Two Lands: Joe Capra's 4K Time-Lapse of Greenland and Iceland

Northern lights, glaciers, the icebergs of Disko Bay and Iceland's Kirkjufell all feature in Two Lands – Greenland | Iceland is a 4K time-lapse film by Joe Capra of Scientifantastic, shot over just ten days in two of the most dramatic landscapes in the North Atlantic.

Two Lands: ten days, two countries, three cameras

Capra describes the film as a brief project: four days in Iceland and six in Greenland, with some of the shoot under client lockdown, so the film is built from the footage he was free to use. Everything was shot in 4K Ultra HD on three Canon 5D Mark III cameras, with motion-control gear from Dynamic Perception and eMotimo moving the cameras slowly between frames.

Greenland: Ilulissat Icefjord, Disko Bay and the ice sheet

The Greenland half of the film takes in Kangerlussuaq, Ilulissat, Ilimanaq, the Ilulissat Icefjord, the Russell Glacier, the Greenland ice sheet and Disko Bay.

• Ilulissat Icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004, runs about 40 km from the ice sheet to Disko Bay. At its head, Sermeq Kujalleq (Jakobshavn Isbræ), the most productive glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, flows 20–35 metres a day and sheds around 20 billion tonnes of icebergs a year.
• Disko Bay is where those icebergs reach open water, just south of the town of Ilulissat. From there they drift north before turning south toward the Atlantic.
• Kangerlussuaq has the longest civilian runway in Greenland and is the only place in the country with road access to the ice sheet: a 35 km road built in 1999 leads toward its edge, past the easily reached Russell Glacier.

Iceland: Kirkjufell and the Snæfellsnes Peninsula

In Iceland, Capra filmed along the South Coast and on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, around Kirkjufell and the town of Grundarfjörður. Kirkjufell, 463 metres high, rises from the north coast of Snæfellsnes and is claimed to be the most photographed mountain in Iceland. Game of Thrones fans know it as the "arrowhead mountain" from seasons 6 and 7.

How the aurora and time-lapse work

The northern lights appear when charged particles from the Sun, carried on the solar wind, are funnelled by Earth's magnetic field into the upper atmosphere, where they excite oxygen and nitrogen. The familiar green glow comes from oxygen at lower altitudes; the rarer red from oxygen higher up. The aurora is concentrated in a band about 6° wide, centred near 67° north, right across the high latitudes where Iceland and Greenland lie. Big displays are most common around the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle and the equinoxes.

Time-lapse compresses hours into seconds by shooting frames far more slowly than they are played back: one frame a second played at 30 frames a second runs 30 times faster than real life. Mounting the camera on a slow motorised slider or pan head, as Capra does, adds smooth movement through the scene. The real aurora moves more slowly than it does on screen; for a sense of its true pace, compare Ronn Murray’s real-time aurora recording.

See more still images from the same trip in our Two Lands photo gallery.

Sources