James Balog first visited the glaciers of Iceland in 2005, on assignment for the New Yorker. His work and personal life have been consumed by ice ever since.

This whole effort is not just about time-lapse engineering and about the film, but also about single-frame imagery, the connection between the human mind and eye and heart and these incredible landscapes.

Chasing Ice, a documentary tracing his seven-year effort to illustrate just how fast glaciers around the northern rim of the planet are disappearing, opens in theaters next weekend. While ice is nominally the subject of the film, it is Balogs own personal experiencesranging from delirious success in the field to nearly debilitating frustrations caused by trying to work in some of the coldest, most remote corners of the planetthat set the film apart from being just a rant against a changing climate.

In 2007, Balog formalized his photographic hunt for receding glaciers as the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) and then set out with small teams to both photograph and set up time-lapse cameras on glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains.

MORE: 'Chasing Ice': Irrefutable Evidence of Our Ever Warming World

Like most in recent years who have been trying to bring stories and evidence of climate change to the public, on the eve of the films premiere, Balog is relieved that thanks to the recent superstorm that swept the East Coast, high-ranking politicians, including New Yorks Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have very publicly linked big weather events with climate change.

"There is a kind of tyranny of the marketplace right now," says Balog from his Boulder, Colorado office, "which has suppressed a free and open and honest dialogue about climate change. Ultimately the politicians dont want to touch the subject for fear of getting entangled with financial interests connected with fossil fuels. And those financial interestsbig oil, big gaskeep saying We Shalt Not Discuss the Subject of Climate Change.Which is why the story of climate change has had such a hard time getting out during these past seven years, since we began the EIS.But because of Sandy, everyones eyes are all of a sudden wide open. When you have the governor of one of the major states in the country (Cuomo) saying the climate is changing and were in a new normal, that puts the issue at the top of the social agenda."

Our conversation continues below.

TakePart: Having labored for many years with a small team in very cold and lonely places, are you surprised by the success of the film?

James Balog: Seven or eight years ago it was not at all clear this film would even be made. When it was finished it wasnt clear it would have any kind of audience or any sort of success. So to wind up with the wonderful quality of the film, the tremendous circulation and the acclaim and all of a sudden to be landing it in the middle of the climate change debate is gratifying to say the least.

Excerpt from:
‘Chasing Ice’: James Balog Brings Climate Change to the Silver Screen