Representative image of a glacier. (Image Credits: Pexels).
An extensive collection of 1.5 million images in time-lapse chronicling 15 years of global glacier retreat has been officially preserved and archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) . James Balog, an environmental photographer and mountaineer, founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) in 2007. The transfer then happened by hand in a parking lot, where Scott was handed a military ammunition box containing Balog’s hard drive of 1.5 million images from the EIS project. Once the drive arrived, a dedicated team spent 60 hours downloading, reconciling and organizing the images, including removing more than 200,000 duplicate files.
Because balog’s team lacked the bandwidth to push 1.5 million images to NSIDC’s servers and directories were too large; what they needed was funds, however, transferring the data proved difficult from the start.
Reflecting on the data transfer, Balog said he wanted to show future generations that some people were paying attention. The project aimed to capture the physical impacts of climate change in real-time across the world’s most remote frozen environments. The massive repository was transferred via a physical hard drive to the NSIDC server systems at the University of Colorado Boulder. Now the project is a public domain research resource for glaciologists and climate scientists worldwide. Donna Scott, programs and projects lead, secured endorsements from the science team, and director Mark Serreze and Jennifer Kay, a CIRES associate director, stepped up to contribute funding.
After hearing from others about weather changes, he discerned that the real story was to be found in the ice. With his background in earth science and master’s degree in geomorphology from the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), he felt equipped to track changes in the cryosphere. Balog drew inspiration from photojournalists Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith, who exposed societal crises, and hoped to bring the same focus to the natural world.
Balog’s massive visual census is an expansion of his earlier works, documenting deforestation and endangered wildlife during his global travels.
