
Re-forming Glaciers
11MIN
Availability ended 9/14/2020 EDT
an art/science film communicating 30 years of the science of the Greenland ice sheet
Filmed at ice cap Point 666 and in Ilulissat Ice Fjord, Greenland, there is no downplaying that Greenland's natural gallery of enormous ice sculptures is a spectacular sight. It tells a profound story of the planet’s history, and it is humbling in a time of climate change debate.
When people talk about Greenland these days, there’s a lot of talk about melt. And it’s true, that the warm summers cause surface melt. "We know that the Greenland ice sheet will move a little bit faster and that it will melt, but at this point in time, we really don’t know how to predict that", as stated by Dr. Neil Humphrey, one of the world's leading glaciologists, who's been studying the glacial dynamics of the Greenland ice sheet over the past three decades.
One of the things to remember about glaciers, and the Greenland ice sheet in particular, is that the ice not only melts, it also slides. It slides from where it’s cold in the interior out toward the margins where it’s warm and it can melt. So probably more important than the melt that we’re recording, is the sliding, because it’s the sliding that’s bringing the massive ice out to the margins where it can drop into the sea in a place like Ilulissat Ice Fjord, one of the fastest and most active glaciers outside Antarctica.
The bedrock is rough underneath the ice with bumps and lumps on all scales. And that has a lot of resistance to motion. Nevertheless, the ice undulates over the bedrock - and that process is not well understood. It doesn’t just move uniformly, it moves at different speeds at different parts. The ice can move very smoothly and uniformly, in a wavy, undulating form, or it can move very jerkily. Learn more in this art/science film communicating 30 years of the science of glacial dynamics by Dr. Neil Humphrey, Professor of Glaciology at the University of Wyoming.
What we’ve been interested in with this project has been to bring the experience of being on the ice to a wider audience by involving something other than just research - using the human body to give perspective to the scale of ice landscapes - creating an aesthetic dimension to communicating science. Credits
Directed by Maliina Jensen
Produced by Maliina Jensen