When talking about climate change, sea level rise is often brought up as one of the devastating consequences. Melting glaciers and emaciated polar bears have become infamous images over the decades, symbolizing the effects of global warming. But ice can also tell a story - by looking at its past, it might be possible to predict climate impacts in the future.
Now, a new local documentary is looking at Greenland, the largest island in the world. And overwhelmingly made up of ice, Greenland’s landscape has the potential to affect conditions across the globe.
Kathy Kasic is a director, cinematographer and associate professor at Sacramento State. She joined Insight host Vicki Gonzalez to talk about her latest documentary “The Memory of Darkness, Light and Ice,” about the melting Greenland ice sheet and the future of sea level rise across the globe.
The film will be available via streaming later this year, but in the meantime, you can watch it at the California Capitol International Documentary Film Festival in Rancho Cordova on Saturday, March 8.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
First, what is an ice sheet?
An ice sheet is a very large body of ice that covers a landscape. So it's similar to a glacier, just much, much larger.
What's so special about the Greenland ice sheet?
Well, the Greenland ice sheet is sort of this big pancake of ice that covers all of Greenland. When you step onto it, it's like being on a whole other world. You really get the sense that you're on something that has been there for quite a long time. And what's happening is that it's actually melting, and it's melting quite quickly. So I suppose I think that's probably the biggest thing that's important to our society today.
Help us visualize what this could do to coastal regions in the US, surrounding islands and worldwide if Greenland melts?
If Greenland melts, we're looking at massive sea level rise. And of course it could take many years before the entire Greenland ice sheet melts. But even a small amount of melt leads to a massive change in the sea level rise–could be five feet of sea level rise around the world. And then we see places like Shanghai covered in water. We see Florida completely flooded. There's massive consequences, not just with the Greenland ice sheet, but also Antarctica.
Where did the title for your documentary come from, “The Memory of Darkness, Light and Ice?”
It came from just sort of thinking about the Greenland ice sheet [and] how this particular story is about a core of sediment that's found by a group of scientists. And it reveals crucial clues about the ice sheet and the loss of the ice sheet. So, that kind of memory that the sediment holds tells you a little bit about when the ice sheet covered the ground–when it was dark. And then, when it was no longer there–when it was light. And of course, the ice.
How long has this recent iteration of the ice sheet been around? Do you have an idea?
Well, the scientists have found that the sediment core is 416,000 years old at the very top part. When they did this coring, it was back in the Cold War era. And they took an ice core that went all the way down to the bottom of the ice sheet. And then they took a sediment core, about nine feet. And so you can kind of look at the top of that sediment core to understand how old the ice sheet was, because it tells you when the ice was gone.
Let’s hang on to the Cold War aspect. You really focus on this area called Camp Century. Tell us about Camp Century and its role for the United States at a time when it was worried during the Cold War and militarized Greenland.
Camp Century was this sort of bizarre idea that the US military had to build a camp underneath the ice sheet in Greenland. And they were planning to kind of hide missiles, nuclear missiles in the ice sheet to hide them from enemy view. But they quickly realized that it wasn't going to happen, because ice moved, as a property of itself. Whether or not it's melting, it just moves. And so the camp actually collapsed under the weight of the ice.
But before it happened, they were doing science because they were trying to understand ice itself. They knew at the time that fossil fuels were changing the climate, going to change the climate substantially. So they did kind of want to understand just how quickly the ice would melt.
Given that the ice sheet has melted before, what do you say to the argument that this is meant to be part of these dramatic shifts [that] are natural to what the planet goes through?
Yeah, absolutely, there are. There are natural climate drivers. But we're actually in a period where our climate should actually be cooling, but we're warming. And we're warming due to human-induced climate change.
You end your documentary by saying that this documentary is a mandate. What do you hope the general public takes away when they watch this?
Well, I hope that they understand the science of the melting Greenland ice sheet. I hope that they recognize that there are a lot of people doing work to try to understand how Greenland existed in the past, so that we can predict the future. And I think through that, I hope that they can start to see that it really is time to do something collectively, to hold our representatives in Congress accountable for making real change. And also it's time to hold the corporations accountable. I think sometimes they move to different countries to evade regulation, and we really need to hold them accountable on Wall Street so that they can't miss out on regulation that could save our future generations a lot of heartache, a lot of suffering.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Kathy Kasic's name. It has since been corrected.
Follow us for more stories like this
CapRadio provides a trusted source of news because of you. As a nonprofit organization, donations from people like you sustain the journalism that allows us to discover stories that are important to our audience. If you believe in what we do and support our mission, please donate today.
Donate Today
