Photo Into the Ice
Nature documentaries are rarely shown on the big screen. An entire weekend of nature documentaries in the movie theatre is something special. The Heerenstraat Theatre will screen a series of nine documentaries next month as part of the Wageningen Wildlife Film Festival. It is actually a spin-off of the Wildlife Film Festival Rotterdam, which takes place a week earlier.
The Rotterdam event has existed since 2015 and is a real show-stopper. ‘The Cinerama is always packed’, says Sebastiaan Grosscurt. The Forest and Nature Management alumnus facilitates the Q&As in Rotterdam, which are held after the screening. The Rotterdam organising team has been wanting a spin-off in Wageningen for quite some time, so he took the initiative.
Q&A
Grosscurt says the most breathtaking films from the programme in Rotterdam will be screened in Wageningen. Nine films will be shown twice each in the space of four days. Additionally, a Q&A will take place after one of the films every day. Three of these sessions will have scientists from Wageningen present: Patrick Jansen, Laurens Ganzeveld and Gibbs Kuguru.
Laurens Ganzeveld (Meteorology en Air Quality) will answer questions related to the Into the Ice documentary. This film documents the work of glaciologists who study the impact of the changing climate on the icecap in Greenland. Ganzeveld was involved in the MOSAIC polar expedition in 2019 and studied the interchange of climate-active gasses between the ice and the atmosphere. The expedition focused on sea ice.
Summit
Into the Ice is a film about the land ice in Greenland. Ganzeveld spent a month in Greenland in 2009 to take readings of the land ice. ‘That was on the Summit, the Greenland icecap. The ice there is 3.5 km thick and so heavy that it pushes the soil hundreds of meters down. The lowest layer is 100,000 years old.’
The higher a glacier reaches, the faster it grows as the higher air is colder
Laurens Ganzeveld, Meteorology and Air Quality
Ganzeveld teaches about the dynamics of glaciers. ‘How a glacier responds to climate change within the climate system. How a glacier can grow rapidly through feedback mechanisms but also diminish just as fast. The higher a glacier reaches, the faster it grows, as the higher air is colder. Until it reaches a height where the air is so dry that snow no longer occurs.’
800,000 years
‘That occurs in Antarctica’, Ganzeveld continues. ‘The icecap there is just as thick, but the cold is so extreme that there is hardly any snowfall. That is why the ice in Antarctica responds to climate change much more slowly. That lack of dynamic means the ice there is much older, with the bottom layer going back as far as 800,000 years.’ What is shown in Into the Ice is a mystery for Ganzeveld. ‘I still have to watch the movie myself’, he says.
Wageningen Wildlife Film Festival, 9-12 November, Heerenstraat Theater.
