Chasing down the world’s vanishing glaciers

The melting glacial ice in places similar to the Alps, Greenland and the Himalayas is a spectacular visual document of how our planet's climate is fast changing. The United States based environmental photographer James Balog, it is a vision he has spent over 6 years trying hard to record and preserve. I was really shocked by the changes taking place and sought to find a way to capture what was going on, in the Arctic and glaciers elsewhere around the world. The effect has been a new documentary film, "Chasing Ice," based on 36 time-lapse cameras looking at 16 different glaciers in locations in Alaska, Canada, France, Greenland, Bolivia, Iceland, Nepal, the Rocky Mountains and Switzerland. Each camera has been taking a snap every half-an-hour during daylight, developing almost one million pictures in total. What we have seen has been an absolute shock. I never really projected to see this magnitude of change. Every time we open the backs of these cameras it's like 'wow, is that what's just happened.

He says at one point in the film, he has just removed memory card from camera and saying: "This is a memory of a landscape. A landscape that is now gone and will never be seen again in the history of civilization. It is the Arctic that has attracted most attention in recent years. In September 2012, the ice cap fell to its lowest point on record. Surprising it grows each winter but is retreating further and further every summer, and the summer ice extent has decreased by 13% each decade since the ice was first monitored in 1979. Climate researchers have previously forecasted the Arctic could lose almost all of its ice cover in the summer months by 2100. Though, the current accelerated ice losses have led some to believe that date could come much sooner.

What we are observing is a much more accelerated rate of change, particularly in the last 40 years or so and that has clearly been traced by researchers to the impact of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions into the atmosphere. In the last 100 years, the atmosphere has accumulated 40 percent more carbon dioxide in it than had been seen in the peak over the past one million years. He believes the economic and technological solutions to mitigate the effect of climate change already exist. What we require is a better political and public understanding of the immediacy and reality of these changes. I think that this film can help shift public perceptions by telling people a story that is true and happening now.