MUMBAI: The Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival opens on 15 January in Nevada City after which the venue will become a center of activism to halt global warming.

Antarctica will be among the places featured as signaling the effects of human interaction with Mother Nature. The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning by award-winning Canadian filmmaker Mark Terry is a one-hour documentary that profiles how the issues of global warming are impacting the southern continent.

Terry, who has been on the film since 1986, is a member of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society having won a Platinum Award for best documentary feature and best director at the Houston International Film Festival in 2001 for We Stand Guard about the history of the Canadian military.

Through Terry‘s investigative work during International Polar Year, when scientists were invited to study Antarctica‘s larger-than-life-creatures, he noticed little information was coming out of Antarctica.

So he visited for his 50th birthday to bring the latest findings of the scientific world to the big screen. The film released in 2009, interviews some of the leading scientists living in Antarctica as they study the dramatically changing wildlife and polar ecosystem.

Among other questions they address: are penguins really committing suicide?

Antarctica Challenge won the Silver Sierra Award at the Yosemite International Film Festival and best picture in environment and ecology at the International Film Festival of Ireland. The film shows how warmer temperatures are affecting the icy landscape in three ways.

First, land ice is melting at a faster rate than expected. Second, the newly exposed rock absorbs sunlight, heats up and creates giant landslides of ice and third, the precipitation cycle shows a marked increase, as more fresh water is evaporating. This fresh water then rains down on the land ice which, in turn, melts the ice faster.