Documentary featuring UB’s ice sheet research wins Emmy

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A documentary film that features University at Buffalo research on ancient sediment from below the Greenland Ice Sheet has received an Emmy award.

“The Memory of Darkness, Light and Ice” won the national News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary at a ceremony held last month in New York City. It had been nominated alongside productions from NOVA, National Geographic Documentary Films and Netflix.

The documentary details how a team of researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation, has used the long-lost sediment to investigate how Greenland’s ice sheet has melted in the past and when it might again. 

Researchers featured in the film include Elizabeth Thomas, PhD, associate professor in the UB Department of Earth Sciences and a faculty affiliate of the UB RENEW Institute. She was interviewed in her North Campus lab for the film and appears in it alongside RENEW postdoctoral fellow John Michael Aguilar.

The backstory of the sediment is also deeply intertwined with UB. The U.S. Army scientists who pulled it from nearly a mile below the ice sheet at Camp Century military base in 1966 were led by Chester “Chet” Langway, who would later serve as chair of UB’s geology department.

The military had aimed to place nuclear missiles under the ice. Those plans were never realized but Langway and his team did successfully drill through the ice, pulling up not only 11 feet of sediment but also the world’s first complete deep ice core that kicked off studies of the Earth’s ancient climate.

Langway brought the sediment with him when he came to UB in 1975. It remained in the university’s Central Ice Core Storage Facility and Information Exchange, then the nation’s leading ice core laboratory, until Langway’s retirement in the mid-1990s.

The sediment then sat largely forgotten for another two-plus decades at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark until a serendipitous freezer cleanout in 2018.

Thomas and her colleagues, led by the University of Vermont, have since used the sediment to reveal that the Greenland ice sheet was much smaller 400,000 years ago, when temperatures were similar to or slightly warmer and atmospheric carbon dioxide was at least a third less than it is today. 

“The Memory of Darkness, Light and Ice” was directed by internationally acclaimed scientist-filmmaker Kathy Kasic, who was a co-principal investigator on the NSF grant that supported the team’s research. It was produced by Metamorph Films, LLC. 

In addition to the Emmy, the film has won awards at multiple science and environmental film festivals. The film was also screened at the U.S. Capitol as part of a Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition Task Force briefing.