See the Extreme Ice Changes Near the Antarctic Peninsula | Short Film Showcase

[Music] We're here for a 3-week expedition to deploy some time-lapse cameras on the Antarctic Peninsula and on South [Music] Georgia. We've already told a powerful story of what's going on way up North. I've always wanted to tell the story of what's going on down here; adding a story from this part of the world makes the archive that much more powerful.

The peninsula is one of the fastest warming places in the world. The year-round temperatures at Palmer station are up 5° on average. 5° is an enormous increase in warming; that's a big story, and the glaciers give us a chance to bring that story to [Music] life. South Georgia is a stunning place that was completely prepared for how spectacular it would be.

Hey boys! Hey boys! In the early 1800s, this place was a hub for sealing and whaling. In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition stopped here on its way to Antarctica. His photographer, Frank Hurley, shot some pictures that document where the glaciers were on the beach. In 1972, Phil Stone comes down and he does a study of ice positions as well. Frank Hurley’s photographs from the Shackleton trip are enormously valuable. The whalers took photographs, but they took photographs of the whaling stations and whaling activity. Hurley’s pictures are probably the earliest we have of the general environment of South Georgia.

The changes of South Georgia in the last century or so are really quite marked. As far as the extreme ice survey is concerned, we thought our real work was in Antarctica, and when we got here, I realized that South Georgia was an incredible opportunity for both art and science. South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula, down here in the air currents blowing around the southern part of the world, are giving you a test for what's going on in these latitudes. You can see the air and the climate change changing through these glaciers.

Let's see this one. That's the one that was taken over there. Yeah, all the deflation that may have occurred could just throw off what we're actually looking at. But I think overall, we're a little bit higher than what this photo is taken as. But good God, has that changed! In 1972, the Brabazon Glacier was this great big tongue of ice looking down out of the Highlands, laying all the way across this area called Gold Harbor. We just got here, and there's no ice on the beach anywhere, so big changes have happened here.

Our pictures, repeating what others have already done, make an amazing long-term record of how this area has changed. We can follow the retreat of glaciers from satellites these days; they produce very precise numbers. But in many cases, there's simply no substitute for a striking visual image. I think it carries power that raw numbers don't. I no longer know how long the extreme ice survey is going to go on. I thought it would only be a three-year project; now we're on year eight, and we're basically committed for five more years.

Down here in the southern hemisphere, there's some connection between our minds, the camera's eyes, and what's going on in the landscape. There's some voice that comes through that process; it comes from the ice, through the camera, through our minds, and back out in our voices to the society around us. We're performing a service on behalf of the landscape. After a certain point, I am not even sure that it's my choice to make; it's just what is our humble task to do. [Music]