CNN —
During Laura Larocca’s 2019 visit to Denmark, the climate scientist unearthed old aerial photographs of Greenland’s icy coastline, which were discovered in a castle outside Copenhagen approximately 15 years ago.
Now archived in the Danish National Archives, these historical images led Larocca and her team to reconstruct Greenland’s glacial history amidst a rapidly warming climate.
Through the digitization of thousands of archived paper images from the 1930s, Larocca’s team combined them with current satellite images of Greenland to assess the extent of change in its frozen landscape.
The comparison revealed an alarming rate of retreat in Greenland’s glaciers, which has intensified over the last two decades. Their study, recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change, indicates that the rate of glacial retreat in the 21st century is twice as fast as that in the 20th century.
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According to Larocca, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Arizona State University School of Ocean Futures, the effort was “very time consuming” and involved a substantial amount of manual labor. She remarked that the rapid changes underscore the accelerated warming and transformation of the Arctic.
Research in 2022 indicated that the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world. The consequences of this warming are becoming increasingly evident, with unprecedented occurrences such as rain at the summit of Greenland and destabilization of its massive glaciers.
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Larocca was struck by the fact that the Danish pilots who took the original photos never anticipated their significant contribution to climate science nearly a century later.
She found it fascinating that many of the photos were taken during military operations, demonstrating their links to international and US history. It’s remarkable how these century-old photos are now being used for scientific purposes to document the changes in Greenland’s glaciers over time.
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Larocca hopes that this visually-driven study will bring attention to the accelerated melting of Greenland’s glaciers and the resulting threat to the world’s coastlines as sea levels rise.
She emphasized that every small increase in temperature will have substantial consequences for these glaciers, stressing the importance of taking swift action to limit global temperature rise and reduce future loss and sea level contribution from the melting glaciers.
