Extreme Ice Studies: Historic Sequences, 2005 - 2023

In 2007 James Balog launched the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), which deployed a network of time-lapse cameras at various glaciers around the world and produced unconfutable, visual evidence of climate change. Between March and July 2007, the EIS team mounted 24 cameras on rock walls above and alongside glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and northern Montana, documenting how our warming climate has caused the world’s ice masses to retreat and thin. Powered by photovoltaic panels, the automated cameras photographed year-round during every hour, or half hour, of daylight. Eventually, a total of 72 time-lapse cameras were intermittently deployed, including in Antarctica, Greenland, South Georgia, and Austria, and at the foot of Mount Everest in Nepal. Most photographs in this sequence were selected from the 1.5 million frames of the Extreme Ice Survey’s digital time-lapse imagery. That data is now preserved in the archive of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Other images were the product of efforts to repeat aerial or ground-based camera positions year after year.