This is a short trailer for the documentary film: Watching the Earth Melt Away. (   • Watching the Earth Melt Away - Meltin...  ). In 2001, I did a story on a patient, tenacious, gregarious ornithologist named George Divoky, who had spent 28 years and counting, living on a forbidding stretch of ice north of Alaska, 3 months a year, studying his specialty, arctic seabirds. Inadvertently, what he also did was amass one of the world's largest experiential accounts of global warming. A lot of theoreticians who project climate change use algorithms, and scientifically based modeling to project the loss of the ice pack. By contrast, George has lived it, all these years, sleeping on the ice, living in solitary, difficult conditions, and making painstaking notes in old school, battered, salt stained notebooks. When I visited him, it was basically the two of us, stranded on the ice for nearly ten days, eating Dinty Moore beef stew and living in pup tents. You get to know each other in these conditions. George and I became friends and remain so to this day.
His study is now at 45 years in duration, and I went back up to Cooper Island in July of 2019, with a film crew, to document his ongoing research, which is an astonishing and important act of perseverance. I photographed George standing once again in the very same place I photographed him all those years ago. Back in 2001, he was standing on ice. In 2019, he is knee deep in water. To quote George, "The Arctic is melting."
Click here for the full-length documentary film:    • Watching the Earth Melt Away - Meltin...