POST

Glaciers

Monday December 20th, 2010

Ethan Welty is prepared to answer questions. Any offhand inquiry I made in our correspondence would be met with a careful and patient response by the Denver-based photographer, who gave me a short course in glaciology and the scientific uses of photography.

Ethan’s photography displays a wide range of travel experience, and a reasonable dose of trouble and adventure; he has just emerged from a lawsuit resulting from his arrest at an environmentalist protest he was shooting, as chronicled in this ASMP interview. But alongside his photography Ethan works as a scientist; his website’s biography details some of his travel interests, and then appends the following sentence:

I recently moved to Boulder to start at PhD at the University of Colorado, where I am studying tidewater glacier dynamics (in Alaska) while developing scientific photography methods for both my own research and citizen science initiatives.

This short description, of course, contains within it an enormous amount of work. When I first approached Ethan about his recent projects, he mentioned preparing for a session at the American Geophysical Union on ”photography as data.” This piqued my interest, and I asked Ethan to tell me more about the presentation and the research behind it.

Learning more involved a minor education in the science of glaciers and methods of research. Ethan showed me a video from a previous presentation at the UW Graduate Climate Conference, which you can also watch on his website. (He wants me to tell you that when he says “Alaska and Southeast Asia” he actually means “Africa and Southeast Asia.”)

As Ethan explained to me, he has “two projects running in parallel: the grass-roots documentation of glacier change, and the detailed study of tidewater glacier dynamics.” To pull off the first he has analyzed “one million ‘glacier’ photos (by 105,509 users) on Flickr,” which demonstrated that “photographs online span the majority of the planet’s glaciated regions and achieve near-daily frequency during summer months at many popular locations.” If he can find enough photographs from different perspectives close enough together in time, it’s possible to generate a 3D model; but either way, he can work towards his goal of showing the scientific research community “the data potential of massive online image collections, in part because I think it is thrilling to be able to involve the public in research.” As he explained in depth:

I also have an artistic interest in the idea that once skeletal sets are constructed, the online public could browse the timeseries online, and submit their own image to see their experience of a place put into the greater context of a changing world, as seen by others. By encouraging contributions alongside data-mining, we could unlock the world’s photographic evidence of ecological change, and perhaps compel others to, on their next glacier visit, take a set of pictures more suitable for extracting 3D information.

The scientific end is highly technical, and has to do with a phenomenon called “calving,” when portions of glaciers break off and enter into water bodies; it’s potentially a significant contributor to change in sea levels, far more than melting ice caps. The causes and the natural progression of this phenomenon are still to be studied, and Ethan hopes that mass data collection and techniques like time-lapse photography will contribute to generating research.

Ethan’s fascination with glaciers is in some sense a product of his passion for “mountain and alpine environments, and the aesthetics of snow and ice.” There is one space that is especially meaningful for Ethan: “Wherever the seed of my passion originated, without any doubt it was the Washington’s North Cascades that nursed my vision to fruit.” Visions of the North Cascades inspired Ethan to use physics, geography and photography to produce unique research, and after a year-long survey of graduate schools he settled on the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado, where he could work with glaciologist Dr. Tad Pfeffer—”also,” Ethan said, “a photographer and passionate scientific communicator.”