{"id":1361,"date":"2026-06-03T18:58:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T18:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/?p=1361"},"modified":"2026-06-03T19:01:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T19:01:48","slug":"seeing-climate-change-through-time-why-historical-archives-matter-for-polar-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/seeing-climate-change-through-time-why-historical-archives-matter-for-polar-literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Climate Change Through Time: Why Historical Archives Matter for Polar Literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By J\u00fcrgen Merz<\/em><\/p>\n

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Climate change is often described through numbers: degrees of warming, centimeters of sea-level rise, gigatons of ice lost. While these metrics are essential, they are rarely what moves people emotionally or changes how they understand environmental transformation. For that, we need stories\u2014and just as importantly, we need images. Historical photographic archives provide one of the most powerful tools we have to build what is increasingly referred to as polar literacy: a broader public awareness of how cold-region landscapes are changing, why those changes matter, and how they are connected to everyday life far beyond the Arctic or Antarctic.<\/p>\n

One striking example comes not from the polar regions themselves, but from the European Alps. Around 1895, the Wehrli brothers\u2014Harry, Bruno, and Artur\u2014established one of Switzerland\u2019s pioneering postcard publishing companies. Motivated by the growing tourism industry, they produced thousands of landscape photographs across Switzerland and Europe. Among their most valuable contributions are detailed images of Alpine glaciers taken at the turn of the twentieth century, captured using large-format glass plate negatives under physically demanding conditions.<\/p>\n

These photographs, now preserved in the Swiss National Library and available under public domain, document glaciers at a time when their extent was far greater than today. What makes them particularly compelling is not only their age, but their technical quality: the level of detail allows viewers to read the landscape closely, from crevasse structures to vegetation lines and even people standing on the ice. They offer a frozen moment in environmental history\u2014one that can be directly compared with the present.<\/p>\n

This is where contemporary photographic work builds a bridge across time. Photographer J\u00fcrgen Merz has spent recent years revisiting the exact locations from which the Wehrli brothers took their images. Using historical maps, Alpine club records, and on-site exploration\u2014sometimes assisted by drones where the original terrain has vanished\u2014he recreates the original perspectives as precisely as possible. The result is a series of comparative images showing glaciers such as the Rhone, Aletsch, Morteratsch, and Eiger glaciers, then and now.<\/p>\n

The visual impact of these comparisons is immediate and unsettling. In many cases, vast ice fields have shrunk to thin remnants or disappeared entirely. Former glacier surfaces are now rocky slopes, lakes, or areas overgrown by vegetation. In some locations, the very place where the historical photographer once stood no longer exists\u2014the ice beneath their feet has melted away. No graph or abstract model can convey this transformation as directly as these side-by-side images.<\/p>\n

Although these photographs depict Alpine rather than Arctic landscapes, their relevance for polar literacy is profound. The physical processes driving glacier retreat\u2014rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, feedback mechanisms involving ice and albedo\u2014are shared across mountain glaciers and polar ice masses alike. For many audiences, the Alps feel more familiar and tangible than the Arctic. Seeing dramatic change in a known or visited landscape can serve as a gateway to understanding similar, often larger-scale transformations happening in Greenland, Svalbard, or Antarctica.<\/p>\n

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Historical archives play a crucial role here because they anchor climate change in lived human experience. The Wehrli images were not created as scientific data; they were cultural artifacts, produced for travelers and tourists. Today, repurposed through careful archival work and contemporary photography, they become tools of climate communication. They remind us that environmental change is not abstract or hypothetical\u2014it unfolds across generations, reshaping landscapes within a human lifetime.<\/p>\n

For researchers and communicators working on polar issues, this offers an important lesson. Polar literacy is not only about conveying information from the poles outward; it is also about building conceptual connections. When people understand that the disappearance of Alpine glaciers is linked to the same global processes threatening Arctic sea ice or Antarctic ice shelves, climate change becomes harder to dismiss as distant or irrelevant.<\/p>\n

In this sense, historical photographic archives are more than repositories of the past. They are instruments for the present and future\u2014helping societies see change, reflect on responsibility, and imagine alternative trajectories. By pairing archival images with contemporary perspectives, we can create powerful narratives that foster awareness, concern, and ultimately, engagement with climate change across regions and scales.<\/p>\n

\n

J\u00fcrgen Merz is a glacier photographer who approaches ice from a wide variety of perspectives. In addition to historical comparative photos, his portfolio includes classic landscape shots, glacier caves and abstract patterns and shapes. Re-shooting glacier photographs from the Wehrli archive is one of his ongoing projects.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\u200b<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Follow him on www.abstract-landscape.com<\/a> or Instagram (@glacionaut).<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By J\u00fcrgen Merz   Climate change is often described through numbers: degrees of warming, centimeters of sea-level rise, gigatons of ice lost. While these metrics are essential, they are rarely […]","protected":false},"author":1639,"featured_media":1363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[301,55,300,302,228,167],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-field","tag-archive","tag-climate-change","tag-history","tag-literacy","tag-photography","tag-polar-literacy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paHdq5-lX","meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/568\/2026\/03\/Screenshot-2026-03-21-at-09.09.14.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1639"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1375,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions\/1375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}