Extreme Ice | NOVA

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Extreme Ice

Watch Extreme Ice on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Follow photojournalist James Balog to some of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth as he documents the disappearance of an icy landscape that took thousands of years to form. An artist, scientist, explorer, and former mountain guide, Balog braves treacherous terrain to site his cameras in ideal locations to record the unfolding drama. Remarkable time-lapse footage reveals massive glaciers and ice sheets splitting apart, collapsing, and disappearing at a rate that has scientists alarmed. This NOVA-National Geographic Television special investigates the latest evidence of a radically warming planet.

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NOVA | Extreme Ice

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Secrets Beneath the Ice

Watch Secrets Beneath the Ice on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Is Antarctica headed for a catastrophic meltdown? New evidence of ancient climate change may hold clues.

Almost three miles of ice buries most of Antarctica, cloaking a continent half again as large as the United States. But when an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Manhattan collapsed in less than a month in 2002, it shocked scientists and raised the alarming possibility that Antarctica may be headed for a meltdown. Even a 10 percent loss of Antarctica's ice would cause catastrophic flooding of coastal cities unlike any seen before in human history. What are the chances of a widespread melt? "Secrets Beneath the Ice" explores whether Antarctica's climate past can offer clues to what may happen. NOVA follows a state-of-the-art expedition that is drilling three-quarters of a mile into the Antarctic seafloor. The drill is recovering rock cores that reveal intimate details of climate and fauna from a time in the distant past when the Earth was just a few degrees warmer than it is today. As researchers grapple with the harshest conditions on the planet, they discover astonishing new clues about Antarctica's past—clues that carry ominous implications for coastal cities around the globe.

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NOVA | Secrets Beneath the Ice

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On Thin Ice in the Bering Sea

In this series of video stories, explore the past and future of the fast-changing Bering Sea region, its culture and people, and the new polar science that is emerging from an expedition on board the Coast Guard cutter Healy.

PART 1: Polar Science and Yup'ik Culture
"The Healy is really a science machine... We have people studying everything from whales to walruses."

PART 2: Science and Subsistence
"Most of the hunters spend a lot of time observing the weather, the ice conditions, the water currents. This information is going to save your own life, or somebody else's life."

PART 3: Hot Spots and Cold Patches
"The Bering Sea is warming. What we are trying to do is understand how this system, which is shallow, it's vulnerable, how it is going to respond and change."

PART 4: Bering Sea Harvest
"We may not have sea ice whatsoever—potentially in the next couple decades... That is in our lifetime."

> Watch: NOVA | Extreme Ice | On Thin Ice in the Bering Sea | PBS

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If Polar Ice Vanished

What would happen if all of Greenland’s ice or all of Antarctica’s ice melted? Nobody expects this anytime soon, but as a kind of visual thought experiment, the late Bill Haxby of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University graphically depicted how the coastlines of four regions—the mid-Atlantic U.S., the state of Florida, northern Europe, and Southeast Asia—might change if the planet's seas rose 17 feet or 170 feet. (These are conservative estimates for how much seas would rise with the melting of all of Greenland’s or Antarctica’s ice, respectively.) For comparison, Haxby also showed how the same coastlines would have looked 20,000 years ago at the height of the Ice Age, when sea levels were some 400 feet lower than they are today.

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NOVA | If Polar Ice Vanished

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NOVA | Extreme Ice: Expert Q&A

Jim White, Director of INSTAAR, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at University of Colorado, Boulder, answers questions about the speeded-up melting of glaciers and ice sheets now occurring worldwide, the possible consequences for the natural and human worlds, and more.

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see also

what next: Global warming

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