The Last Glaciers – Stunning Visuals and Climate Code Red

Their original plan was to make a film about para-alpinism. It would be an IMAX production, and all that goes with it. Big, crisp visuals and a powerful story from high alpine places, featuring a team of climbers who combine their passion for ascending high peaks with their love for flying back down to the valley floor using paragliders.

Director/producer Craig Leeson and co-producer Malcolm Wood, a para-alpinist and UN Environment Programme Mountain Hero, were enjoying a vacation in the Alps, celebrating their multi-award-winning documentary A Plastic Ocean. That highly successful film reveals how plastics, once they enter the ocean, break up into small particulates that enter the food chain and are eventually consumed by people and other creatures.

But as life often does, especially in the mountains, their plans took a turn. “We’re at the highest ski resort in France, at 2,100 metres, it’s the driest December on record, and there’s no snow,” Wood described. “We’re looking out at grass.” After a few more drinks and more conversation, they realized half the people at their table didn’t believe climate change was really a thing.

“Some thought it was a hoax, or politically driven,” Wood said. “It was shocking, 50 per cent of North Americans did not believe in climate change five years ago.” They’d found the topic for their next film. And they would cast glaciers in the starring role.

They would hike and fly paragliders, rather than fuel-intensive helicopters, over glaciated terrain to immerse the audience, looking deep into crevasses and cruising by towering, unstable seracs. Featuring para-alpinism would help engage a younger audience.

Leeson dove into learning how glacial systems work from experts at the world’s oldest glacial study institute, GLACIOCLIM in Grenoble, France. He was introduced to their collection of many-thousand-year-old glacier samples which trapped air bubbles in the ice. Those bubbles provide scientists an historic record of temperatures and the greenhouse gasses that are causing our planet to warm. It was the first time he’d seen something that succinctly, easily, and factually told the story of climate.

“And it pointed the finger, quite rightly, at human intervention, in the climate, which began when we started burning fossil fuels,” Leeson said. Over the next five years, Leeson and his team travelled to film in 12 countries in four of the planet’s regions where glaciers are rapidly disappearing – Antarctica, the Himalaya, the Andes and the Alps. Yes, they concede, that’s a lot of flights.

The shorter, 40-minute version of The Last Glaciers launched at numerous locations including science centers and museums on World Water Day, March 22. A longer, more involved 100-minute feature version will follow, and includes footage from Canadian glaciers.

The film takes viewers aboard NASA’s specially modified 50-year-old DC8, retrofitted with state-of-the-art technology and new engines to fly over Antarctica to record the melting rate and state of ice in the coldest place on earth, information not adequately recorded by existing satellites.

It includes footage from a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland where a reported 1500 private jets converged with their owners to discuss, among other things, how humans are messing up the planet. One arctic scientist in attendance states how the four largest greenhouse gas emitters are the US, China, India and the EU.

“But even on a personal level, if I fly from New York to London on a round-trip flight, I’m melting three square metres of sea ice just by flying,” Julienne Stroeve says. “So, we’re all contributing to this in our daily lives.”

While that statement fails to recognize the millions, or billions of less affluent who don’t fly, own cars, or even heat or cool their homes, the science in the film is film is clear, accurate and on-point.

Temperatures on earth have risen and fallen naturally over time, until we humans started to burn fossil fuels. If we keep burning fossil fuels at the same rate we as are today, earth will become unbearably hot, by as much as five degrees by the end of this century. Never have humans lived on the planet with temperatures so high.

Viewers visit the spectacular Himalaya, learning the range has lost 25 per cent of its glacier ice in the last 40 years. Ten of the world’s most important river systems originate from those glaciers, including India’s Ganges, Pakistan’s Indus, the Yellow River in China and the Mekong, which flows through six countries. As the region’s water source diminishes, some 240 million people will be affected locally; some 2 billion in the larger Hindu Kush.

In IMAX splendor, we trek up Langtang Valley following glacial waterways to the base of 5732-metre Yala Peak, from where the crew will launch paragliders to view the mountain panorama. Hiking in pre-dawn light, they stop with their local guide, Tenzing Sherpa, who shows them where, just 10 years ago, climbers put on crampons. The remaining glacier lies much higher up the mountain, with only about 50 metres of glacier ice left at all.

Traveling to the Cordillera Blanca in Peru, where glaciers supply 90 per cent of local drinking water, and downstream to some 50 million, we learn Peru has lost half its glaciers since 1970, with the rest estimated to be gone by 2060.

Pursuing adventure, the team climbs to Vallunaraju’s 5,686-metre summit to launch their wings. Powerful, gusty winds make for dangerous flying, and while the excitement of the dicey flight competes with the message of melting glaciers, after a sketchy landing the viewer returns to climate change reality, stunning visuals contrasting stark information. And that’s exactly the point, Leeson said.

With an educational pack for students and an interactive website, The Last Glaciers is a multi-layered project explaining why we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and how we do that. And how we have 10 years to act before the consequences ramp up, making areas of earth too hot to inhabit, and as ice sheets and glaciers melt, sea levels rise, coastal regions flood and agricultural land is destroyed 2 billion people are forced to migrate in search of food, shelter and water.

“This is fundamental fact. This is code red,” Leeson said. “By exploring these glaciers, I hope to inspire the next generation to be the voice of change. If we don’t act now, our children will look at our generation as the one that failed.”