Ice and the Sky

At the base of our plan­et sits a giant archive. It’s an archive of cli­mate activ­i­ty that spi­rals back to the dawn of exis­tence. At the age of 23, avun­cu­lar glaciol­o­gist Claude Lorius decid­ed he want­ed to work as Earth’s cli­mate archivist, head­ing on reg­u­lar treach­er­ous expe­di­tions down to this inhos­pitable tun­dra in a bid to dis­cov­er what secrets were encased the ice sev­er­al thou­sand meters below his cram­pons. With exact­ing­ly-primed drills, shafts of ice are exhumed from the earth and the gasses cap­ture with­in them paint­ed a pic­ture of the world, going back some 800,000 years.

Luc Jacquet’s film offers a pro­file of Lorius’ life, cap­tur­ing the large­ly hap­py-go-lucky activ­i­ties of a man under­tak­ing this high­ly spe­cif­ic, albeit deeply impor­tant occu­pa­tion. Across fifty years of col­lect­ed research, much of it cap­tured on cam­era, we see this relent­less­ly chip­per soul car­ry­ing out his research as his fam­i­ly wor­ries for his well­be­ing back in France.

The film itself is some­thing of a time cap­sule, pre­sent­ing the chang­ing fash­ions and tech­nolo­gies over the years as well as high­light­ing the steep learn­ing curve that came from evolv­ing method­ol­o­gy and the fact that these endeav­ours were usu­al­ly the result of pan-glob­al teams com­ing togeth­er and defy­ing polit­i­cal ten­sions in the name of some­thing valu­able for all. Luck­i­ly for Jacquet, Lorius is also poet­ic in his diag­no­sis of an uncer­tain future for the plan­et, and the film’s nar­ra­tion is beau­ti­ful in and of itself.

They way he describes the world and the prob­lems it faces is like some­one who thinks that the prob­lem is so trans­par­ent that shout­ing and hec­tor­ing is not need­ed. But the film accrues its pow­er from not bom­bard­ing the view­er with sta­tis­tic-backed doom­say­ing. This is not a film which uses sta­tis­tics to back up a hys­ter­i­cal cli­mate change polemic, but a doc­u­ment of the painstak­ing task that was under­tak­en to actu­al­ly dis­cov­er these chill­ing sta­tis­tics in the first place.