “I do it because I know this is real. I don’t want to be 85 years old and have my kids saying, ‘How could you have been so oblivious?’ I fear we’re not going to take strong enough action quickly enough.”
He adds, “I want to do whatever I can with the skills I have” to convey the urgency of climate change. “I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing.”
Balog’s team includes Tad Pfeffer, a CU professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering. The EIS board of scientific advisers includes Konrad Steffen, a CU geography professor and director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
EIS’s sponsors include National Geographic, NASA and the National Science Foundation.
For more information about EIS, see .
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