A screening of the award-winning 60-minute documentary, The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice (2024). Directed by former evolutionary biologist Kathy Kasic, the film features surprising discoveries about the Greenland Ice Sheet by climate scientists, including Columbia’s Dorothy Peteet and Joerg Schaefer. The film meditates on the uses of scientific knowledge of the past, the urgency of global warming for our future, and the challenge of spurring action in the present: “Paradoxically, our ability to look forward in time is best aided by looking backwards in time.”
Following the screening, there will be a panel discussion with the director and Columbia faculty
Register here
About the Film
If the ice sheet covering Greenland melts, global sea levels would rise 21 feet, profoundly impacting our planet. How, why, and when could this happen? Scientists have recently found lost sediment from a forgotten secret sub-ice Cold War base in the Arctic that holds clues about a time when the Greenland Ice Sheet had fully receded. What does the discovery that the Greenland Ice Sheet has completely melted before mean for our future?
Panelists:
- Kathy Kasic, director of The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice (Metamorph Films: https://www.metamorphfilms.com/) and Associate Professor at California State University, Sacramento
- Dorothy Peteet, paleoecologist and Lamont Senior Research Scientist
- Joerg Schaefer, climate geochemist and Lamont Research Professor
- Jane Gaines, documentary film scholar at Columbia School of the Arts
- Jennifer Wenzel, scholar of literature and environmental humanities, A&S
- Leah Aronowsky, historian at Columbia Climate School
