Ice - The Solid Water: Documentary Review on 'Chasing Ice'

After a few weeks of in-depth learning on groundwater, let's shift our attention to ice - the solid phase of water and the documentary named ‘Chasing Ice’ is worth-sharing with all of you. You will definitely be amazed by the images of ice and also by the facts of how climate change would exert so much impact on ice melting and global warming. 

Worth-mentioning Shots

Here are the moments I found either astonishing or inspirational throughout the documentary:(37:12)

“The glacier is retreating but also thinning at the same time. It is like air being let out of the balloon.” The trim line, known as the high water mark of the glacier in Greenland, receded 11 miles from 1984 to the observation time in 2008. The vertical change is roughly equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building.  

(40:33)

The part of the Greenland melting begins with its edges, and the area of this ice sheet is growing and moving higher upon the ice sheet as the climate changes in that part of the world. All the water there is melting down through the swiss cheese holes and it goes through small channels to big ones. Eventually everything drops vertically down through these big Moulin caverns, goes down to the bottom of the ice sheet and out into the ocean. 

(41:30)

The sea level rise that will happen in our lifetimes is estimated to be minimum approximately between 1.5-3 feet. This would affect places down the Chespeake Bay, along the Gulf Coast of the United States, in the Ganges flood plain, as well as in China and Indonesia. A minimum of 150 million (1.5*10⁸) people would be displaced, flushed out and would have to move somewhere else, while all these are caused by ourselves. Hurricanes and typhoons are also intensified as more water is pushed inland. 

(58:30)

Tangible, visual evidence of the immediacy of climate change itself. 

Glacier is the place where you can see climate change happening. 

(1:03:25)

The change in glacier area from 1958 to 2008 in Yukon Territory in Canada has shown that, with natural variability being taken into account, of the 1,400 glaciers that used to exist there in 1958, only four got bigger, over 300 disappeared completely, and almost all of the rest got smaller.

(1:08:25)

It took 100 years to retreat eight miles from 1900 to 2000. From 2000 to 2010, it retreated nine miles. So in 10 years, it retreated more than it had in the previous 100 years. 

My Humble Thoughts

While showing my genuine respect to Mr JamesBalog and his Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) team who turned himself from a photographer to a climatologist while still being a responsible global citizen at all times, I cannot agree more with him that we need to raise the public awareness on ice melting, glacial calving and retreating due to climate change.

On the one hand, as we know that 70% of fresh water is capped and stored in glaciers and icebergs, global warming allows ice to melt and flow inland as liquid water, which may potentially increase the amount of  fresh water resources for us human beings. On the other hand, much more severe problems aforementioned such as flooding, hurricanes and typhoons would occur in a massive scale and would undoubtedly cause loss of both human lives and financial properties. It seems that there are more cons than pros in terms of the sustainability of global water resources contributed by the melting ice and glaciers while it still remains debatable.