Published in the December 2012 issue

In the documentary Chasing Ice, director Jeff Orlowski follows the efforts of James Balog (above) to document the effects of climate change through time-lapse photography of the world's glaciers. Near the end, there's a scene that starts out so still it almost could be one of Balog's photographs. A bored camera crew is on a cliff above the Atlantic Ocean, their cameras trained on Greenland's Ilulissat glacier. They check in with Balog to assure him that nothing of note has happened in the last 17 days. Then there's a rumble. "It's starting," one of the crew members says as the glacier calves, a sheet of ice crumbling off and rolling over in the water. This begins a domino effect, slow at first but growing in speed and scale so rapidly that as the camera zooms out to take it all in, it starts to resemble a large-scale slushy machine, miles of frozen mush churning against itself. The largest calving event ever caught on film releases a mass of ice the size of lower Manhattan. Sit through Chasing Ice's flood of expert testimony, which you can do with what you will, just to see how terrifying climate change can be.

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