The Film Chasing Ice by Jeff Orlowski: The Impact of Destruction of The Environment by Humanity

Chasing Ice

The saying, "what goes around comes around" can be easily applied to describe the shape that the world is in. People all around the world are abusing the environment around them they've taken for granted. Chasing Ice is a film that displays at its prime that if humans continue to not care about the environment, the environment will show no mercy for them. Chasing Ice is a mesmerizing film that really made me concerned about how much the actions that humans take are effecting the Earth. Through this film, I understood how human's use of carbon dioxide really changes the world in the worst way.

I, as well as many others, have always had doubts about global warming believing that just possibly, it might be something the government made up like many conspiracy theories state. Through James Balog's documentary, it is clearly shown that global warming, due to heavy uses of carbon dioxide, is causing many glaciers to melt into the ocean and recede. Over a span of the last ten years, the large masses of ice have melted faster than they have in the last few thousand years. This fact makes me very worried about the future and wondering how humans will be able to stop subdue or prevent this from happening.

Watching this documentary also answered the question to my recent pondering on how does the water level rise if water has the same mass as ice. Due to the recent lab our class had conducted, seeing if after the ice melted, whether the water level will rise or not, I had questioned why if the water level doesn't rise after the ice melts, why does that happen on the Earth? I learned that the reason being is because along with the ice in the water, there is also ice atop of areas like Greenland, Iceland or Alaska. Due to global warming, the ice on those regions melt into the sea, causing water levels to rise. Rising water levels would eventually also result in the effects of having more hurricanes and pushing people more into the center of continents.

Chasing Ice helped me understand more about how in the recent years, humans have been causing destruction to the place they live in; faster than ever before. This movie has also convinced me to become more aware in trying my hardest to try and help the environment around me rather than hurt it. The glaciers and water levels are not the only that has been effected by humans' heavy emissions of carbon dioxide; more wild fires and other natural disasters have also been a result of the emissions. Balong had said that he wanted to make this film to convince others that global warming is in fact a real thing and something that everyone needs to be aware of; I feel as if he has convinced me to try to take more care of the world I live in.