The Forum at Columbia University
601 West 125th Street New York, NY 10027
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Center for Science and Society, Columbia Climate School, Film & Media Studies at Columbia University School of the Arts, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS)
Registration required even for CU/BC ID holders
A screening of the award-winning 60-minute documentary, The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice (2024) followed by an interdisciplinary panel
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
Panelists:
- Kathy Kasic is the director of The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice (Metamorph Films: https://www.metamorphfilms.com) and Associate Professor at California State University, Sacramento. Twenty years ago she traded researching evolutionary biology in the Ecuadorian Amazon for filmmaking. Since then, her artistic vision and craving for adventure have brought her to film off the bow of a ship, underwater in wild mountain rivers, and on the ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica. Using a sensorial emphasis on place to unveil the human relationship with the natural world, her 100+ productions have appeared at international festivals, on television, art galleries, museums, and won numerous awards.
- Dorothy Peteet is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor, Columbia University. She directs the Paleoecology Division of the New Core Lab at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia and in collaboration with GISS climate modelers and LDEO geochemists is studying the Late Pleistocene and Holocene archives of lakes and wetlands (peatlands, salt marshes, tidal freshwater marshes, bogs, fens).
- Joerg Schaefer is a Climate Geochemist, Lamont Research Professor, founding Director of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Cosmogenic Nuclide Group, faculty member of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (DEES), and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for DEES as well as the Columbia Climate School. His key interests include how glaciers and ice-sheets respond to past and modern warming, how changing ice impacts the environment and society, and how science can assist in developing solution strategies for these climate-related challenges.
- Jane M. Gaines is Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University and currently Professor of Film, Columbia University. Author of two award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (North Carolina, 1991) and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001). A founder of the Visible Evidence conference on documentary, she continues to publish on documentary activism, intellectual property in the internet age, the history of piracy, and most recently has critiqued the “historical turn” in film and media studies as “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?” and “Eisenstein’s Absolutely Wonderful, Totally Impossible Project,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a General History of Cinema.
- Jennifer Wenzel is a professor of postcolonial theory and environmental and energy humanities, jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009), Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger; Fordham, 2017), and The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham, 2020). A new book co-edited with Imre Szeman, Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, is forthcoming in April.
- Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science and the environment and Assistant Professor at the Columbia Climate School. Her research focuses on the history of climate and energy since the late 1970s. She is currently writing a book about the political histories of climate science and fossil fuels. Her academic writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Environmental History, and Environmental Humanities, among other outlets. She also writes essays and reviews about contemporary climate politics in places like The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Public Books, and MoMA Magazine. Before joining the Climate School, Leah was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia.
From the film description:
“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?”
Please direct any questions to sofheyman@columbia.edu
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
