Archivist of Ice Earth’S Climate Is Changing

COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS J. BALOG/EXTREME ICE SURVEY J. BALOG/EXTREME

James Balog has developed new photographic equipment to monitor changes in glaciers such as the Ilulissat in Greenland.

Mountains and at Mount Everest. Shoot- ing every half-hour of daylight year-round, Q&A James Balog each one generates 8,500 frames per year. The footage provides scientists with information on the mechanics of glacial melting and gives the public evidence of how rapidly Archivist of ice Earth’s climate is changing. For six years, photographer James Balog has trained his lens on ice, capturing time-lapse images that have helped scientists to study how glaciers and ice sheets respond to climate What is the most dramatic moment conditions. With the documentary Chasing Ice soon to debut in US cinemas, Balog talks you’ve caught? about the loss of landscapes. Every year there are calving events in which ice falls off glaciers into the sea. The rate of ice loss in Greenland has doubled during Why are you Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers the past 20 years, and this summer we’ve interested in Rizzoli International: 2012. 288 pp. £29.95 seen unprecedented rates of surface melt- frozen landscapes? ing. We expected the Ilulissat Glacier on the Chasing Ice When I was six years Jeff Orlowski: 2012 west coast of Greenland to have a massive old, I had to walk discharge of ice, so in summer 2008 two of home from school in cover story, ‘The big thaw’, in 2006. The my team members stood watch for weeks. a heavy snowstorm. next year I created the Extreme Ice Survey, They caught the biggest calving event ever N. HIGGINS ILLUSTRATION: It was a great contest deploying time-lapse cameras to monitor recorded on film. It was as if the entire lower between myself and retreating ice in the Arctic and mountain tip of Manhattan had broken off and fallen nature. As a young man, I started ice climb- areas, some so remote that our team was into the ocean, like an urban skyline top- ing and mountaineering in the White Moun- probably the first to visit them. Tempera- pling, with skyscraper-sized blocks of ice ICE SURVEY J. ORLOWSKI/EXTREME PHOTO: tains in New Hampshire. When I looked at tures could reach –40 °C and the winds submerging and resurfacing. photographs of glaciers in Alaska I knew I 150 miles per hour. We had to tackle deep wanted to spend time there. snow, torrential rain and falling rocks. Off- What’s the aim of the Extreme Ice Survey? the-shelf gear wasn’t robust enough, and it The problem of climate change is percep- When did you start photographing took six months of experimenting to come tion. Human brains and our economic sys- glaciers in time lapse? up with a reliable time-lapse system. Right tem favour the status quo. We aim to collect After being blown away by the glacial retreat now, we have 27 such cameras at 18 glaciers powerful visual evidence so that people I saw while shooting a National Geographic in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, the Rocky can understand what’s really happening.

When satellites capture retreating PHYSICS glaciers from hundreds of kilometres away, the images may be beautiful but they’re removed from human experi- ence. We live on the ground. Retreating Modelling Feynman glaciers are where you can see climate change as it happens. Daniel Cressey marvels at a gleaming depiction of the subatomic by the world’s leading information designer. What have scientists learned from your images? In 2006, on the Greenland Ice Sheet, I efore the explosion in ‘infographics’ All Possible Photons: The Conceptual and met glaciologists who said that glaciers describing everything from cocktail Cognitive Art of Feynman Diagrams are big lumbering things that respond mixology to US health-care spending, ET Modern, New York. to climate change on a scale of decades Bthere was Edward Tufte. Until spring 2013; official opening 15 September. or centuries. We have learned that gla- Tufte, a statistician, is perhaps the world’s ciers respond hourly to atmospheric most celebrated information designer. In All calls “a complete enumeration of everything conditions. Our visuals also suggest Possible Photons at his Manhattan gallery, that could happen” in that instance. that subglacial floods may trigger some ET Modern, Tufte has unleashed his love of This isn’t the first time Tufte has ven- of the bigger calving events. We have artistic explanation in a series of sculptures tured into Feynman territory. The diagrams nearly a million pictures in the archive instantly recognizable to anyone with a pass- feature as models of good design in Tufte’s now, although there’s a lot of analysis yet ing knowledge of particle physics. Minimalist book Beautiful Evidence (Graphics, 2006). to do. ‘graphics’ consisting of stainless-steel tubing They are also referenced in one of his enor- formed into straight and undulating lines, mous Rocket Science sculptures of fantastical How do you fund the ice survey? Tufte’s rendering of Feynman diagrams space probes attached to giant bazooka- A significant part of our initial fund- transforms recondite scientific notation into style launchers. In the Airstream Interplan- ing was from the Expedition Council abstract, glinting art. Tufte also plans to show etary Explorer (2011), the probe is an iconic at National Geographic. Nikon gave us versions more than five metres high at his silvery Airstream caravan adorned with hardware. By partnering with scientists, sculpture park in Woodbury, Connecticut. Feynman diagrams. Tufte’s contention is that we got help from the US National Sci- US physicist Richard Feynman created because subatomic particles everywhere in ence Foundation and NASA. But most of elegant traceries of lines, dots and arrows to the Universe behave as shown by Feynman the funding over the past five years has describe and predict how subatomic parti- diagrams, these could work as communi- been from private donors. It has been an cles interact. Feynman was not unaware of qués to other worlds. As he has put it, “Bet- absurdly difficult project to run without his diagrams’ aesthetic appeal, and famously ter the cosmopolitan verbs of Nature’s laws ‘big science’ government-scale funding drove a van painted with a selection of them. on spacecraft than the local proper nouns of and logistical support. Tufte’s matt or polished steel sculptures, national flags, earthly Gods and Goddesses, mounted on the walls, are shorn of explana- and government agency logos.” Do you have a science background? tions as well as much of the detail that makes By focusing on the diagrams alone, the For my master’s in geomorphology, I them scientifically useful, such as arrows and sculptures in All Possible Photons bring home researched Colorado’s Big Thompson labels. Some are large and dominate their wall the power of Feynman’s achievement. There River flash flood of 1976. But I would not space. The most powerful artwork on display is beauty in his diagrams, but the real deal is presume to call myself a scientist. When is the collection of 120 smaller pieces that give what they can potentially describe — which I was finishing my thesis, I remember the show its name — a cluster representing all is everything. ■ looking at a stack of manila punchcards possible space and time paths of a particular and deciding that I’d rather see the world interaction of photons. These form what Tufte Daniel Cressey is a reporter for Nature. through a camera than through data analysis. The data are incredibly impor- tant, but my calling is to understand the

world through art. A. SEVERNY

What next? The underlying theme of my work is the collision between human needs and nature. I’d like to do more with energy, in part because my grandfather died in a Pennsylvania coalmine collapse. We worked in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and are documenting changes in forest cover in the Rockies. And I am trying to make the ice survey financially stable so that the cameras can keep going for a long time. I feel a tremendous obligation to preserve a pictorial memory of these vanishing landscapes for the people of the future.

INTERVIEW BY JASCHA HOFFMAN Edward Tufte adjusts his All Possible 6-Photon Scattering (120 Space-Time Feynman Diagrams) (2012).