November 2008 - Rink Glacier, Greenland
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November 2008
James Balog
Internationally acclaimed photographer James Balog is the founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey. A former mountain guide with a graduate degree in geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps. James lives on a Rocky Mountain ridge top high above Boulder, Colorado with his wife Suzanne, and daughters Simone and Emily.
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| This glacier has been a huge surprise. Glaciers aren’t supposed to change all that much in the winter, but our cameras are showing Rink to be active all winter long. Immense ice islands, some the size of dozens of city blocks, break off en masse. They eventually must beat their way down through the fjord after spring breakup, but with all the frozen sea ice holding the glacier terminus back, it’s hard to understand how and why they break off at all during the winter.
Finding the Rink camera, even when you’re flying close to the ground, is really tricky. It blends in with the rocks—plus, the GPS coordinates don’t lock it in tightly. We’ve burned up a lot of helo time trying to return to pick up the images. Worse yet, one helicopter pilot found the nearby terrain so steep he couldn’t land close enough to the camera. The place he wanted to land was so far away that by the time we got to the camera, serviced it, hiked back and returned to our base, we would have been caught by darkness in the dangerous, rugged mountains of Alfred Wegener land. So all the expense of flying there that time was wasted. Things like that are really frustrating—but on another flight half a year later, we finally picked up our pictures
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