At the end of 2014, two new scientific studies revealed that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than expected. Conducted separately by Ohio State University and the Center for Polar Observation and Modeling, the research indicates that Greenland’s future ice losses and its consequent contribution to rising sea levels have been underestimated.

The news comes just in time for the DVD release of Daniel Dencik’s Scandinavian documentary Expedition to the End of the World, which chronicles a boatload of artists and scientists as they journey to the previously ice-blocked fjords of northeastern Greenland, which have been recently defrosted by global warming. A wry account of their voyage, the film examines the unexpected interrelationships between scientific discovery and artistic creation against a backdrop of arctic grandeur and apocalyptic predictions. As the expedition’s Danish co-leader and geologist Minik Rosing declares, “Humans are at that point in our development where we are changing the environment faster than we can adapt to it.”

A professor of geology at the University of Copenhagen, Rosing spoke further with Sloan Science and Film about their journey, science and art, and the end of humanity.

Sloan Science and Film: When you began this project, were you interested in looking at the way science and art overlap?

Minik Rosing: Not really, to be honest. The whole idea was to let it be opportunity-driven, which is to say that we got the opportunity to take this trip. And this area in northeast Greenland is hard to get to, and has a great potential for science and natural beauty. So the idea was to take a group of people and give them an unexpected opportunity. It was not that the scientists and artists should cross-fertilize one another; it was more that science and art are both trying to describe the world we live in, but by different means. By having the two side by side, you get a more complete and interesting description. It was not a didactic exercise, where one should learn from the other. But, of course, when you put all these people together, they will share ideas.

SSF: Can you talk about this specific area of Greenland and why it is geologically so important?

MR: There are several reasons. There’s pure geology of the space—this area has a sequence of rocks from a period of earth’s history which spans a purely microbial world to one that has animals in the same region. You can follow evolution, basically. If you’re a geochemist, you can translate the chemistry of the sediments into information about the environment that was present on the surface of the earth at different times. In that, you can have parcels that show the link between the evolution of life and the environment of the earth. You can do that in many places on earth, but this is a particularly beautiful place to do it.

It’s also one of the places where the first ideas about plate tectonics were conceived about seventy years ago. With all the new methods, isotopic and geochemical, that we have, we can reopen the book on this research and start all over again.

SSF: Were you able to establish any breakthroughs or discoveries about the evolutionary process?

MR: Not yet. But we are working on aspects of it. We are definitively pursuing it. It’s very fascinating. There’s a period of earth’s history where there are major changes in the behavior of the planet. You have these snowball earth events, where for some reason or another, the whole earth froze over. And associated with that, temporarily at least, animal life started to emerge. In that area of Greenland, you can also sample these ice age periods and also try to understand why they happened and what brought earth back to normal again.

We’re also trying to document the environmental changes leading up and following the ice ages. We are trying to find out whether there were changes in the amount of oxygen in the ocean, whether there was a period of time when the production of biological matter was lowered by these glaciations.

SSF: It’s not explained in the film, but when two of the scientists discover something in their microscope, it seems like a huge breakthrough. How significant was it?

MR: I think it was a new species, not a new form of life. But I don’t know how significant it is. One thing that’s interesting and it’s a virtue of this movie, is that the film has its own life. It’s not documenting what we were all doing. It’s telling its own story about how the filmmaker experienced these scientists and artists. It’s not just a chronicle of what’s happening.

SSF: There is a lot of talk in the film about man’s current relationship with the environment, which is not strictly the construction of the filmmaker. This must be on your mind. Do you think that our time is running out?

MR: Clearly. The question is how fast it’s running out. The short answer is that all species have a limited time, and then they somehow or something undermines their support. What’s so intriguing about understanding the current evolution of life and earth is that it’s a repeat story of how success for any species allows them to make an impact on the total environment of the planet, which undermines its own existence. That’s the enterprise of evolution: you spend all your early part of your evolution adapting to an environment and then you’re so successful you change the environment. Then you disappear.

SSF: Where else do you see that?

MR: You see that repeatedly in Earth’s history: there have been a number of mass extinctions that have been caused by environmental impact of one form or another. One of the most dramatic events happened about two and a half billion years ago when the first organisms [cyanobacteria] started to release oxygen in the atmosphere. Before that, the earth’s atmosphere was devoid of oxygen. But when the organisms grew, there was a saturation point, and they could no longer absorb the oxygen being produced. Suddenly, the atmosphere became toxic. It was a horrible event for most life on earth.

SSF: Where are we now with respect to the state of the oceans and glaciers? What do you see as the timeline as far as seismic environmental change?

MR: One thing that you can tell for sure is that global temperatures are increasing, and carbon dioxide is acidifying the upper part of the ocean and that has a lot of impact. Where is this heading and how fast it’s heading? It’s very difficult to predict. But learning from the geologic record, we have seen other events where we’ve seen rapid increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which have caused mass extinctions before the Triassic period, and it seems to be related to the same thing: the burning of coal. You can see an analogous situation now, and we could be heading in that direction.

SSF: So are you on the 200-year plan or the 2-million year plan?

MR: All we can say is the impact that we have now: Clearly, we are living within a mass extinction period, probably one of the fastest mass extinction periods the Earth has ever experienced. And we are most likely the primary cause for it. But [for the timeline] maybe that’s for the artists to decide.

SSF: From the film, you seem to be a bit of a musician yourself. How long have you been playing the banjo? Is it a release for you from the hard science?

MR: Forever, more or less. I’m not very good at it, but I enjoy it a lot. Many people think that scientists are very serious and solemn people, but for most of us, science is like playing music or doing art.