Manitoba researcher celebrated for role in Emmy-winning documentary

The University of Manitoba celebrated a local researcher who was featured in an Emmy-winning documentary about Greenland's disappearing ice sheet.

A local researcher from the University of Manitoba was celebrated Monday for being featured in an Emmy-winning documentary.

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen is a professor at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the U of M, and is one of the scientists featured in the new documentary “The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice.”

It follows Dahl-Jensen and other scientists as they analyze ice cores collected under Greenland during the Cold War and what they discovered about the ice sheet.

“It’s the first ice core that was drilled in Greenland, but it was really well done because they managed to drill more than three meters of gravel and till from under the ice,” said Dahl-Jensen. “This material has been totally forgotten and saved in a freezer in Copenhagen. So, this movie is about finding these jars of till from under the ice – finding smaller plants and insects that lived at a time where the site was not covered by ice and then trying to (unravel) the story about what happened.”

The soil that was analyzed is more than 400,000 years old.

Dahl-Jensen said being able to look back in time to see what caused the ice sheet to melt is a great source to help scientists predict what might happen in the future.

“We are in a period of time with big climate change. It’s warming a lot, and there’s a lot of debate going on on how fast the Greenland ice sheet will melt, because when the Greenland ice sheet melts, the sea level will rise significantly, up to seven meters.”

She notes researchers can’t make models to understand what happened back then, so having actual material from that time period can show how much warming happened and how long it took for the ice to melt, as well as how that translates to today.

“How fast will the ocean rise? How will the drought and the (storms) develops? These are things that are extremely relevant for us to know. So we can predict how to do things in the future on all aspects.”

The documentary was screened for students at the University of Manitoba on Monday to celebrate Dahl-Jensen.

Along with winning an Emmy, the film, which took three years to make, also won the Environmental Filmmaking Award and was named the Best Feature Documentary at the Raw Science Film Festival.

Dahl-Jensen said it has been exciting to see how successful the film has been.

“It’s always great when your work comes out to many people, but I also find it so fantastic that it seems so popular that it can reach a broader audience, which is extremely important for us in science.”

For those interested in watching the documentary, it can be seen on a number of streaming platforms.