Canada's Glaciers: Mysterious And Gigantic Rivers Of Ice | Full Documentary | TRACKS

there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download today [Music] glaciers are the largest freshwater reservoirs on earth inching their way along like gigantic rivers of ice glaciers have shaped canada's landscape like no other force of nature powerful yet fragile glaciers are a world under themselves a world just waiting to be explored from the tallest peaks to the farthest icy depths [Music] [Music] we're now leaving the forest world and entering the world of mountains past the center altitude you enter the mineral world wow look at that just incredible amazing i think we'll be able to climb over the glacier on the right we can always try but we're not exactly traveling light oh yeah do we have too much to eat exactly [Music] in the wee hours damien and frassois xavier embarked on a flight they would later describe as one of the most beautiful they've ever experienced by leaving from vancouver and heading north they've reached the world of high mountains aboard their ultralight plane [Music] oh wow look at this this is total freedom we're the kings of the world glaciers as far as the eye can see just amazing our adventurers are off to explore the world of glaciers their objective for this expedition is to personally experience the glacier's long journey from their formation on the highest mountains to their melting at the bottom of the valleys this journey will provide a unique perspective on canada's glaciers and an insight into the deep connection between glaciers and humanity [Music] the sun's out today it's the middle of the summer here above the coast mountains in british columbia yet the temperature inside the cabin is below zero degrees celsius the reason being quite simply the altitude they mean we got about 2500 meters right yeah we had seven 7000 feet so obviously it's a lot colder here than in the valley at this altitude we have mountains of course but we also have glaciers there's a gigantic glacier right under us the view inspires admiration and respect of course but you have to remember that just a few decades ago the ice level was a lot higher than it is now notice how smooth the rock is on these mountains that's the work of the former glacier several hundred meters of ice have retreated here there is no disputing it this is a sure sign of climate change the planet's glaciers are melting and canada's are no exception but the glaciers haven't had their last word case in point the lillouette ice field we're in western british columbia in this part of the world the lillauet ice field 400 meters deep and covering 700 square meters is definitely in the heavyweight category our adventurers will start here at the base of the glacier tagging along with them is glaciologist christophe kennard the three men will spend an entire week on the ice field without assistance or the possibility of getting fresh supplies you must feel quite at home for a glaciologist another day at the office right at the office [Music] that face is just awe-inspiring yeah that face is mount bridge the first objective of our mountaineers the snow and ice covered peak at over 2 900 meters above the ice field towers menacingly above the three men the mere idea of reaching it seems highly unlikely to them after attempting to climb the mountain the three men plan on crossing the ice field and reaching the bridge glacier thus following the ice path along its relentless downward descent [Music] we're almost there wow [Music] beautiful mountain eh that's a big rock i'll say very steep so how do we go about it [Music] we could get a bit closer to the mountain and then camp for the night sounds good yeah okay damian and i have something to tell you christoph oh yeah we did some research and no one's ever climbed his face is that right so if we get to the top we get to name the route it's the first yeah excellent you can pick the name you can start thinking of when okay i'll get on it [Laughter] did you snore not usually i'll same here good night guys good night time to get up sleeping was hell was so hot hey how's it going guys great isn't it beautiful here a few rocks a bit of ice bit of snow beautiful line and it goes straight up we're not far from the past pretty steep slope huh yeah with a great view on the bathroom below it always seems steeper when you look down okay ready yeah [Music] francois zavier will be head climber for this first stretch it's rock solid here good over the course of the ascent the three men will take turns being head climber thereby alternating between the most dangerous but also the most thrilling position that of leading the team fantastic [Music] it is often said that mountain climbers like sailors are the conquistadors of the useless useless or not any climber will tell you that scaling a mountain has little to do with reaching the top and everything to do with the actual experience of climbing it in this case what our three friends are looking to experience is the journey of ice since its arrival on earth in the form of snow to its return to the rivers or oceans a few dozen or a few thousand years later good job [Music] [Music] [Music] a little break sure here should be okay nice view of the glacier and of the bridge glace your tongue down in the valley and the accumulation basin that is the lillauet ice field we can see the glacier's position at the moment but there's also a very clear demarcation line at the vegetation level it hasn't been overrun by vegetation yet because these are recent geological deposits a few hundred years max so it's still unstable and vegetation can't quite get a foothold yet but this gives us a clear idea of where the glacier was not so long ago when you look at it it all seems frozen in time but it actually moves some 100 meters a year like a river of ice yeah exactly and we see what looks like a natural dam holding back this lake that's the frontal moraine right right from where the glacier used to be exactly that's the terminal which will mark out the glacier's ultimate position can we estimate when the glacier arrived at the level of that moraine typically like in other parts of the rockies those terminal moraines date back to the little ice age this is basically the last period we know of where glaciers expanded and that was between the 1500s and 1900s okay i'd like to see that on the map oh right you brought a map we can see the entire glacier and there's no lake here yeah indeed incredible the glacier must be up to here now yeah more or less so a good two kilometers yeah a good two kilometers based on the source data we can see that this map was drawn between the 70s and 90s that is the aerial photos that were used to make the topographical map so the appearance of that lake is fairly recent it dates back to just the last few decades ben peck is a bush pilot aboard his seaplane he flies all over the coast mountains to transport people and supplies to the four corners of the province today his mission is to drop off glaciologist dan moore of the university of british columbia at the foot of the bridge glacier it's a trip the scientist makes every year this time with his assistant haley dan is sort of like the doctor of the bridge glacier each year he comes here to take its pulse thanks ben thank you great wow this looks quite different from the last time i was here i don't recall that big stream right there this is so different from the last time we were here it's like it's like the whole landscape just started falling apart yeah this whole thing's a mess yeah i think if we go down here drop down here and then cross over there yeah just incredible it's amazing how quickly stuff can change so the work that we're currently doing is to try and get a better understanding of the winter snow accumulation and then the summer melt rates so then we can develop a model to make projections in the future of how the glacier is going to change and how the contributions to river flow are going to change my role is to go onto the glacier we drill holes in the ice we put marked cords down and then we go back and we can measure the length of the cord that's sticking out of the hole and we can determine then how much ice is melted to give you an idea each of these lengths is a bit over a meter and so the amount of melt that's happened this year so far is about for me to hayley over a single summer we could have more than this well even up to six meters in a really a hot summer yeah it's pretty amazing if you look at the lower limit of the forest up there about 150 years ago the glacier filled the valley up to that level there was almost 500 meters thickness of ice here so that's like five football fields stacked vertically in more recent time we know that since 1990 the glacier used to extend down past those icebergs so four kilometers retreat in last 25 years back in the 1970s and 1980s when glaciologists were doing studies uh surveys of the glacier they had a hut that they built at the top of that hill and in those days the glacier was so much thicker they could just step right off the hill onto the ice to do their surveys so we're seeing very dramatic changes in my knowledge it's the fastest retreating glacier in this part of the world most recently the climate change story has become the big one and that's when we were quite unprepared for when i started never occurred to us that this was going to be how our own careers were going to be ending as kind of as witnesses to the slow disappearance of glaciers on the earth's surface and the consequences of that that was far this thing from our minds at the time we were interested in other stuff in the early days i was just interested in how thick the ice was you know it's always running around with um explosives doing seismology on glaciers boom and then seeing how quickly the waves came back and turning that into an ice thickness so those glaciers were a kilometer thick there have been many ice ages in the past few million years and at that time we thought that we were out of an ice age which we were and still are we were looking for this clockwork to continue and um slowly enter a new ice age and um i thought that the re retreat of those glaciers was probably just what was happening because the end of that ice age and then it kept going and the glaciers kept retreating and it became quite obvious that they were being kind of burned away by the new climate that we have created problem really is that it's quite hard to really be sure about these changes because the actual visual changes are are quite subtle that glacier is getting much thinner and that's something you would not appreciate by just looking at the area of it looks about the same but it's 100 meters thinner than it was and you don't see that but it's there so you get a kind of false reassurance by looking at the landscape and the computer work i've done with the animation visuals is very interesting because it shows you how how misleading your own senses can be too we know that the flow of a glacier is influenced by the temperature of the ice by the pressure of the water by the slope of the glacier the thickness of the ice all these things we know but you can put all that knowledge into physical computer models that imitate in their behavior what glaciers actually do so i was very interested in how with the glaciers in western canada respond to the possible climates of the future this is the um the business as usual one which is not quite a worst case because we're actually um behaving worse than the worst case that they imagined right now but if we continue like this we can see what happens to the glaciers if we do that so here we go 20 50. and now what's interesting is everything seems to go haywire at this moment everything just goes going uh and the glaciers almost look as if they've been thrown on a frying pan they just go in in this worst case scenario there's there's no bridge glacier at all um here what we have is that our adventurers who are still assaulting mount bridge are within grasp of the summit but the mountain has decided otherwise this isn't really secure this wouldn't be a great spot to fall these rocks are kind of treacherous wow it's pretty exposed here you can really feel the void yeah oh wow i'm on a big cornice here oh kind of scary no this is a total blast yeah not quite what we imagined brittle rock unstable snow the conditions are simply too dangerous the three men abandoned the climb nature won out that's all yeah it wasn't an easy decision yeah true but the conditions were very difficult it's extremely hot the adventurers descend to the relative safety of the ice field their disappointment over the failed climb is soon forgotten a fun descent on skis is apt compensation [Music] so we're back on the lillaway ice field we're really at the spot where the glacier is forming where it accumulates all of its water during winter it accumulates five meters of snow in the summer when it's really hot like now it melts so some of it flows down into the valleys at the end of the year there's the surplus of about uh three or four meters of snow and in fact it's the snow that accumulates here that is compacted and turned into ice and in the end the ice is fluid it can change its shape so that ice will buckle under its own weight progressively flowing towards the valleys creating outlet glaciers like the one we saw yesterday the bridge glacier how much ice is under our feet here [Music] i would say approximately between 200 to 300 meters thick wow so if you stuck the eiffel tower and the glacier you barely see the tub true enough but obviously as the surface of the ice keeps getting lower because of climate change the eiffel tower would progressively emerge because of your great passion for glaciers it must be even more intense for you to see them retreat to such an extent and so fast yeah of course but at the same time the interesting thing scientifically speaking is seeing how the systems are changing so quickly in fact most of my research is trying to understand how all these systems react to the climate how they'll evolve based on climate change to what extent they're important for us and how much impact they'll have on hydrology and water resources because glaciers are obviously a symbol of climate change they're changing right in front of our eyes what we don't know yet is how serious those impacts are and for whom and in what part of the world but what's clearly disheartening with respect to those regions where the glaciers are retreating is realizing that they'll be gone within a few decades then it's more the mountain climber in me that gets upset the wind seems to be picking up yeah yeah it's a bit windier and i don't know if you think so but the wind is stronger than earlier might be good time to get the kites out yeah i think so and it's blowing in the right direction if we managed to cross the whole plateau by kite yeah it would be a lot easier more fun too now we have perfect conditions it's brilliant using the wind to cross the glacier the wind turning in their favor the men get out their power kites if their plan works with the winds help they'll be able to cross the ice field faster than any traditional skier could [Music] carried along by their power kites christophe francois xavier and damian cross the gigantic lillowet ice field in record time gliding on the snow at over 30 kilometers an hour the three adventurers take in the immensity of the landscape the place is a perfect example of what the whole of canada would have looked like 15 000 years ago a vast and continuous maze of glaciers spread out from here to the north pole the ice age is the age of creation when our landscape was carved and shaped by the immense forces of nature that are glaciers [Music] however to really understand the hidden mysteries of the ice you have to relinquish infinitely vast views and focus on the infinitely small this should be good almost there yeah just this last part here that should be straight enough maybe clear this out a bit can you turn on the light sure i can't wait to see what they look like ready yeah you can turn it on wow that's amazing it's just amazing see how you can make out all the details it's an improved version of a typical snow pit used in glaciology this is how you measure a glacier's state of health we take out a slice and measure the thickness of the snow that's accumulated on the glacier then we measure the melt water during the summer season to see how much water was lost at the end of the year we compare both results and see if the glacier is gaining or losing mass so all these brighter layers represent water infiltrations exactly those are water infiltrations during melting or when the rain penetrates the surface of the snow the water will seep deep down into the glacier and as soon as the water hits a layer that's below zero degrees it will freeze and form these lenses by the end of the summer you often get these big ice crusts or ice lenses and with a bit of practice it's possible to detect them with a probe okay let's do this see how it keeps going deeper there's one layer then another it won't go any deeper so that's just in one year yeah just in one year that's huge during the winter the glacier gained four meters of snow in its accumulation zone one of the objectives for this type of sample is to convert it into water height for that you need to know the snow's density snow is a combination of air and ice so it can have varying degrees of density depending on whether it's new or old snow so we'll take a sample here hold the scale while i take a snow sample then i'll put it in this bag here hold up okay now hook it into the little scale so how much is that 140. which comes out to about 500 grams per liter or half the water's density so this year the glacier gained two meters of water in its accumulation zone what remains at the end of the summer which hasn't melted and left the glacier by runoff is known as nevi and that never will get compacted and eventually form ice tell me how long does this process of fresh snow to ice take on this glacier to form glacier ice in the case of a temperate glacier it usually takes three to five years compared to glaciers in arctic or antarctic zones that can take hundreds of years for fresh snow to be transformed into ice now we'll check the crystals that make up the snow we'll retrieve a crystal sample with this tool so we can examine their shape that will tell us a lot about the snow transforming process so we'll see what kind of grain we have fresh snow is composed of nice star or needle-shaped crystals that snow will be transformed by various processes the wind will break it up into little pieces they get compacted exactly the escaping vapor will also round out the grains and the melt water will eventually form ice lenses it's the combination of those processes that will gradually produce new and finally glacier ice now we'll look through the magnifying glass this is a great example of the grain of melting snow big grains grouped together no more branches the branches are long gone so it's big clusters of rounded grains it's spring snow it's the sort of soft snow that kept us from reaching the top of mount bridge unfortunately because it's really hot we can also check the snow's temperature with this thermometer according to this the snow is at zero degrees it's a spring snow also known as isothermal snow it's at zero degrees so it's melting the succession of ice layers suggests that we've had a very mild winter and spring but to confirm those findings we'd need historical data either that or dig a little deeper about 10 more meters but i suggest yeah we need to grab some sleep instead exactly we need to rest up sounds good let's go ellie [Music] so [Music] so powerful and fragile at once only a few short decades ago they seemed to be invincible today a man can see over the course of his lifetime a glacier literally disappear under his very eyes the changes are everywhere around us we can see them feel them the climate is getting warmer and the glaciers are melting it's undeniable do we still have 10 50 or 100 years before the last glaciers disappear and how many meters will the oceans rise these are basic yet unresolved questions that may well impact the very survival of our species in the great spectacle that is the melting of the glaciers the canadian rockies are at center stage and the main star is the columbia ice field the biggest one of them all it's here that english glaciologist david rippin has decided to tackle these big questions with help from the latest technology [Music] we struggle to assess the changes that are going on being able to quantify and measure those changes that are going on is is a really important thing when you have such a big body of ice as the columbia ice field that's quite a difficult process to to carry out what i'm doing is is uh utilizing an aircraft and with a camera attached to that and then flying back and forth over the ice field gathering thousands of thousands of images and then we use this technique structure from motion to mosaic those images together and build three-dimensional models of the ice surface and we can do that really high spatial resolution hopefully up to centimetric resolution and if you do that once and then you do that again and you do that again you can look at change at a really high spatial resolution i stress this is these are early days results but it seems to me that the rate of retreat of the columbia glacier is increasing so it is it is retreating it is getting smaller at a increasing rate i feel quite strongly about climate deniers it frustrates me that people think that this is something that you have the choice whether to believe in or not it's science you know you don't get the luxury of choosing whether you believe in it or not our climate is warming and we're having an impact our atmosphere is getting warmer we're disrupting our climate these messages sound so familiar yet so abstract at the same time how could such puny beings have an impact on the immense planetary climate system the explanation can be found in the glaciers [Music] the water molecule is two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen and the oxygen molecule occurs in different isotopic forms a heavy one called oxygen 18 and then like one called oxygen 16. if you have oxygen 16 and 18 in water vapor and you precipitate it out the ratio of oxygen 18 to 16 in the precipitation is a function of the temperature of the atmosphere at the time when the precipitation fell so if you can work your way down an ice core and measure the oxygen 18 to 16 ratio then you can actually quantitatively reconstruct the atmospheric temperature over the time when the ice was being deposited the link between the temperature and the isotopic composition of snow was discovered in the 1960s it was an astounding discovery later it came to be known as the isotope thermometer overnight humans were able to reconstruct the climate of the past through the simple analysis of ice core samples at the dome sea boring station in antarctica they were able to go back 800 000 years into the past the ice has spoken and the results are described in a now famous graph that reveals millennium upon millennium the cyclical succession of ice ages and warmer periods a knowledge of our prehistoric climate is crucial for a better understanding of our planet what will even more deeply impact humanity however is being able to reconstitute carbon dioxide concentrations in the [Music] atmosphere air that was in the snow at the time when it initially gets deposited is caught then it's turned into small bubbles that exist within the ice so you can look at the ice and you can see it's it's basically blue but there's bubbles in it and then if you if you can extract the gas from those bubbles then you can actually analyze uh what that gas is made up of and so you can measure things like the amount of carbon dioxide the amount of methane amount of nitrous oxide all of which are greenhouse gases in these bubbles and if you have a long enough record you can look at how those things have fluctuated over time [Music] there's a perfect and irrefutable correlation between co2 and the temperature but now let's travel toward the present the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have never surpassed 300 parts per million in the past 800 000 years in the mid 1800s during the industrial revolution co2 levels began a meteoric rise and never came down again today we've passed 400 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere 100 more than the highest peak recorded in the last million years as for temperatures there's no more doubt about which way they're heading really symbolically it's not good to think that we're kind of ruining uh the place we live that's part of the loss of glaciers is just telling us that as stewards we're doing a really bad job but then there are practical sides to this as well they're providing this extra service of delivering water when we need it they build up mass in the winter you add snow and then temperatures warm in the summertime and you generate water by melting that snow and some of the ice and so that water then reaches the river system many parts of the world we rely on the water from glaciers to keep river levels high and then of course the water in those rivers is used for irrigation of crops drinking water in some places industry transport hydroelectric power the only thing that's keeping the rivers flowing throughout the summer will be these large hydroelectric dams and they weren't built with the idea that the glaciers would be gone so they'll be under-engineered for the new job that they have which would be to regulate the river flow i don't think there's a way that we can marshall the huge amount of money that's going to be required to deal with all the climate damage that we're setting in play and then we'll just have to say too bad um move away say goodbye to your house move somewhere else say goodbye to your livelihood can't grow stuff here anymore those are changes we're not thinking about but we're certainly putting them into play [Music] the work that we did made a very strong suggestion that the cautious uh scenarios of low carbon into the atmosphere would bring a reward not a absolute perfect reward we're not going to keep things as they were but we would have glaciers in the rockies glaciers in the coast mountains into the future so i don't think despair is the right thing here and i don't think that would lead to an improved world if we have a lot of desperate people around i'd vote for doing something there's nothing much wrong with the future that isn't burning stuff and putting it in the atmosphere it doesn't seem there's something ugly about that and it's not harmful [Music] for the last leg of their adventure kristoff damien and fx have made their way to the squamish glacier which neighbors the lillouette ice field they're now about to experience the last phase of their great ice journey check this out guys wow what a gigantic hole wow so huge that sure is deep so that's a glacier mill yeah a former glacier mill water no longer flows through it but we can see water in the bottom the water cut into the ice exactly and you can see the bottom of the glacier you see the river you can see the under ice river we're about what 20 30 meters high let's go check it out then inside yeah so we're gonna go down to the bottom yeah we'll set up a few eye screws and rappel down sure why not oh you don't seem too sure no i'm sure christoph can you help me with the anchors yeah three screws right yes three screws and we'll keep digging till we get to the dense ice the surface is all rotten rotten by the sun huh yeah that crust forms because the sunlight the melting and the re-freezing that should be good i'll put in an ice cream yeah it's summer all right for sure perfect now close the carabiners that's solid well i'll go first okay see you down there i love it don't forget to smile it's really solid after all it's funny going down is a bit like reading a history book you're exploring the history of the glacier yeah the farther down you go the older the ice you can still make out the original layers the snow accumulation that is compressed and transformed into ice see you down there at the heart of the glacier sounds good to me nice descent huh super wow nice huh just gorgeous damian's all about style should we go exploring let's do it we'll follow the water exactly it's amazing when you think about it we've traced the glaciers great journey from the moment the snow falls on the surface all the way to its melting at the bottom of the glacier yeah this is the last stretch of the journey for meltwater and it's joining up with the base of the glacier this is the glacier's internal plumbing it's a sort of hydrologic network that evacuates water towards its extremities while completely hidden from the surface world exactly from the surface you'd never guess there was so much water under here well should we see where it leads we can get through but it'll be a tight squeeze yeah it does look quite tight have you ever done any caving few times but never through such narrow passages can you imagine how many tons of ice there's above us and remember ice has a tendency towards filling any voids so we shouldn't linger too much that would be bad but the glacier isn't moving today right it's on a break today i hope it's taking a break the space is opening up here oh it's barely 20 centimeters high here this bus if you can get through then i can too are you saying i'm fat ah i found the exit can you hand me my bag yeah how is it looking over there oh it's just gorgeous you'll never have felt so close to a glacier i'm pretty close already are you sure we can get through oh yeah hey this is wigglytub one i'm in my element thanks great and look at that gorgeous huh that color is crazy and those bevels here are just amazing like in 3d you mean the air bubbles in the ice yeah and they're perfectly round this seems like a good example of the plumbing you mentioned earlier christoph wow you can clearly see the water flowing down a conduit it's flowing down here yeah just incredible you can clearly see that water vein you can even follow the water all the way from the top to here there are a few conduits that split up one goes in that direction and the other takes a left turn it's called an ice vein right yes an ice vein or conduit it really looks like a blood vessel yeah it's an arterial network when the veins become wider they turn into mills these long channels that capture all the surface melt water and transport it towards the base and then that water will forge a path and create a sub ice hydraulic network with all these conduit networks that we can see here i don't know if you remember but there was very little flow at the surface because in this type of glacier the major part of the melt water will infiltrate the cracks and it will then merge with one of these channels at the base of the glacier and that water lubricates the glacier that has an extremely important effect because it will reduce resistance to friction so the glacier will be able to flow out more quickly in a way the glacier is rolling along on beads and that's specific to mountain glaciers because they're warmer if you will so there's a lot of water infiltration they're very dynamic but it's not the case for all glaciers in the arctic there are cold glaciers that are frozen at the base so they don't necessarily have this water infiltration problem so those glaciers last longer because they don't break up at the base they don't slide along the base check out the size of this boulder it's huge did you see that really impressive that's really a boulder it's not part of the glacier's bedrock this was carried here by the glacier exactly this boulder was carried by the glacier it's been incorporated into the ice it shows just how powerful the glacier is only a glacier could transport a boulder this size rivers and wind couldn't move such big material that's why we say glaciers are the main force of erosion on the planet imagine that huge boulder being transported maybe several kilometers downstream just by the force of the ice yeah maybe it was broken off at the top of the glacier or at the base it's incorporated into the ice that's what makes the deposits we saw earlier you know those famous marines that we saw at the extremities of the glaciers that sort of look like rows of sediment this is where they're formed basically so all this material is ripped away and incorporated pushed to the sides like a bulldozer we can see through the eyes too yeah that ice is really impressive very nice it's like an aquarium you can see through it for meters yeah in fact the ice is very pure all the air was ejected by the pressure yeah that's what makes it so translucent it looks like there's water behind it you could almost imagine a fish swimming by yeah and here there are spots where the eye sort of merged with the rocks the ice can behave like a plastic it can slowly change into another shape it merged with the rocks here and you can see there are two sizes of debris there are fine particles and then there are rocks this is known as glacial till and the finer particles are known as rock flower that happens when the glacier polishes the rocks like sandpaper it's almost like sand in fact so these rocks were ground by the glacier this is the debris that was caught in the ice that ended up rubbing against the rocks like sandpaper and it produces this fine blend of sand and silt so it's the rocks that are embedded in the ice that rub against the rock exactly because the ice by itself doesn't cause erosion there has to be debris inside it impurities and it's that debris that will rub against the rocky base and that's what hollows out the valleys yeah it hollows out the valley that's what makes for big u-shaped valleys this is really a unique opportunity to be here at the exact interface between the rock bays and the ice this is exactly where it happens yeah this is where it happened so if we were really patient and stayed here for a few days we'd see it move we'd eventually see the glacier moving in jerks because a glacier can move fast some 50 to 100 meters per year but sometimes it jerks forward so it might not move for a couple of days and then it could move a whole meter in one fell swoop then we'll have to come back yeah we'll have to come back christoph damien and francois xevier have reached the end of their journey and so has the ice it's a bittersweet journey many people will say that their children will bear witness the end of the glaciers but is that really the only possible outcome could we dare to hope for a better future for our glaciers [Music] it's obviously worrisome when you keep track of climate change when you're monitoring its impacts it gives you a fairly pessimistic vision of the future yet i'm still a lot more optimistic today than i was five or six years ago why because i have the feeling that we finished the phase of identifying the problem and the public awareness phase today the public is well aware of the problem and the facts have been well established [Music] we've seen certain initiatives to decarbonize the economy and i think we've moved on to the next phase the problem solving and action phase

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

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Keywords: TRACKS, documetary, tracks travel, Documentary movies - topic, full episode, travel documentary, culture documentary, full documentary, full documetary, full travel documentary, tracks travel channel, North America, Canada, salmon, british columbia, british columbia wolf, british columbia travel, full documentary nature, Uncharted Canada, Caves, Glaciers, Canada Glaciers, Rivers of ice, Glacier, Glaciers Whisper

Id: XaFSZ_l29jQ

Length: 50min 52sec (3052 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022