Photographer's Glacier Footage Becomes Climate Change's Most Dramatic Evidence

James Balog was standing in Greenland with his camera crew when a piece of glacier the size of lower Manhattan simply broke away and fell into the ocean. For an hour and fifteen minutes, they watched it happen—ice structures two to three times taller than the buildings of Manhattan collapsing into the sea. It was the largest glacier calving event ever captured on film, and Balog, a photographer who had spent decades documenting the Arctic, found himself witnessing something that would reshape not just his work but his entire understanding of the planet.

Twenty years earlier, Balog would have dismissed such talk as alarmism. Through the 1980s and into the early 2000s, he carried a reputation as an environmental photographer, but he was openly skeptical of climate change. The computer models seemed unreliable to him, full of margin for error. The warnings felt melodramatic, a distraction from real environmental problems. He could not accept that humans possessed the capacity to alter the basic physics and chemistry of an entire planet. It seemed neither probable nor possible.

That certainty fractured in 2005. National Geographic sent him on an expedition to the Arctic, and what he found there—physical evidence preserved in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica—became what he would later call the smoking gun. The data showed the world had moved far outside the bounds of natural variation. More Arctic landmass had melted in the previous twenty years than in the ten thousand years before that. The evidence was not abstract or modeled; it was tangible and preserved in ice. Balog's skepticism gave way to something harder to dismiss: direct observation.

He began the Extreme Ice Survey, positioning time-lapse cameras across the Arctic Circle to document what was happening to glaciers, ice sheets, and the broader landscape. The work stretched across fifteen years, accumulating more than 1.5 million images now archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. In 2012, he appeared in the documentary "Chasing Ice," explaining his transformation from doubter to witness. By 2024, when he spoke with CBS about his ongoing work, the urgency had only sharpened. "When I started the extreme ice survey, climate change was still seen as a pretty abstract thing," he said. "It was something that was going to happen 20 or 30 or 50 years from now. But when you could start to realize no, it's happening right now right in front of us. It put a real marker in time to say this is now, this is real."

The Extreme Ice Survey concluded in 2022, but Balog's documentation did not end. The same team that produced "Chasing Ice" reunited for a follow-up called "Chasing Time," which premiered on PBS's POV series and chronicles the closing of the project. Balog has framed his photographic archive as a message across time—evidence for a future that will look back and ask what people in 2024 knew and what they chose to do. "I want to be able to say to those people of the distant future," he explained, "look not everybody in this time was terribly conscious or cared about climate change. But I want to be able to say that this mind, these eyes, and this heart was paying attention." The footage of that glacier calving in Greenland—a geological event unfolding in real time, captured and preserved—stands as the most dramatic proof yet that the change is not coming. It is here.