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Photographer James Balog and his team were near a glacier when his camera captured something extraordinary.
They were in Greenland, collecting time-lapse images they had placed around the Arctic Circle over the past few years.
They were also there to film scenes for a documentary. And while they were hoping to capture some interesting moments on camera, No one expected that a huge chunk of glacier would break off and slide into the ocean right before their eyes.
Massive waves created by the fall of large chunks of glacier.
It was the largest such event ever filmed.
For nearly an hour and 15 minutes, Balog and his team stood still and watched as a patch of ice the size of lower Manhattan, but with buildings equivalent to the ice on it, two or three times higher than that… It just melted.
A representation that demonstrates the enormous size of the ice that broke off into the sea.
As far as everyone knows, this was an unprecedented geological catastrophe and they recorded it all on tape. It won’t be the last time something like this happens either.
But once upon a time Balog was openly skeptical about this whole “global warming” thing.
Balog had a reputation since the early 1980s as a conservationist and environmental photographer. And for nearly 20 years, he had mocked the harbingers of climate change by shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
“I didn’t think humans would be able to change the basic physics and chemistry of this entire huge planet. It didn’t seem likely, it didn’t seem possible,” he explained in the 2012 documentary.Chasing the ice“.
There was too much room for error In computer simulations, there are too many other pressing problems to address about our beautiful planet. As far as he was concerned, these melodramatic doomsayers distracted attention from the real problems.
That was then.
The glacier ice continues to erode.
In fact, it was not until 2005 that Balog became a believer.
National Geographic sent him on an Arctic photography expedition, and that first trip north was more than enough to see the damage for himself.
“This was real tangible physical evidence that was preserved in the ice cores of Greenland and Antarctica,” he said in a 2012 interview with ThinkProgress. “That was really the smoking gun that shows how far from normal and from natural variation the world has become. And that’s when I really started to get the message that this was something important and serious and needed to be addressed.”
Part of that evidence may have been the fact that More Arctic landmass has melted in the last 20 years than in the previous 10,000 years.
Watch video of the glacier calving event below:
“CHASING ICE” captures the largest glacier calving ever filmed – OFFICIAL VIDEO
This article originally appeared on 11/04/15.