Global Warming

Please find below a remarkable image sequence, which captures a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. Composed of 436 frames taken between May and September of 2007, it shows the glacier rapidly retreating by about 1.6 kilometre, a volume loss of some 1.67 cubic kilometres of ice or 1,500,000,000,000 litres of water or simply 1.5 trillion litres of water!

The time-lapse was taken as part of the ongoing Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), an ambitious project to capture global warming-induced glacial retreat in the act. Beginning in December 2006, photographer James Balog and his colleagues set up 26 solar-powered cameras at glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Alps, and the Rocky Mountains. Each unit will take a photograph every daylight hour until fall 2009.

In 2008, Balog's team began to return to each of the camera sites to collect images. In the end, they will have more than 300,000 images to analyse and stitch together to produce more dramatic videos like this one.

This kind of multi-year effort, says Balog, is necessary to radically alter public perception of the global warming issue.

You will need a high-speed internet connection to view this video!