Drangajökull Glacier

Okay. We had a team out watching this glacier, and we recorded the biggest calving event that's ever been put on film.

June 25th, monster calving events happened.

And the same glacier today.

A 400 foot tall calving face breaking off.

The glacier moves but by inches.

The glacier moves but by inches.

That's the retreat of this glacier.

This is happening in glacier national Park.

This is a view of what's called the calving face.

We're now at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska.

Helicopter in front of the calving face for scale, quickly dwarfed.

This is pitched on a glacier at 17,500 feet.

This is Argentina 20 years ago. Same glacier today.

I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit.

This compression is seen when the glacier calves, creating a blue iceberg.

No. It was retreating through the winter because it's an unhealthy glacier.

This glacier has doubled its flow speed in the past 15 years.

Within 15 years, this will be the park formerly known as glacier.

Here is what's been happening year by year to the columbia glacier.

The one glacier up in Greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the Ilulissat Glacier.

According to scientists, in 100 years all the mountain glacier will be gone.

But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it.

And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier.

In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city.

When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do?

A mile of retreat in 75 minutes across the calving face, in that particular event, three miles wide.

And all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice.

One day, I still remember... the glacier melted, and the icebergs drifted to the north.

If you look in the middle background, you can see the calving face bobbing up and down like a yo yo.

Like Al Gore told you, two billion people live on the water from the glacier of Himalaya.

This is a rock field, and under the rocks, there is still some ice from the glacier.

To give you a little bit of a sense of scale, that calving face in this picture is about 325 feet tall.

We have some cameras on the south edge of the Ilulissat, watching the calving face as it goes through this dramatic retreat.

This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier.

You see the glacier flowing in from the right, dropping off into the sea, camera shooting every hour.

This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier.

And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug.

The calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off, but in fact, it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet.

We certainly have movement of the glacier sheets, but overall definitely colder, an icy environment, but very rich in animals as well.

The main stem, the main flow of the glacier is coming from the right and it's going very rapidly up that stem.

The calving face is four and a half miles across, and in this shot, as we pull back, you're only seeing about a mile and a half.

They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier.

The block was three fifths of a mile deep, and if you compare the expanse of the calving face to the Tower Bridge in London, about 20 bridges wide.

But, in any case, the deflation of this glacier since 1984 has been higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the Empire State Building.