A Gripping New Film Charts a Death-Defying Scientist's Half Century Quest to Study and Save High-Mountain Ice

Listen above or watch after 7 p.m. Eastern time today, Sunday September 10, as I interview two famed mountaineering climate scientists and the filmmakers who’ve just chronicled their lives. Watch and please SHARE the show on LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter or YouTube. (There’s a very rough transcript here.)

For half a century, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, an extraordinary husband-and-wife science team at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, have been documenting both the decline of mountain glaciers in and around the tropics and the climate history locked in cylinders of ice they’ve extracted from such frozen libraries before they vanish.

Photo of the Thompsons in their sub-zero ice-core repository at Ohio State University (photo via Ohio State); read this alumni magazine feature on the Thompsons

Now two filmmakers, Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest, have produced an enthralling documentary, Canary, that chronicles this couple’s edge-pushing and literally death-defying efforts. O’Malley is best known for his work on the long-running Chef’s Table series on Netflix and Rivest recently moved from neuroscience research into science storytelling. Despite, or maybe because of, those unlikely backgrounds, they’ve produced a deeply human account of two indefatigable human beings whose planetary heroism emerged through a mix of curiosity, serendipity and passionate perspicacity.

Scenes from Canary, the new documentary about two scientists' half-century quest to conserve high-mountain ice.

September 20th theater screenings

The film has a special one-night screening at more than 140 theaters around the United States on September 20th and I strongly encourage you to go if you can find a screen close by at the Oscilloscope Films website.

Here’s the Canary trailer:

I watched the film in an online press preview and loved every minute, but I’m biased. I’ve known the Thompsons since 1994, when I interviewed Lonnie for a 1995 feature on the global retreat in alpine glaciers I wrote for Conde Nast Traveler. I encourage you to click and give it a read (I reposted it here on Substack with some new artwork).

I continued to cover his work, including in a 2001 front-page New York Times story on the retreat, and inevitable vanishing of the tenuous ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro.

Read my story in The Times

This snippet from Canary, posted with permission, shows Lonnie at work in that bizarre Kilimanjaro ice field back then:

By 2004, I was writing about how that mountain’s meldown was becoming a two-sided icon in the debate over what to do, or not do, facing human-caused global warming.

And please read the extraordinary 2012 profile of Lonnie written by my former Times colleauge Justin Gillis, who began the reporting when he learned that this high-climbing scientist was poised to have a heart transplant: “A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality.”