Historic photographs of glaciers and glacial landforms from the Ralph Stockman Tarr collection at Cornell University

• Published in: Earth System Science Data
• Main Authors: J. Elliott, M. E. Pritchard
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
• Subjects: info; geo; Greenland; glacier; glaciers; Alaska
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-771-2020; https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/12/771/2020/essd-12-771-2020.pdf; https://doaj.org/article/8b2ad722bd9244528e769792267f5743

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.