| Adam LeWinter and I spent more than three weeks camping in Greenland, hoping to capture a huge calving event on video. After 10 days at Store Glacier, we moved to the Ilulissat Glacier, the most productive glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. It flows at the rate of 130 feet every day and puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other Northern Hemisphere glaciers combined.
Camp at the Ilulissat Glacier is a bit bleak. Aside from a few water sources, the only features on the landscape are rocks, rocks, and more rocks. No plants. No wildlife. Just rocks and ice.
Adam and I maintained a 24-hour vigil, working in eight-hour shifts—we’d be up for eight hours together around dinnertime, then one of us would sleep for eight hours, then we’d switch. We had nine cameras with us. We had a few cameras running 24/7—some video, some time lapse. The others were on standby, with fresh tapes and batteries, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
After six days without any change in the glacier, we called James Balog on the satellite phone. “No, nothing yet . . . There’s a huge peninsula here, but it’s been pretty boring so far . . . Uh, wait. Something’s moving. We’ll call you back.” It was during that phone call that we witnessed the start of the largest calving event that’s ever been filmed.
The calving continued for 75 minutes and constituted a full mile of retreat on the glacier: 1.8 cubic miles of ice broke off, the equivalent of 3,000 U.S. Capitol Buildings. It was a massive, historic event, and we captured the entire thing in high definition. Adam and I turned to each other in complete disbelief: “I guess we can go home now.”
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