The debate about climate change is over, the facts are in, the effects are evident and more people are on board to take on the challenge. The movement is strong and growing with every new weather-related disaster, but we need to get everyone on board.

The new documentary Chasing Ice (which opens today in New York City and later this month in several other cities-see schedule for more info), details the great lengths at which one man, James Balog, went in the pursuit of providing conclusive visual evidence of what opened his eyes to the very real threat of climate change. A seasoned photographer, Balog has spent his life looking through the lens. He knows the value of tangible images in telling a story and he set out to use his expertise to give the world a photographic record of climate change.

Through his foundation of the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog setup more than 25 multi-year time-lapse cameras across the world to capture the loss of glacial ice cover.

The results are breathtaking, but the realities are frightening. In a matter of seconds you can see our vanishing glaciers over the past several years and the rate at which the ice is melting is made undeniably clear. As you sit back and watch massive sections of glaciers break off (or calve), and hear the tremendous noise of such a monumental occurrence, the severity of our changing climate is brought to life. The animation of these images and videos reflect a world that is changing drastically and is increasingly becoming a foreign planet.

A chunk of ice the size of the entire lower tip of Manhattan and 2 ½ to 3 times as tall breaking off into the ocean can bring to mind a frightful image, but to actually see it in real-life and time hits home unlike any analogy or statistic. Glaciers offer a unique perspective on the immediacy and scale of climate change because of our ability, as demonstrated through Balog’s work, to visibly see these massive formations dwindle into nothing. This is why Balog chose to tell the story through images and ice.

Chasing Ice leaves a truly haunting impression on viewers, but not a futile one. As Balog says, there is still time to act, but there is no more time to argue. If we want to leave a positive legacy and provide a livable future for our species and all of the Earth’s wildlife, we need to act now.

Chasing Ice premieres November 9th at Cinema Village in New York City. It will have limited release across the country and will be in Washington, D.C. at the Landmark E. Street theater beginning on November 16th. Check out the website for showings near you.

Opening in select theaters this weekend is the documentary Chasing Ice, which chronicles photographer Balog’s worldwide journey to accumulate visual evidence of the effects of climate change. We can’t necessarily see carbon pollution, but we can see what it does. And we can see it most clearly in the chilliest places on the planet–Iceland, Greenland, Alaska.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Balog and his team of scientists and engineers travel from glacier to glacier setting up cameras, bolting them to mountainsides or nestling them between boulders and out of the hurricane-force winds. The cameras are part of a high-tech, specially-constructed package made to (mostly) withstand harsh conditions, while still capturing an image every sixty minutes during daylight hours. The team checks back on the cameras periodically, downloading the files and fixing technical difficulties. Then they compile all the images, a virtual flipbook of sorts, showing the changes in glaciers over time; in this case, several years.

Since I am a mind-reader, I know you are thinking, glaciers are huge! Does a glacier’s size really change that much in such a short amount of time? 

You know the term “moving at a glacial pace,” used to infer that something is happening so slowly that it’s only noticeable on a geologic time scale? Based on Balog’s time-lapse images, it’s probably time we clarify that term…”moving at a glacial* pace” (*pre-industrialized-era glacier, that is). So yes, a glacier’s size really does change that much in such a short amount of time. Yes, because moving at a glacial pace is not quite as slow as it used to be.

The compiled images are really something else, something that we literally have never seen before, and the footage of Balog and Team tramping around ice fields and rappelling into crevasses is enough to make any cautious person’s stomach drop. But on a level far greater than promoting the aesthetic beauty of far-off places, Balog manages to bring the average person to far corners of the world, and closer to the ice-melting realities of our carbon-polluting society.

After you see this stunning documentary, visit the Chasing Ice website to spread the message and encourage high-profile members of our society to give it a watch.

• Find a screening of Chasing Ice near you
• Listen to the Fresh Air interview with James Balog, during which he asks, “If a glacier vanishes in the arctic and no camera is there to witness it, would anyone ever know if it was ever there?“ 
• Watch James Balog’s TED Talk

Connect with Campus Ecology on facebook, and follow @CampusEcology and @YouthforClimate on twitter. 

Surveying the Lyell Glacier in Yosemite

Yet Californians don’t need to venture outside their own state to witness a similar, if less dramatic event, as climate change is shrinking many of the state’s native glaciers. “California and glaciers, it’s like pairing Hawaii and penguins. It doesn’t quite go together, but we actually do have living glaciers here in the sunshine state,” observed the Yosemite Conservancy’s resident naturalist Pete Devine.

Devine has ventured to the same glacier in Yosemite for over twenty years, and although his first trip to Mt Lyell and its glacier began as a simple desire to bag Yosemite’s highest peak, after crossing an ice field that had stood for centuries he began a personal quest to chronicle its story.

During this trip, he noticed the letters L and K painted on the rockwall surrounding the glacier in bright orange paint. When he returned from his hike he visited the Yosemite Research Library and found a comprehensive legacy of study that began with John Muir’s visit to the glacier in 1871 when he planted ice stakes to measure its movement. Devine also realized that this body of historical research had recently been discontinued and decided to take action.

“I noticed that glacier surveys that had been conducted for decades had been stopped. And I thought, here is this long stream of valuable data that is going to end and I knew we had to pick this up again somehow. So I obtained a small grant and brought a group of science teachers up to Lyell Glacier to help find the old reference points and do new measurements. And I have been returning almost every year since.”

Watch a Yosemite Nature Notes video on the park’s glaciers featuring Pete Devine:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lyell Glacier is the second largest glacier in the Sierra Nevada, but the biggest on the range’s west slope. The glacier, currently just over a half square mile in area, has shrunk about fifty percent of its size since Muir first surveyed it. Muir writes an early description of the glacier in his book, The Yosemite.

“The Lyell Glacier is about a mile wide and less than a mile long, but presents, nevertheless, all the more characteristic features of large, river-like glaciers-moraines, earth-bands, blue-veins, crevasses etc., while the streams that issue from it are turbid with rock-mud, showing its grinding action on its bed. And it is all the more interesting since it is the highest and most enduring remnant of the great Tuolumne Glacier, whose traces are still distinct fifty miles away, and whose influence on the landscape was so profound. The McClure Glacier, once a tributary of the Lyell, is much smaller. Eighteen years ago I set a series of stakes in it to determine its rate of motion which towards the end of summer, in the middle of the glacier, I found to be a little over an inch in twenty-four hours.”

Today, the Lyell Glacier is close to “stalling out,” says Devine. “A glacier by definition is ice that moves. And you can extrapolate into the near future and know there will not be a glacier there. Just remnant, static ice. People ask me frequently, ‘since you’ve been here such a long time, what is the biggest change you’ve seen in Yosemite?’ And they assume I will comment about there being more bears or less bears or how crowded it has become but in those areas, I could not really say I have visually seen a change. The glaciers, however, are really shrinking away before my eyes.”

A time comparison of the shrinking Lyell Glacier (photos by Hassan Basagic)

“I am just excited to show people a glacier in California—it’s the same thing you watch on the Discovery Channel in Alaska or the Antarctic right here in our backyard. It’s the source of the Tuolumne River that supplies so much water to agriculture and to San Francisco, so it has a direct connect to our home. You turn on your faucet in San Francisco and that water is coming from glacial ice in the Sierra.  If that glacier melts away—actually it’s more appropriate to say when that glacier melts away—who knows what will be left for your tap. So for people to actually see a glacier, to put their boots on it, to learn about that record of recent climate change, I think that’s a unique experience that’s different from a great documentary or website on climate change and glaciers.”

Want to see Lyell Glacier before it vanishes? Pete Devine, also a member of NWF’s California Advisory Council, is leading the Yosemite Conservancy Lyell Glacier Backpack trip on August 23-26 and there is still limited space available. He’ll be assisted by the National Wildlife Federation’s California Director and longtime Yosemite area resident, Beth Pratt.

How can you help? Make a donation to help the National Wildlife Federation’s work on climate change issues.

Global warming continues to wipe out Glacier National Park’s namesake:

Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.

And it’s not just an environmental risk — it could be an economic disaster:

Smaller glaciers and warmer temperatures could lower stream flows, which in turn prompt fishing restrictions and hobble whitewater rafting businesses, said Denny Gignoux, who runs an outfitting business in West Glacier. Tourism is a $1 billion a year industry in the area.

“What happens when all these threats increase?” Gignoux asked. “We’re losing a draw to Glacier.”

Learn more in a new report from the Rocky Mountain Conservation Organization & Natural Resources Defense Council, Glacier National Park in Peril: The Threats of Climate Disruption.

Photo via Flickr’s Don Pugh