Photographs of the Swiss Matterhorn (taken in 1960, left, and in
2005) show the shrinkage of its glacial ice. Both photos taken
after major snowstorms.
(All Photos: Left, © Bradford Washburn; Right, © David Arnold;
via LA Times online, December 13, 2009)
During the 1930's, photography as both art and documentation was a branch of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA). Most of America's major photographers -- Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White; Edward Weston; Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange; Ben Shahn -- were employed making records of life in America.
Artists like Adams were drawn to vistas of the natural world. Along with the more well-known photographers came others whose names were never known outside a limited number of federal bureaucracies needing specialized work performed, specific industries, or a circle of people who had .
Henry Bradford Washburn was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 50's. He made first ascents of, and added climbing routes to, many major Alaskan peaks -- often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, herself a pioneer among American mountaineers. Bradford established the Boston Museum of Science in 1939, served as its Director until 1980 and then as its Director Emeritus until his death in 2007.
The Washburns also pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning their mountaineering expeditions. Bradford was also a cartographer, and he used the black-and-white photos (primarily of Alaskan peaks and glaciers) he'd taken took as references for maps of the Alaskan wilderness that are still standard references. The photographs themselves are standards for detail and artistry.
I tend to have sharp words for what I see as a class of persons useless and empty of anything except hereditary wealth and the dull-witted avarice which accompanies it. But, on rare occasion they produce individuals with passion and intelligence for something greater than the world they were born into (in fact, often antithetical to it); people who spend their lives adding to, rather than subtracting from, the sum of human knowledge. Both Washburn and his wife, fortunately, were such people.
Washburn was born into privilege in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his family was modestly wealthy by the standards of his class, and he attended the usual route of private-academy-to-Ivy-League-School, taking an undergraduate degree at Harvard in the middle of the Great Depression.
Washburn in the 1940's (American Mountaineering Museum)
He could have done little of consequence with his life beyond helping to tend his family's fortune for later generations, or tossing money at a charity as a way of "giving back" -- but Washburn had spent years learning to climb mountains and had fallen in love with the Wild spaces; they were nothing like a sedate Cambridge or the quiet exclusivity of Porcellian at Harvard. Washburn was determined to document the geographic magnificence he experienced first-hand, as the great naturalists of the 19th century had. His tools were the camera, a set of Dietzgen mapmaking compasses and pens, and his own eyes.
Henry and Barbara Washburn atop a peak in Alaska, 1940's
Fortunately, he found someone who wanted to share the trek and climb alongside him. And in 1939, when the world was poised to fall into another World War, Henry and Barbara Washburn put their money where their hearts were by being the primary drivers behind an expansion of (and founding, in a way) the Boston Museum of Science.
Although the Guyot glacier in Alaska may look larger in the 2006
photo [at right], most of the white in the image is fog. Ice has
receded over 14 miles since that pictured in the 1938 photo at left.
David Arnold is a photographer with the Boston Globe, who had grown up looking at exhibitions of Washburn's aerial photos. "Five years ago I purchased a photograph by the late Bradford Washburn", Arnold told the Los Angeles Times. "Driving home and sneaking peeks of my new picture ... I started wondering: If global warming is real, what does that icy scene look like now?"
Over the past several years, Arnold has flown over the same remote sites captured by Washburn, taking nearly-identical pictures. He reported, "The news is not good," and organized an exhibition of the side-by-side photographs.
As the photos show, the ice world is melting fast. This includes the ice stored in the planet's largest water tower, the Himalayan mountain range, which annually sends drinking water down seven major rivers to hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indian citizens. In another 20 or so years, they are likely to start getting thirsty; the well-armed governments for another 7 billion people will be getting snippy about their water; and I won't be able to buy flood insurance for my home on the Boston waterfront.
When Washburn photographed the Shoup glacier near Valdez,
Alaska in 1938 [left], it extended six miles beyond the right
edge of the picture. Arnold’s photo at right is from 2007.
About the arguments made that predictions of the effects of global warming are the result of "bad science", and it can't be proven to exist, Arnold is blunt: "I look at it this way: I'm told I have a malignant brain tumor and it's growing -- and out of one hundred doctors, ninety-eight say that if it is not removed, I will die. Two well-credentialed doctors say there is no research that can prove the tumor will continue to grow, and say to sit tight, do nothing.
"I'm going with the surgery," Arnold concludes. "And the flood insurance."
This is an additional, if unanticipated, benefit to Henry and Barbara Washburn's legacy: Documentary evidence of climatic change; a comparison between then, and now, in a detailed graphic format. If he hadn't had the passion and commitment to goals he had seen and set for himself, we would not have it now.
To create a comparative record of changes to glacial and mountain ice fields may have been possible to reconstruct through anecdotal observation and occasional photos of others -- but not with the detail Washburn provided. And at this point in our species' history, we need all the data we can get.
You can see Arnold's full exhibit online at doublexposure.net, created through the Washburn's legacy, the Boston Museum of Science.
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