A Trove of Old Photos Could Reveal the Future of These Arctic Glaciers

The Svalbard Islands, part of Norway, are warming seven times faster than the global average. Aerial pictures from the 1930s are helping researchers understand what that means for the region’s ice.

The mammoth, ethereally beautiful glaciers of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, near the North Pole, bear the scars of climate change more than almost anywhere else on the planet.

Over the past three decades, Svalbard has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the Arctic region and seven times the global average. That is causing the islands’ glaciers to melt at an alarming rate, threatening polar bears and other wildlife, and adding to rising sea levels around the globe.

For a long time, though, predicting how quickly future warming might cause the ice to retreat took guesswork. In Svalbard and other places, most field measurements started only in the mid-20th century, and satellite observations even later.

Now, advances in computing are helping scientists bring old ice back to life in astonishing detail. Using black-and-white photos taken during mapping expeditions nearly a century ago, they are creating three-dimensional digital models of how the glaciers looked before modern record-keeping, and illuminating the ways they have changed over a longer stretch of time.

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