pics @lemmy.world

4mo ago

The Arctic ocean photographed in the same place, 107 years ago vs today.

Here is the original article from 2002

118 comments

Facebook comments: Well obviously it was taken in the SUMMER 😂🤣😆 Morons global warming is all fear mongering!
Yes Jim. It's very normal that entire glaciers disappear, regularly in fact, every year. You are so smart, much smarter than all of the scientists who are panicking.
- Ummm…. There’s people right here on lemmy saying the same dumb shit about summer. Don’t think for a second that lemmy doesn’t host some of the exact same idiots Facebook does.
  
  Good news is that many instances on Lemmy are less tolerant to alt-right trolls and climate deniers. Best to use that report function so your admins, or even better, their admins, can snipe them.
  
  We are all humans, we are all dumb. A smart human isn't one who knows everything, they're one who knows what they don't know and knows who knows that. And, ya know, defers to the people who know about things when they don't.
- The only issue that really matters to me is climate change. Or maybe plastic.
  But this is the same as the picture of the statue of liberty that is used to "debunk" sea level rise by showing the level at the same height, despite being taken 100 years apart. Were they taken at the same tide? Same time of year? Is there any other factor at play here?
  This is a "shoe is on the other foot" moment, and we should be as skeptical of that which supports our beliefs as we are of that which contradicts it. Maybe especially so because confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
  
  Glaciers don't change with a full moon.
- Reddit comment: Shaving does make your dinghy look bigger!
- Also, the sunlight suggests it's summer in the first photo (or at least not winter).

crazy to think that guy has been on that boat for over 100 years
- He clearly switched boats.
  
  Boat of Theseus
  
  Nah, he just slowly upgraded and remodel on the spot. The guy never moved from that spot. 🤥
  
  No boat would live that long...

Wow, it looks so much prettier today. All thanks to climate improvement.
- Thanks, emissionschads!

Thank goodness they cleared out all that snow and ice so that we can finally see the pretty mountains.
- We should put some factories there!
  
  This might be silly but we could replace the ice with trash?

At least we got some space to build car centric suburbia, eh? /s
- More room to pollute! 🥳🥳🥳
  
  Maybe there's oil under there!
  
  Looks like a nice enough spot for a landfill. Get on that, pronto.

A reverse image search revealed to me that there are a hell of a lot of copies of this image around the internet, but I can't seem to find any papers that provide background. I'm going to have to look again later, but if there's any other internet sleuths out there interested in figuring out the origins of these photos with reputable explainers, I would love to know more about this.
I'm always afraid of things like this that seem to confirm my biases without associated information to back it...
- I just did reverse image search and found this article from 2002
  
  The Guardian article nailed it, thanks!
  It doesn't cite exactly where they got the Greenpeace photo from, but I found it here: https://media.greenpeace.org/archive/Climate-Impact-Documentation-in-Norway--Svalbard-27MZIF4WNED.html
  Climate Impact Documentation in Norway, Svalbard Greenpeace documentation showing that glacier "Blomstrandbreen" has retreated nearly 2 km since 1928, with an accelerated rate of 35 metres lost per year since 1960 and even higher in the past decade. In the image, view of climate campaigner Truls Gulowsen on a speed boat going to a mine in Longyearbyen.
  Unique identifier: GP0STSCL6 Shoot date: 03/08/2002 Locations: Norway, Scandinavia, Svalbard Credit line: © Greenpeace / Christian Åslund
  A bit more from the Guardian article:
  Greenpeace activists visited the glacier last weekend on the Rainbow Warrior taking pictures from the same locations to highlight the effects of global warming, which the group says is a threat to the future of the planet.
  The Blomstrandbreen glacier has retreated by one and a quarter miles since 1928, according to Greenpeace. It was shrinking by 115ft a year in the 1960s, a rate which has risen.
  Recent studies carried out by US researchers and reported in Science last month said that 85% of the glaciers they examined had lost vast portions of their mass in the last 40 years.
  Keith Echelmayer of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has carried out research into Alaska's ice streams and checked glacier thickness, said: "Most glaciers have thinned several hundred feet at low elevation in the last 40 years and about 60 feet at higher elevations."
- There's a couple similar photos from 2022 posted to Reddit by the same photographer (meaning the same person posted these two, not that it's necessarily the same person who posted the one above):
  https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/vb20ng/two_photos_of_the_same_glacier_in_the_arctic/
  https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFuckingLit/comments/v9fkqq/i_had_the_unique_opportunity_to_recreate_this/

yeah but it's much more colorful now. that's good, isn't it?
- OP always thinks positive.
  But at what point does it become toxic positivity?

That…. Is fucking tragic. There’s no going back to that. Ever.
- Don't worry, the ice will come back, we just won't be around to see it.
  
  Speak for yourself, I intend to be here for it.
  
  For that to happen the carbon would need to be buried in the ground again, however
  And it's possible that humanity has emitted so much and warmed the globe so much that we shift the global climate stability point to something else than was before. It's possible the new equilibrium over millions of year will be a warmer earth
- Oh it will be back. We won't be. But the planet always bounces back.
  
  Not really tbh. The earth is well past the halfway point until we look like Mars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

people 107 years ago loved sepia filters.
- And retro fashion.
  
  Vvvintage.

Good luck, everyone. I genuinely hope you make it through as okay as you can.
- Thank you. I'll do my best regardless. Will you be joining us?
  
  I'll do my best, yes.

I myself asked "What time of year was the lower photograph taken?" Then I realized I was being dumb, because if either photo was taken in winter time, we would see at least some ice in the water, if not a very large ice sheet.
- That, and it'd be dark. You'd need to pack one hell of a flash.

Well that's fuckin depressing
- Mother Nature: Dont worry humans, everything will be fine, life will go on. Your fucking this up for your self, and you wont be missed

Sure it was at the same time? Did the account for leap seconds?
- It's in TAI timezone

Revenge of the Titanic.

New real estate!

Notice the first guy is in a wooden boat and the second guy is in a boat most likely made out of some plastic-based fibers. 🤔
- The plastic isn't really a huge driver of climate change, the problems it causes are different.
  For the climate change comparison, notice that the old boat has oars, but the new boat has a gas engine
  
  Which is also a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic.
  
  The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It's impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.
  
  The old boat also has a motor, note how it's still moving in the photo while the only person in it is in the back holding a tiller (and appears to be facing forwards).
  
  the old boat has oars
  Which no-one is using. It's the first thing I noticed. There's a man sitting in the stern with a tiller and rudder, but there's no visible means of propulsion, no other crew. Weird.
  Edit: I zoomed in, and it's possible there is someone else in the boat, hard to see.

Oprah buying up development rights on the coastline there too?

air is probably cleaner now than it was then
- Elaborate?
  
  go read a historybook on the industrial revolution

This is wild 🫨

Deleted
- I mean anyone is free to try their hand at reproducing it better, I'm sure the spot hasn't changed that much since the modern one here was taken, and if it has, well it'll just make the comparison that much more dramatic.
- Yes, let's focus on that.
- The motorized boat is an accurate representation of how things are today.

ah to have seen the raw undisturbed beauty earth once had....

What time of year in each photo?
- Are you suggesting that Antarctica typically thaws out in the summer?
  
  Is this Antarctica or the Arctic? The title said the Arctic, but you said Antarctica and the mountains do remind me more of the south than the north.
  
  It is the Arctic, not the ant-arctic.
  Actually that’s all.
  
  Mountains of ice melt in the summer then the water refalls in the fall and winter as snow and freezing rain in truly apocalyptic amounts. Rebuilding the ice mountains to start the process over.
- Given that the sun is up at roughly the same amount, and at the poles the sun remains consistently up or down according to the season, I think we can rightly assume these two photos are taken at least approximately at similar times of the year.
  Also, are you trying to insinuate that 100+ foot tall glaciers are somehow "seasonal?" Because they aren't.
  
  Glaciers actually do retreat and advance seasonally or on even longer cycles. Some have terminuses that move back and forth literal miles. One of the key indicators of climate change is the fact that globally, glaciers are retreating more than they're advancing on average.
- Question. How fast do you think glaciers reach that height?
  
  I'm not your thread's OP but I want to know the same question (what were the seasons) because no, I don't know how fast glaciers reach that height either. Nothing about that implies denial of the validity, it's a question to help quantify the change. Varying 10ft between seasons means this is a massive change regardless of season. Varying 100ft, not so much. No, I don't beleive it'd actually be 100fr of change in 6 months, but I could see it being more than 10ft.
  
  Did you think my question was a veiled attempt at climate change denial, lol?
- I'm sure it's just a smidge of winter snow build up. No need to be alarmed
- No the question isn't time of year but of time of day.
  See it was mid morning so the glaciers all left for tea.
- Are you trolling? The seasonal variation in arctic glaciers is negligible.
- Is the boat the same distance from the shore?

118 comments