By Mayank Jain:Â
Imagine a part of the city that you live in, crumbling down all at once to pieces and dust with growls and howls. Shaking and crumbling don’t stop for over an hour and when they do, there is nothing left to see. That’s close to what happened when two photographers captured the largest glacier melting ever recorded on camera. The glacier was the size of Manhattan!
Such a big icy chunk of our planet just got crushed into water in a matter of 75 minutes and there was no ice to be seen anymore. Ice sheets are collapsing, glaciers are melting and ice caps on the top of mountains that we have learnt to love since childhood are fast disappearing; and it is the fault of human civilization more than anything else. The scary part is that it wasn’t a one-off unfortunate event. It is happening on daily basis, nearer to you and more regularly than you’d think. See the video and you will be left catching for breath.
The project called Extreme Ice Survey is run by photographer James Balog who maintains and captures scores of footage through his time lapse cameras planted all over Greenland, Atlantic and the Himalayas. They make movies and videos out of the shocking sights they record during the day and use them to communicate the impact of climate change.
Climate change is the name of the problem and the effects are grotesque. There will be no more ice sheets in the next thousand years and water will take over the world. The receding of glaciers in the past 10 years was more than that in 100 years this conveys the blatant disregard we have towards conserving our own planet. Earth is dying.
Water, which used to be ice sheets, is now entering low lying regions of the planet. Flooding and torrential storms are everyday events. It has put to danger, the whole existence of islands like Maldives and Sri Lanka which happen to be located solely over the water. The Earth is caving in at a horrible rate of as much as 150 feet every year. That translates to falling apart of ice as high as the World Bank headquarters in Washington. We have all heard of global warming and climate change but the time to act is fast running out.
Reckless urbanization and widespread use of appliances that leave a huge carbon footprint are at the root of this problem. Many countries don’t even feature climate protection on their agenda and hence continue to live in ignorance of this very real threat forever and only awareness can help them conduct a reality check.
Freezing winters, scorching summers and rains all around the year point to the same fact that geologists have been crying about for so long and it is high time we take a note of the climate change situation. Innovations in the area of climate change are far more important than faster car engines and money should be put to good use to combat this problem.
Else, when the ice disappears from Earth, we are going to be next.