The Photographic History of Greenland’s Glaciers – and how the historical data plays an important role in today’s glacier research

Abstract:

As the Greenland Ice Sheet and Greenland’s glaciers are continuing to loss mass at high rates, knowledge of their past response to climatic changes is ever important. By harvesting the archives for images, both terrestrial and airborne, we are able to expand the record of glacier observation by several decades, thus supplying crucial knowledge on glacier behavior to important climatic transitions such as the end of the Little Ice Age and the early 20^th Century warming.

Here we show how a large collection of historical aerial images portray the glacial response to the Little Ice Age deglaciation in Greenland and document frontal change throughout the 20^th Century. A detailed story of the LIA-deglaciation is told by supplementing with terrestrial photos that capture the onset of retreat and high resolution aerial images that portray geomorphological evidence of the Little Ice Age maximum extent.

This work is the result of several generations of Greenland researches and their efforts to portray and document the state of the glaciers, and highlights that while interpretations and conclusions may be challenged and changed through time, the raw observations remain extremely valuable. Finally, we also show how archival data besides photos may play an important role in future glacier research in Greenland.