Photographer James Balog and his film crew were stationed near a glacier in the Arctic Circle when their cameras happened to capture an extraordinary event.
They were in Greenland, collecting footage from various locations all over the Arctic Circle for a several years-long time-lapse film.
Additionally, they were shooting scenes for a documentary. While they were hoping to gather some great footage and scenic shots, nobody expected to witness a gigantic chunk of a glacier suddenly break off and slide into the ocean right in front of their very eyes.
For approximately an hour and 15 minutes, Balog and his crew filmed and watched as a chunk of ice the size of lower Manhattan — but with ice structures two to three times taller than Manhattan’s skyscrapers — simply melted into the ocean.
As far as anyone knows, this was an unprecedented geological catastrophe and they had captured the entire event on film. But once upon a time, Balog, a reputed conservationist and environmental photographer since the early 80’s, was openly skeptical about the idea of global warming for 20 years.
“I didn’t think that humans were capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of this entire, huge planet. It didn’t seem probable, it didn’t seem possible,” he explained in the 2012 documentary film ‘Chasing Ice.’
There was too much margin of error in the computer simulations, too many other pressing problems to address about our beautiful planet. As far as he was concerned, these melodramatic doomsayers were distracting from the real issues.
In fact, Balog remained unconvinced until 2005, when he was sent on a photo expedition of the Arctic by National Geographic, during which he was able to see the damage for himself.
“It was about actual tangible physical evidence that was preserved in the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica,” he said in a 2012 interview with ThinkProgress. “That was really the smoking gun showing how far outside normal, natural variation the world has become. And that’s when I started to really get the message that this was something consequential and serious and needed to be dealt with.”
Part of that tangible physical evidence could be the fact that more Arctic landmass has melted away in the last 20 years than the previous 10,000 years.
Watch the entire video of the crumbling glacier:
Expanded from original source:
“The longest — and probably largest — proof of our current climate catastrophe ever caught on camera.” by Eddie Geller, originally published at Upworthy on October 8, 2014.
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