*This photo is NOT the cover image I refer to, but another image from the same trip, taken by my husband. To view the cover image, click on the link in the post below.
Sometimes a single image has an immense impact.
In 2006, my husband was managing a diamond exploration project in Kangerlussuaq, when he received a phone call from Air Greenland. A National Geographic photographer, James Balog, wanted a helicopter to take pictures of the inland ice, but Air Greenland didn’t have a helicopter available. Would he be able to share the helicopter he’d chartered? He said yes – and he wanted to come too. Balog needed a scale for his photographs, so that suited everyone. But in signing up for the trip, my husband didn’t realise he would become a poster-boy for climate change.
Flying over ice is a challenge. Everyone was excited, but nervous. The pilot was flying in Greenland for the first time and had never flown over the inland ice. In an icy landscape, points of reference are unfamiliar and the ability to gauge distance, both to the horizon and to the ground, is much more difficult. What seems kilometres might be only a few hundred metres: a mountain of ice may be only a mound. Ice is an alien landscape to human eyes.
It was clear and sunny and they flew far into the ice, over fields of crevasses, over crystal blue lakes, deep but perfectly transparent, like flawless filters. Rivers of blue water, pouring across the ice, drew Balog’s attention. He needed his scale, but the landings were fraught. Hovering just feet above the surface, noone could decide whether the ice was solid or merely a soup of crystals. The pilot would not land. Opening the door of the hovering machine, my husband climbed onto the skid, surrounded by the heart-pounding assault of the helicopter blades whining overhead. And then he jumped. Fortunately, the surface was half way between the extremes and he sank knee-deep into strange, dry, gravelly ice.
The helicopter backed off, circling above, and Balog took a snap that would be the front cover image of the June 2007 edition of National Geographic – a man in a red jacket, standing alone, and a bit terrified, beside the water roaring past and plunging, off camera, into an icy black abyss.
The next summer, Balog returned unannounced to my husband’s exploration office in Kangerlussuaq, delivering a signed copy of the front cover edition. The photograph was the lead for The Big Thaw article, set to become the most popular National Geographic article on the environment; so popular that in 2008 the same cover image illustrated a special edition on Climate Change. Now, The Big Thaw is an online theme for National Geographic climate change reporting. And from his success, Balog launched his glacier photography project, culminating in the apocalyptic documentary film Chasing Ice.
For me, I look at that photograph and I see a heart-stopping moment of simultaneous exhilaration and fear, anonymously immortalised in an image that, in a shutter snap, captured climate change – the terror of our time.
