The Arctic ocean photographed in the same place, 107 years ago vs today.

philz@lemmy.world to pics@lemmy.world – 1165 points –
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Facebook comments: Well obviously it was taken in the SUMMER 😂🤣😆 Morons global warming is all fear mongering!

Yes Jim. It's very normal that entire glaciers disappear, regularly in fact, every year. You are so smart, much smarter than all of the scientists who are panicking.

Ummm…. There’s people right here on lemmy saying the same dumb shit about summer. Don’t think for a second that lemmy doesn’t host some of the exact same idiots Facebook does.

Good news is that many instances on Lemmy are less tolerant to alt-right trolls and climate deniers. Best to use that report function so your admins, or even better, their admins, can snipe them.

Good idea. Though I generally don’t like to over-use the report function.

I guess depending on the instance it's not necessarily over-using it, as the point is to report content that isn't up to the instance or community's standard. On some instance that includes disinfo, on others it doesn't.

We are all humans, we are all dumb. A smart human isn't one who knows everything, they're one who knows what they don't know and knows who knows that. And, ya know, defers to the people who know about things when they don't.

The only issue that really matters to me is climate change. Or maybe plastic.

But this is the same as the picture of the statue of liberty that is used to "debunk" sea level rise by showing the level at the same height, despite being taken 100 years apart. Were they taken at the same tide? Same time of year? Is there any other factor at play here?

This is a "shoe is on the other foot" moment, and we should be as skeptical of that which supports our beliefs as we are of that which contradicts it. Maybe especially so because confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

Glaciers don't change with a full moon.

And I never said they did.

Were they taken at the same tide? Same time of year? Is there any other factor at play here?
...we should be as skeptical of that which supports our beliefs as we are of that which contradicts it.

Then what exactly are you implying?

Nothing, I explicitly said "we should be as skeptical of that which supports our beliefs as we are of that which contradicts it." I don't know how I could have made it more clear.

What does that have to do with pictures of a glacier obviously melting drastically in a short time?

It doesn't. It's almost like you are wilfully ignorant about thinking critically.

So you have no point at all? I've asked you multiple times what you're talking about and your only response is "nothing".

Are you mental?

You asked me what I was implying, I told you nothing, then pointed to my explicit point.

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Also, the sunlight suggests it's summer in the first photo (or at least not winter).

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Thank goodness they cleared out all that snow and ice so that we can finally see the pretty mountains.

We should put some factories there!

This might be silly but we could replace the ice with trash?

We might have to workshop this, but I feel like there's a good idea in there somewhere

While were at it we should also put a 50 lane highway

Afterwards, 30 chained fast food resturants along with gas stations can be built along it followed by market advertisement campaigns to set up billboards

At least we got some space to build car centric suburbia, eh? /s

More room to pollute! 🥳🥳🥳

It depends what. Plastic recycling is mostly a scam/fraud and does not fix nor change much.

The industry has long known that plastics recycling is not economically or practically viable, the report shows. An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.

In 1989, the founding director of the Vinyl Institute told attendees of a trade conference: “Recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem.”

Despite this knowledge, the Society of the Plastics Industry established the Plastics Recycling Foundation in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign focused on the sector’s commitment to recycling.

In 1988, the trade group rolled out the “chasing arrows” – the widely recognized symbol for recyclable plastic – and began using it on packaging. Experts have long said the symbol is highly misleading, and recently federal regulators have echoed their concerns.

Cited article, and the report's source

Recycling paper, metal and glass will help and make a difference, keeping in mind that we need to use less in the first place. However plastic recycling is broken by default, pretty much everywhere.

Captain Planets definitely going to shoot you. Maybe even turn you into a tree.

Looks like a nice enough spot for a landfill. Get on that, pronto.

A reverse image search revealed to me that there are a hell of a lot of copies of this image around the internet, but I can't seem to find any papers that provide background. I'm going to have to look again later, but if there's any other internet sleuths out there interested in figuring out the origins of these photos with reputable explainers, I would love to know more about this.

I'm always afraid of things like this that seem to confirm my biases without associated information to back it...

I just did reverse image search and found this article from 2002

The Guardian article nailed it, thanks!

It doesn't cite exactly where they got the Greenpeace photo from, but I found it here: https://media.greenpeace.org/archive/Climate-Impact-Documentation-in-Norway--Svalbard-27MZIF4WNED.html

Climate Impact Documentation in Norway, Svalbard Greenpeace documentation showing that glacier "Blomstrandbreen" has retreated nearly 2 km since 1928, with an accelerated rate of 35 metres lost per year since 1960 and even higher in the past decade. In the image, view of climate campaigner Truls Gulowsen on a speed boat going to a mine in Longyearbyen. 

Unique identifier: GP0STSCL6  Shoot date: 03/08/2002  Locations: Norway, Scandinavia, Svalbard Credit line: © Greenpeace / Christian Åslund 

A bit more from the Guardian article:

Greenpeace activists visited the glacier last weekend on the Rainbow Warrior taking pictures from the same locations to highlight the effects of global warming, which the group says is a threat to the future of the planet.

The Blomstrandbreen glacier has retreated by one and a quarter miles since 1928, according to Greenpeace. It was shrinking by 115ft a year in the 1960s, a rate which has risen.

Recent studies carried out by US researchers and reported in Science last month said that 85% of the glaciers they examined had lost vast portions of their mass in the last 40 years.

Keith Echelmayer of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has carried out research into Alaska's ice streams and checked glacier thickness, said: "Most glaciers have thinned several hundred feet at low elevation in the last 40 years and about 60 feet at higher elevations."

yeah but it's much more colorful now. that's good, isn't it?

OP always thinks positive.
But at what point does it become toxic positivity?

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That…. Is fucking tragic. There’s no going back to that. Ever.

Don't worry, the ice will come back, we just won't be around to see it.

For that to happen the carbon would need to be buried in the ground again, however

And it's possible that humanity has emitted so much and warmed the globe so much that we shift the global climate stability point to something else than was before. It's possible the new equilibrium over millions of year will be a warmer earth

Or an Earth with Harsher winters and Massive Winterstorms followed by Scorching HeatWaves. Only cockaroaches will survive.

Unless you are evolving into roaches, no human being will survive the Earth's mighty global climate swings.

I myself asked "What time of year was the lower photograph taken?" Then I realized I was being dumb, because if either photo was taken in winter time, we would see at least some ice in the water, if not a very large ice sheet.

Well that's fuckin depressing

Mother Nature: Dont worry humans, everything will be fine, life will go on. Your fucking this up for your self, and you wont be missed

Notice the first guy is in a wooden boat and the second guy is in a boat most likely made out of some plastic-based fibers. 🤔

The plastic isn't really a huge driver of climate change, the problems it causes are different.

For the climate change comparison, notice that the old boat has oars, but the new boat has a gas engine

The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It's impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.

The old boat also has a motor, note how it's still moving in the photo while the only person in it is in the back holding a tiller (and appears to be facing forwards).

the old boat has oars

Which no-one is using. It's the first thing I noticed. There's a man sitting in the stern with a tiller and rudder, but there's no visible means of propulsion, no other crew. Weird.

Edit: I zoomed in, and it's possible there is someone else in the boat, hard to see.

air is probably cleaner now than it was then

Elaborate?

go read a historybook on the industrial revolution

That would make the air.. less clean now?

Edit: looks like PM2.5 and PM10 levels were 10-100x more around a hundred years ago. Seems like air quality is in fact better now.

ah to have seen the raw undisturbed beauty earth once had....

I'm always disappointed when someone takes the time to try to reproduce an old photo but they miss by not having everything identical (wooden boat).

Then I'm more disappointed because that motorized boat is part of the problem that caused this tragedy.

IDK, maybe that was the point

I mean anyone is free to try their hand at reproducing it better, I'm sure the spot hasn't changed that much since the modern one here was taken, and if it has, well it'll just make the comparison that much more dramatic.

The motorized boat is an accurate representation of how things are today.

What time of year in each photo?

Are you suggesting that Antarctica typically thaws out in the summer?

Is this Antarctica or the Arctic? The title said the Arctic, but you said Antarctica and the mountains do remind me more of the south than the north.

Mountains of ice melt in the summer then the water refalls in the fall and winter as snow and freezing rain in truly apocalyptic amounts. Rebuilding the ice mountains to start the process over.

Can't tell if a joke or if user doesn't understand how glaciers work.

He doesn't understand glaciers.

Glaciers are made from snow piling up over centuries.

Some of it melts each winter, but over time, the glacier should stay about the same.

If this glacier is melted, that means it's been more melting than building back up for the last century. It's a sign of global warming.

Given that the sun is up at roughly the same amount, and at the poles the sun remains consistently up or down according to the season, I think we can rightly assume these two photos are taken at least approximately at similar times of the year.

Also, are you trying to insinuate that 100+ foot tall glaciers are somehow "seasonal?" Because they aren't.

Glaciers actually do retreat and advance seasonally or on even longer cycles. Some have terminuses that move back and forth literal miles. One of the key indicators of climate change is the fact that globally, glaciers are retreating more than they're advancing on average.

"I must try to look smart by saying lots of things but being one hundred percent wrong about the topic at hand"

Question. How fast do you think glaciers reach that height?

I'm not your thread's OP but I want to know the same question (what were the seasons) because no, I don't know how fast glaciers reach that height either. Nothing about that implies denial of the validity, it's a question to help quantify the change. Varying 10ft between seasons means this is a massive change regardless of season. Varying 100ft, not so much. No, I don't beleive it'd actually be 100fr of change in 6 months, but I could see it being more than 10ft.

Are you trolling? The seasonal variation in arctic glaciers is negligible.

No the question isn't time of year but of time of day.

See it was mid morning so the glaciers all left for tea.