The Extreme Ice Survey merges art and science to give a “visual voice” to Earth’s changing ecosystems. Extreme Ice Survey imagery preserves a visual legacy, providing a unique baseline — useful in years, decades and even centuries to come — for revealing how climate change and other human activity impacts our air, water, forests and wildlife.
EIS field assistant Adam LeWinter on NE rim of Birthday Canyon, atop feature called “Moab.” Greenland Ice Sheet, July 2009. Black deposit in bottom of channel is cryoconite. Birthday Canyon is approximately 150 feet deep.
One aspect of Extreme Ice Survey’s work is a portfolio of single-frame photographs celebrating the beauty, art and architecture of ice. The other aspect of the survey is time-lapse photography. Currently, 27 cameras are deployed at 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya at Mount Everest, Alaska and the U.S. Rocky Mountains. These cameras record changes in the glaciers every half hour of daylight year round, yielding approximately 8,500 frames per camera per year. The time-lapse images are then edited into stunning videos that reveal how fast climate change is transforming large regions of the planet.
You can witness the hauntingly beautiful videos that compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate in the film Chasing Ice. The vivid images of the majestic ice caps slowly melting away are set to an Academy-Award nominated soundtrack featuring Scarlett Johansson.
LeWinter ice climbing in Survey Canyon, Greenland
Chasing Ice features geologist, mountaineer and award-winning photographer James Balog, who is director of the Extreme Ice Survey and founder of Earth Vision Trust.
Join oceanography and climate change researcher Dr. John B. Anderson of Rice University for a one-night-only screening of Chasing Ice at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on June 18 at 6:30 p.m. This is the only digital, giant-screen showing of Chasing Ice in Houston.
WHAT: HMNS Film Screening of Chasing Ice
WHEN: Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m.
HOW MUCH: Tickets $18, HMNS Members $12
Click here for advance tickets.