Archive photos show glaciers in retreat in the 1930s

Caroline Morley, online picture researcher

(Image: National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark)

We all know that Greenland's glaciers are melting but satellite images only go back so far making it difficult to compare current changes with those in the past. However, the discovery of photographs from the early 1930s has allowed glaciologists to look further back.

This photograph was amongst a collection of glass plates from Denmark's Rasmussen's 7th Thule Expedition to Greenland eighty years ago. The photographs were taken as reference for a mapping project. Once the map was finished the images were forgotten until they were recently rediscovered in the basement of Denmark's National Survey.

"They were cleaning up in the basement and had found some old glass plates with glaciers on them," says Anders Bj?rk of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. "Once the map was produced they didn't have much value."

Bj?rk and colleagues have been assembling and digitizing historical images of Greenland from various sources and using them to compare glacial melting from then and the 21st century.

The team found that southeast Greenland glaciers that reach the ocean have been retreating faster in the past decade than in the 1930s. However, land-terminating glaciers experienced a faster retreat in the 1930s.

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1481?

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