Into the Ice

The ice at the poles is melting quickly, and this will have major consequences for the entire world. When sea levels rise, large parts of Denmark, including most of Copenhagen, will be under water, as will many of the world’s other low-lying countries and cities. The question is how fast this will happen. Will we still experience this? Will our children or grandchildren? Is it time to start seeking new ways and places to live? Despite extensive research, we still have no conclusive answer to this question. But this answer is precisely what director Lars Ostenfeld seeks to find when he and one of the world’s leading glaciologists descend 200 metres into one of the major "Moulin" holes in the ice sheet – further than any human has gone before. "Into the Ice" follows Lars and professor Alun Hubbard’s journey into one of the wildest and most extreme landscapes on earth, deep into the melting heart of climate change. Tied to nothing but a rope, they descend into the darkness of the ice, with no idea what they will find or where it will end. This unprecedented descent is part of ground-breaking research that sheds new light on how much meltwater the ice contains, and what happens to the ice when water seeps into and below it. In the film, we meet the other scientists Lars has travelled with, all of whom are working against the clock to find out how fast the ice is melting. Dorte Dahl-Jensen, also known as the Ice Queen, can look 100,000 years back in time via ice core drilling, adding an important historical perspective on climate change, while Jason Box is exploring increasing snowfall on the ice sheet as a potential brake against its melting. All three agree that the Greenland ice sheet is key to understanding the scale and speed of rising sea levels, because Greenland is the so-called global thermometer: what’s happening in Greenland now can help us predict what will happen in the rest of the world.