Abstract
Abstract. Historic photographs are useful for documenting glacier, environmental, and landscape change, and we have digitized a collection of about 1949 images collected during an 1896 expedition to Greenland and trips to Alaska in 1905, 1906, 1909, and 1911, led by Ralph Stockman Tarr and his students at Cornell University. These images are openly available in the public domain through Cornell University Library (http://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/tarr, last access: 15 March 2020; Tarr and Cornell University Library, 2014, https://doi.org/10.7298/X4M61H5R). The primary research targets of these expeditions were glaciers (there are about 990 photographs of at least 58 named glaciers), but there are also photographs of people, villages, and geomorphological features, including glacial features in the formally glaciated regions of New York state. Some of the glaciers featured in the photographs have retreated significantly in the last century or even completely vanished. The images document terminus positions and ice elevations for many of the glaciers and some glaciers have photographs from multiple viewpoints that may be suitable for ice volume estimation through photogrammetric methods. While some of these photographs have been used in publications in the early 20th century, most of the images are only now widely available for the first time. The digitized collection also includes about 300 lantern slides made from the expedition photographs and other related images and used in classes and public presentations for decades. The archive is searchable by a variety of terms including title, landform type, glacier name, location, and date. The images are of scientific interest for understanding glacier and ecological change; of public policy interest for documenting climate change; of historic and anthropological interest as local people, settlements, and gold-rush era paraphernalia are featured in the images; and of technological interest as the photographic techniques used were cutting edge for their time.
Highlights
In recent decades, glacier retreat has become symbolic of climate change, but the relationship between climate and glacier response is complex
Historic photographs have been used in applications as diverse as studies of human history in Glacier
Jay Haynes, a professional photographer who visited Alaska, Yellowstone, and other parts of the American West; Henry Fielding Reid, a professor at Johns Hopkins who performed pioneering studies of glacier dynamics in southeast Alaska in addition to groundbreaking work on how faults related to earthquakes; and Israel Russell, a U.S Geological Survey (USGS) scientist who exwww.earth-syst-sci-data.net/12/771/2020/
Summary
Glacier retreat has become symbolic of climate change, but the relationship between climate and glacier response is complex. We describe a newly digitized collection of photographs from a series of expeditions undertaken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to study glaciers and other geographical features in Greenland and Alaska led by Professor Ralph Stockman Tarr and his students from Cornell University. One goal of the expeditions to Alaska was to document changes caused by a series of earthquakes in the area (e.g., Tarr, 1909; Martin, 1910; Tarr and Martin, 1912a) that caused significant, abrupt uplift and subsidence (Fig. 5) These observations have been used in modern tectonic studies (Plafker and Thatcher, 2008) and can be useful in separating instantaneous tectonic motion from the effects of glacial isostatic adjustment that have accumulated over the past century. We describe the purposes and context of the expeditions, the types of photographs and the subjects, and how they were digitized
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
