Chasing Ice

ABC NEWS ANCHOR (VO): It's hard not to be impressed

when you see entire houses being swept away

by flood waters in the West

CBS EARLY (VO): Fires stretch from one end

of Texas to the other.

Tornadoes--

a dozen tornadoes have already been spotted

Liberals will say, well if it's cold,

it's global warming, if it's snowing it's global warming,

if it's hot it's global warming-- there's nothing

that doesn't prove that there's-- it's global warming.

VO-- MSNBC The latest estimates for rebuilding from Irene,

already seven billion dollars.

CBS 2011 is now on track

to be the most expensive year ever for weather related damage.

FEMALE REPORTER (VO):

A drought of historic proportions has hit Nepal.

The horror

of raging wildfires has again returned to Russia.

FEMALE REPORTER The say it was

like nothing they've ever seen before.

16 of the last 20 years are the hottest on record.

The science is not in

It is in

No

Stuart quit saying that.

The debate is over.

No, the debate is not over

The globe is actually cooling

and has been cooling since 2002.

The consensus is that there is no consensus.

I mean how do you not...global warming

is real.

You're about to self implode here.

The ice caps, the poles, are not going

to melt, the oceans are not going to flood the coast --

I promise you, 20 years from today,

I'll be the one that's laughing.

The worst that would happen is

that I'd just get really wet if I just stood in place.

No.

You fall, you try to run, you bang your knee on a piece

of ice, and you bust your knee.

Ah, I just-- I have to get this picture.

The first time I worked with James,

It was obvious how he goes about things, you know?

Alright quickly!

Cause this light won't last forever.

He pushes it-- he's looking for something.

You do have rope in the car?

Yeah.

Go back and get whatever you have.

Okay.

Alright, I'm,

I'm almost certain to get wet, Okay?

In fact, I think I'm so certain to get wet,

I'll take my boots off.

And it was very interesting

because it was his first real encounter

at looking at ice in that way.

He really did fall in love with it.

There's this limitless Universe

of forms out there...

That is just, surreal, other worldly.

Sculptural, architectural...

insanely, ridiculously beautiful.

And that's when I though, okay, the story is in the ice.

Somehow.

I was umm, about 25 or so, I guess.

And I was finishing my master's degree in Geomorphology.

And um, I loved the science,

but I wasn't interested in being a scientist.

The modern world of science was all about statistics

and computer modeling and that just wasn't me.

I had no contacts in the photo world,

I had no knowledge of the photo world.

But, youthful brashness can take you a long way,

make things happen, so, that's how it worked.

I had this idea that the most powerful issue

of our time was the interaction of humans and nature.

One of the subjects I started to look at involved people hunting.

But they were bloody, gory, horrific pictures, hard to look

at-- hard for me to look at even today.

And so, when I had this idea to look at endangered wildlife,

I realized that I needed to show these things

in a more seductive fashion.

I had to look at it in ways

that would engage people-- pull them in.

He's always taken the big view.

You know? He's not looking at this little micro slice.

He's really looking at what humanity is doing

from a very large perspective.

His books-- they force you to regard nature in a way

that you're not accustomed to looking at em.

He's forcing you to think.

He's forcing me to think.

And that's what I love about James' work.

You know, Ansel Adams was the father

of all landscape photography and he created a movement

around wilderness that only images could do.

And now you have James with that same kind of eye.

But being able to do more with the technology.

It's not just the drive

to climb mountains and hang off cliffs.

He has the ability to capture it in a way and communicate it.

Observing it and knowing it is one thing, but sharing it

and sharing it effectively can change the world.

I did a couple years of research

on the climate change story,

trying to find what you could photograph about climate change

that would make interesting photographs.

And I eventually realized that the only thing that-- to me--

sounded right, was ice.

He came with us with a proposal

to do a profile of one glacier in Iceland.

We essentially countered to him, we said, well look,

why don't we just do a bigger story.

It was on the cover of the magazine.

Most popular, most wellread story in the last five years.

As I was shooting that story,

I started to get the very strong sense

that this was a scouting mission for something much bigger,

and much longer-term that was about to unfold.

The Solheim Glacier, the Sunhouse Glacier in translation,

is where I really first got it.

That glacier had been receding several hundred feet a year;

which is a lot.

You normally have a little bit of advance in the winter time,

a little bit of retreat in the summer time;

but when you see huge amounts of change,

that's outside of normal behavior.

There was a real sense of the glacier just coming to an end;

and like this old, decrepit man, just, you know,

falling into the earth and dying.

It was very evocative, very emotional.

As a guy who's been mountaineering

for basically my whole adult life, uh, someone whose trained

in the earth sciences, I never imagined

that you could see features this big disappearing

in such a short period of time.

But when I did-- when I saw that-- and I realized, my God,

there's a powerful piece of history that's unfolding

in these pictures and I have to go back to those same spots.

So, I set up a whole bunch of camera positions

around that glacier where I would just go back

and shoot a single frame.

You know, one in April, one in October,

and we would just see how the glacier changed in six months.

(VO): Right there where Svav is.

Right there.

That's exactly where the ice was.

Right there.

Right? Over.

Uhh, correct, this is where...

That glacier had changed so much, that,

I'm not kidding, for like three hours, we stood there,

looking at the prints of six months ago,

looking at the glacier going, we must be wrong,

we can't be in the right places.

They appear to be from over there.

And when I saw those, the lights when off

for me, I realized, the public doesn't wanna hear

about more statistical studies, more computer models,

more projections-- what they need is a believable,

understandable piece of visual evidence--

something that grabs them in the gut.

So I created this project called the Extreme Ice Survey-- or EIS.

The initial goal was to put

out twenty five cameras for three years.

And they would shoot every hour as long as it was daylight.

We would download those cameras every so often

and turn those individual frames into video clips

that would show you how the landscape was changing.

I thought that basically,

you could just buy all this time lapse equipment off the shelf,

slam it together and put it out there.

I was so naive about that.

Uh, there was a custom computer that needed to be built

and there were a thousand little engineering details that needed

to be worked out and a lot of trial and error,

because people hadn't built this stuff before.

And it was clear to me, it would have to be a team effort.

I wasn't that into photography,

but I talked him into me coming up here and having a look.

Cause I was curious and I really wanted to do whatever I could

to get my foot in the door.

Svav is the field assistant in Iceland.

You ready?

As ready as I can be.

These are more attractive

because I think they're more pictureeqse,

and they're still big glaciers.

Jason has a deep, deep well of experience

about Greenland's glaciers, about Greenland logistics,

about what the glaciers were doing.

Tad's a glaciologist he's really the grandfather,

the Godfather the knowledge base about those glaciers in Alaska.

The scope and the scale of EIS is bigger

than any other project since I've known him.

They would work all day, in our little,