Have you seen Chasing Ice yet?

The acclaimed documentary was be screened for free on campus, March 4. Afterward, there was a panel discussion with the film’s producer and director, Jeff Orlowski (’07), and three Stanford Woods Institute fellows who focus on climate change: Terry Root (Biology), Noah Diffenbaugh (Environmental Earth System Science) and Michael Wara (Law). 

Chasing Ice - Panel Discussion | March 4, 2013 from Cyperus Media.com on Vimeo.

Chasing Ice chronicles the story of photographer James Balog’s mission to gather evidence of our changing planet. With a team of young adventurers, Balog deployed time-lapse cameras across the Arctic to capture the world’s glaciers as they melted over the course of several years. The result is a haunting visual record that compresses years into seconds and documents ancient mountains of ice disappearing. Chasing Ice is "full of stunning images in addition to being timely... as watchable as it is important," according to The New York Times. It has won nearly 20 awards at film festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival’s Excellence in Cinematography Award for a U.S. documentary.

Orlowski, who graduated from Stanford in 2007, is the founder of Exposure, a film company dedicated to socially relevant films. Root, who is featured in the film, works on large-scale ecological questions with a focus on impacts of global warming. Diffenbaugh’s research is centered on the dynamics and impacts of climate variability and change. He recently released the results of a snowpack study that predicts this source of freshwater could shrink drastically. Wara, an expert on environmental law and policy, addresses the performance of the emerging global markets for greenhouse gases and mechanisms for reducing emissions, especially in developing countries.

Yost House in Residential Education hosted the event in collaboration with the Stanford Woods Institute.