By: By Terrell Johnson
Published: November 29,2013
Photographing Alaska's stunning landscapes has been a passion of
Bruce Molnia's since the first time he visited the 49th state, as a
Cornell University graduate student in the late 1960s.
While
studying for his Ph.D. in geology – which would later lead him to a
storied career with the U.S. Geological Survey in coastal, glacial, and
ocean research – he came across the photos taken by the earliest
American explorers of Alaska back in the early 1880s.
It was these
photos – taken by everyone from John Muir in 1879 to later explorers
like William Field and National Geographic's Bradford Washburn – that
Molnia would use when he was asked in 1999 by then-Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbit to find "unequivocal, unambiguous" proof that climate
change was real.
Since his first visit in 1969, Molnia has returned to Alaska
"probably 300 times," he says. On nearly every visit, he has made
expeditions of his own to recreate the photos taken by Muir and others,
from their exact same vantage points.
Molnia spoke with
weather.com about the work he's done over the last 14 years, and what it
means to our understanding of how Earth's climate is changing today.
The stories and thoughts below were captured during our conversation
with him:
I started out with wow, look how the glaciers are changing. But
it became pretty clear after the first or second year of doing this,
that it wasn’t only the glaciers you could document changing. To me, the
most remarkable thing was how quickly ecosystems became established in
areas where the early photograph shows nothing but bare bedrock.
This
all began in September 2000, when I spent a week with a team of four
people in Prince William Sound. We visited about 15 locations where I
had found historical photos from the early decades of the 20th century.
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This was before we had Google Earth to help us.
Some of [the photos] I knew were going to be impossible to attempt to
duplicate because of the locations, and others because when I had been
in those general areas, the vegetation was so dense that I knew you
would never be able to see from that original photo point.
But
many of them were [taken] standing on the shoreline, or from the top of a
ridge. So that was my premise: Finding sites where there was a good
enough image that you cold then look at a map and figure out which peak
on the map was which peak on the photo, and where the photo might have
been taken from.
That was what prompted me to think, I have enough historical images that I could do this.
To me, understanding the obvious – the photographic pairs – was the
best mechanism to present irrefutable, non-judgmental, unambiguous,
unequivocal visual documentation that climate change was both real and
underway.
There are so many late 19th-century photos because of John Muir. Once
he publicized it, steamers started making their way up to coastal
Alaska. This corresponded to a time when Eastman-Kodak was making
available handheld cameras that people could take with them that were
pre-loaded with up to 100 exposures.
In the photo pairs, the landscape goes from black and white, to blue and green.
I have a photo that was taken in 1941 of the Muir Glacier. We went back
in 2004 and the vegetation was so dense I couldn’t get my field
assistants out onto this bedrock ridge that is in the foreground of this
picture.
In the photographer's notes for the photo, he said you
go to this particular creek, you walk up the creek, you walk up this
rise ... and you’ll be there in 15 minutes. We went to the creek, and
the alder was so dense that you were literally pushing each branch out
of the way and stepping over them to be able just to go up in the stream
bed.
It took us almost six hours to get from where we started,
which was probably a distance of less than two miles. Because the
vegetation was so dense, you couldn’t even see the sky.
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To understand climate change, we have to look at what climate’s done for the last 1,000 years. Beginning
about 900 years ago, we experienced a global cooling event that
triggered the Little Ice Age. In Alaska, glaciers expanded dramatically,
and many glaciers filled fjords.
At the peak of the Little Ice
Age, there were probably 200 ice-calving [glaciers] in Alaska. Since
then, we have seen more than 99 percent of the more than 2,000 glaciers
in Alaska begin to actively retreat, and continue to retreat up to the
present. We’ve gone from over 200 tidewater-calving glaciers to less
than 50.
About a dozen years ago, someone caught a marlin off the coast of southeastern Alaska.
How could that be? The fishermen tell me that in Prince William Sound,
for years now, they have seen a major influx of sand sharks and other
species that were not native and are out-competing the fishermen for
bottom fish, like halibut - and for crab. And so the ecosystem is
rapidly changing.
The simplicity of the photos is so striking.
My basic premise is, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, what’s a
pair of photos showing dramatic change worth? And that clearly is the
message I’m trying to convey.
