PSU professor is featured in TV special about global warming

Anne Danahy

The icy images featured in the upcoming NOVA National Geographic film “Extreme Ice” are mesmerizing in their beauty. But they’re also a sign of trouble.

Photos provided/Jeff Orlowski and James Balog

Richard Alley, Evan Pugh professor of geosciences at Penn State, is one of the experts featured in the National Geographic film “Extreme Ice,” about the effects of warming temperatures on the earth. The program will premiere March 24 at 8 p.m. on PBS. Below: Pieces of ice break away from an iceberg in Greenland.

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“We are heading toward Glacier National Park without any glaciers,” warns Richard Alley, Evan Pugh professor of geosciences at Penn State.

Alley is one of the experts featured in the program that premiers Tuesday on PBS and shows the effects of warming temperatures on the earth.

The program features nature photographer James Balog, who stationed 26 time-lapse cameras across the Northern Hemisphere for three years. While there was daylight, the cameras snapped pictures every hour of the ice — frozen, melting and breaking apart.

“This is one of the scariest, dumbest things I’ve done in my life,” Balog says at one point.

The audience gets to watch Balog as he treks across and down eye-popping glaciers. Viewers watch ice breaking apart and falling into the water as the narrator explains how quickly ice is melting and what warming temperatures, disappearing glaciers and rising sea levels could mean.

“Glaciers everywhere across the Rockies, Indies, Alps and Himalayas are in their death throes,” the narrator says.

While talking about the film, Alley said ice shows the changes that are occurring better than other things do. “If you pull an ice cube and a rock out of the freezer and put them on a table and watch, you’ll see the ice cube change, but you won’t see the rock change,” he said, even though they’re both getting warmer.

“If you want to see how things are changing, ice is the easiest place to see it,” Alley said.

Alley was one of the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. In April, he will be awarded the 2009 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

“There’s no question ice does matter to us, including people who don’t live on the ice or near the ice,” Alley said.

“There’s big questions now that we didn’t think we were going to have to solve,” he says in the film. “They’re hard questions. Ultimately you crank up the temperature in the air and the ice sheet notices, and it flows faster, and it raises sea levels. But how fast and how much are questions that, really, we don’t have answers to.”

He said scientists at Penn State are at work on that, trying to reduce the uncertainty about what is happening.

Anne Danahy can be reached at 231-4648.

“Extreme Ice,” a NOVA National Geographic television special that details the impact of global warming on the arctic regions, will premier at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 24 on PBS. (Check listings.)