One Man's Camera Captured the Largest Glacier Collapse in Recorded History

A Skeptic Watches a Mountain of Ice Disappear

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic — and at the time, he was a skeptic about climate change. For nearly 20 years, he had scoffed at climate change warnings, saying, "I didn't think that humans were capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of this entire, huge planet." What happened next would permanently shatter that skepticism — and produce the most jaw-dropping footage of glacial destruction ever committed to film.

That first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk. Within months, Balog conceived the boldest expedition of his life: the Extreme Ice Survey, deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world's changing glaciers. Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski followed Balog as he set up more than 20 time-lapse cameras in remote locations around Alaska, Montana, Nepal, Iceland, and Greenland — each one designed to withstand sub-zero temperatures and 150 mph winds, snapping about 8,000 frames a year.

Seventy-Five Minutes That Changed Everything

Balog and his crew were in Greenland, gathering footage from the time-lapse cameras they'd positioned all around the Arctic Circle for the last several years, also shooting scenes for a documentary — and while they were hoping to capture some cool moments on camera, no one expected a huge chunk of a glacier to snap clean off and slide into the ocean right in front of their eyes.

On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic breakup at the Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland. The calving event lasted 75 minutes, and the glacier retreated a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. For nearly an hour and 15 minutes, Balog and his crew stood by and watched as a piece of ice the size of lower Manhattan — but with ice-equivalent buildings two to three times taller than that — simply broke away and crashed into the sea. The height of the ice reached approximately 3,000 feet, with 300 to 400 feet visible above water and the rest submerged below.

Two EIS videographers had waited several weeks in a small tent overlooking the glacier before finally witnessing 7.4 cubic kilometres of ice crashing off. The footage went on record as the largest glacier calving event ever captured on film, according to the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records. Balog himself called the video "irrefutable" evidence of climate change.

The Bigger Picture Behind the Ice

Scientific observation at Greenland's Ilulissat Icefjord confirms that the glacier had receded 9 miles during the preceding decade, uncovering more ground in ten years than it did during the entire previous century as it slips toward the sea. Ice calving — a cataclysmic event in which large chunks of ice break away from a larger glacier — is not a new phenomenon, but it is becoming more and more frequent as the temperatures of both air and ocean continue to rise. Scientists say the Greenland ice sheet could contribute around 4 centimeters to sea level rise by the year 2100, though this estimate may be too low since it doesn't account for rapid, large-scale ice loss through processes such as the accelerated flow of glaciers into the sea.

Balog's hauntingly beautiful time-lapse videos compress years into seconds, capturing ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. The footage became the centerpiece of the 2012 documentary Chasing Ice, which won the Excellence in Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival. For millions of viewers, the film did what decades of scientific reports had struggled to do: make the abstract catastrophe of climate change feel viscerally, undeniably real.

A Record That Keeps Getting Worse

Balog has said he hopes his photographic record will serve as a document of the present and a message to the future. The Ilulissat event remains the gold standard of visual climate evidence — not because nothing has gotten worse since 2008, but because few moments have been captured with such stunning, sustained clarity. What Balog and his crew accidentally filmed that day in Greenland is more than a record. It's a warning, still echoing nearly two decades later, about what happens when a planet's thermostat is turned up and no one is watching closely enough.