180,000 forgotten photos reveal the future of Greenland’s ice
In searching for an interesting topic to discuss on the blog, I came across this article. I found it fascinating that scientists can utilize a collection of random snapshots to piece together the history of the behavior of ice in Greenland since the early 1900s. It is even more intriguing that this information can then be used to forecast patterns of the ice melting.
Other parts of this article that I appreciate include how the authors and scientists presented the information. The slide feature that shows the old and new photos further makes the point of the changes in ice. The article doesn't rely strictly on side by side comparisons as has been done in traditional articles as shown below.
Overall, this article makes great use of photography to convey important lessons about nature.
http://www.nature.com/news/180-000-forgotten-photos-reveal-the-future-of-greenland-s-ice-1.20335
- Brenna Rowe
The picture on the right is beautiful; the dark turquoise color is almost hypnotic. I found an interesting website that monitors ice and climate in the arctic: Polar Portal. On the Greenland page they talk about the "albedo effect:" ice reflects heat where the darker melted areas absorb energy, resulting in more melting.
ReplyDeleteMartha McDaniel
The article reminds me of the History of Commodities class we took together. The first surprising lesson of the class was the enormous diversity of historical sources. The pattern was very nifty, and relied on a historian looking or stumbling into records whose main purpose was obsolete or irrelevant, but coupled with imaginative and clever work by a historian it could be transformed into a valuable data point. I am sure that the aerial photographs the author mentioned were never intended as a record of glacier melting. It is a surprising recycling of photography for scientific purposes.
ReplyDeleteDanny W Chang