Luc Jacquet, the Oscar-winning director of the international smash hit March of the Penguins (2005), returns to Antarctica to film the life and astonishing work of the 82-year-old French polar explorer and glaciologist Claude Lorius. The result is an eco-cinema masterwork that celebrates the tenacity, patience, and scientific versatility of the man who was responsible for linking global climate change and the greenhouse gases created by human beings.
Using home-movie footage taken during Lorius's many trips to Antarctica, the documentary begins with the scientist's passionate account of his first research trip in October 1956 when he was just 23. He, along with two others, spent a year in a small underground space he calls "a termite's nest." Lorius fills his time doing various experiments designed to map the mountains and valleys of this freezing cold continent which is regularly pulverized by terrible winds and incredible blizzards. Through patience and courtesy, the three men live without any privacy and refuse to let bad moods spoil their labors. At one point, Lorius says enthusiastically, "I grasped the power of science, of the invisible. I was hooked on the thrill of discovery. My fate was sealed."
Luc Jacquet has written a poetic text which is dramatically spoken by the voice-over skills of Michel Papineschi who renders this glaciologist as a wise old man "sad to see that history has proved him right." The cinematography, which is enhanced by the use of drones, vividly conveys the vastness and the meditative qualities of work at the bottom of the world where one day the frozen tundra is inviting and the next day a storm threatens the very survival of Lorius and his co-workers. Two on-camera plane crashes further illustrate the life-and-death perils of these research excursions.
Drilling out ice cones and then analyzing them with a machine, Lorius is able to study temperature over time. He has an aha! moment when he comes to see that air bubbles trapped in millennia-old chunks of ice could hold the secret of surface air temperature from the first day they were formed. Viola! — climate data from 800,000 years ago.
After a series of shots of Lorius walking across melting glaciers and burned-out forests, which speak to the havoc wrought by global climate change, the film ends with an all important question: "Now that you know, what are you going to do?"