Chasing Ice

'Chasing Ice’ is a documentary about a chap called James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey team who go out to photograph the melting glaciers by using automatic cameras, set to take shots over a long period of time. The resulting time lapse scenes are as equally impressive as they are shocking, showing the rapid retreat of the glaciers.

The film does preach a bit about climate change and Balog has an obsession to document it. That as well as a passion for photography and a dodgy knee. He has my sympathy there. It’s a knee on which he’s had several operations. He ignores his physio too and we see him out on the ice on his crutches at one point. This along with the problems they had setting up the cameras in the harsh environments of Greenland, Alaska and Canada, make the film more interesting for me.

I suppose on the climate change front the film never really gets to grips with the issue, other than providing irrefutable photographic evidence that it exists but doesn’t prove that it is man-made. While, if it is, they don’t suggest anything to us that we can do about it. Cracking photography though.