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A new Earth conversation presents a screening of ‘Beneath the Polar Sun,’ a documentary that earned the Green Planet Award from the 2021 Rhode Island International Film Festival and was an official selection at the 2022 Environmental Film Festival in Washington, D.C. A panel discussion will follow with the filmmakers, Stephen Smith and Diana Kushner, and Clark Professor Karen Frey, a polar scientist and longtime contributor to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card.
When ice on the Arctic Ocean vanishes, the sea’s surface no longer reflects solar energy. The dark sea absorbs the suns heat. And global temperatures rise.
Five hundred nautical miles from the North Pole, inside the Arctic Ocean’s “Last Ice Area,” a research team has set out to measure the world’s largest and oldest sea ice floes. They know the data, the models, and the science, but none of that has prepared them for the truth on the ground. The floes are crumbling, collapsing — jumbled slabs of sea ice are crushing in around them. There’s no way forward, there is no way back; they are tiny specks in the Arctic wilderness. Caught in a frozen maelstrom, something has to give.