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Norway: photographs taken of the same places separated by long periods of time
- reustle 11y agoWow, these are really cool. I lived in the farmhouse on the other side of the bridge in #16 2 summers ago. What a beautiful country.
- unsigner 11y agoSome of the pictures show signs of warming (although in one of the text descriptions it's attributed to planting of trees), but there's virtually no sea level rise evident?
- _delirium 11y agoThe global average sea level is only estimated to have risen about 20 cm (8 inches) since 1880, so it wouldn't really be noticeable in a photograph, especially on steep coasts like Norway's. Whether the photograph was taken at high vs. low tide would make a bigger difference in most cases.
- wcameron 11y agoGlobal sea level has risen less than a foot in the past 100 years. Although in environments like this, I would assume isostatic rebound (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound) would play a large role in apparent local sea level changes.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dagw 11y agoThe land level in that part of the world has been rising for the past 100 years, counteracting most changes in sea levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
- kbart 11y agoThe rise of see level can be seen pretty clearly in photo no. 6.
- dvdcxn 11y agoYou can't be sure that isn't just because the tide is higher. The land now covered by water looked like tideland in the older picture as well.
- lars 11y agoIt's almost certainly the tide. I'm familiar with the area around Torghatten. The high tide/low tide difference there can be ~2 meters, more than enough to explain all the variation in sealevel.
- kbart 11y agoAlso, more trees might relate to stricter environmental laws (you can't simply take an axe and chop a random tree nowadays) and more advanced and energy efficient heating sources that use biomass briquettes, electricity and gas instead of tree logs from the nearby thicket.
- evgen 11y agoInteresting. The bit that I found most noticeable in the then/now comparison was that people in the past really did not like trees :) Every bit of human habitation was surrounded by open areas denuded of trees. It actually looked unpleasant and sterile to see the lack of trees near everything man-made. Roads, fields, home...no trees anywhere in the vicinity.
- tormeh 11y agoA lot of the difference in vegetation is due to climate change. I'm Norwegian and born in the beginning of October, which was first snow at the time. Now it never snows in October. You have to wait late November or early December. That sort of thing makes a lot of difference to plants.
- WalterBright 11y ago> Every bit of human habitation was surrounded by open areas denuded of trees. I theorize that is due to the nearby trees all being used for firewood.
- akafred 11y agoLand owners can generally chop down trees as they wish; with some exceptions, which mostly don't apply in these photos. I think there are three main reasons for the increase in woodland: 1. Less cultivated land; including less land used for grazing (eg. by sheep). 2. Other sources of heating (mostly electricity, some oil, and still some wood, but usually not taken from just outside the door; there is very little use of gas in Norway). 3. Milder climate has raised the tree line. Which of these is most significant probably varies.
- Arnt 11y ago
- dogma1138 11y agoLook at the ground that is covered by water it's clearly tidal shore there are patches of water everywhere.
- hellofunk 11y agoInteresting caption to one of the photos regarding how the temperature of the environment has changed: >Axel Lindahl’s picture of Engabreen from 1889 shows the foot of the glacier, where there was only ice, glacial gravel, water and bare mountainsides in a seemingly cold and hostile landscape. Now, more than 120 years later, the valley has become far more fertile. Birch forest, shore meadows, willow thickets and marshland have established themselves, while the glacier arm has retreated far back up the mountainside.
- btiede 11y agoYes, agreed. I found more images that capture the changing climate in action: http://climate.nasa.gov/state_of_flux#Qori-Kalis-930px-80-v2.jpg http://climate.nasa.gov/state_of_flux#Qori-Kalis-930px-80-v2...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- baldfat 11y agoI don't know about the forest being caused by climate as much as just technology. In US in New England we see the exact same thing in old pictures and new pictures.http://serc.carleton.edu/vignettes/collection/24682.html http://serc.carleton.edu/vignettes/collection/24682.html "Imagine a time machine that could take you back 150 years. Open the door and look out at the slopes of Vermont, the Green Mountain State. In 1850, the slopes would be anything but green. Most would be barren, stripped of their trees, and trampled by grazing sheep."
- jofer 11y agoChanges in landscape and colonization by various plants as glaciers retreat is a very, very well-documented process. The vegetation changes in the picture shown are unambiguously due to the retreat of the glacier. Global changes aside, it takes awhile to form soils that will support plant life. Near the foot of a retreating glacier, you'll always have till and moraines. If they've been recently exposed, they'll always be bare. It takes a few decades for forests, etc to get established.
- btiede 11y agoStunning photos! Number 11 is particularly striking because it captures global warming in action!
- crottypeter 11y agoSo does number 2 (although I don't know how big the seasonal variation is?)
- Asbostos 11y agoKeep in mind that this is natural shrinking of glaciers that's been going on for 10,000 years. Nothing to do with the newer AGW.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bnegreve 11y agoIt's interesting to see how churches are fixpoints in most pictures.
- dvdcxn 11y agoThe churches are the only constant whilst the landscape and towns chances around them.
- dogma1138 11y agoPeople rarely tear down a church, churches in many places especially in Nordic countries where often the only "real" building in town as they were initially built by Lutheran missionaries you can see the same thing from very old pictures in Iceland you'll see a village with pretty much only turf(sod) buildings and then a more or less modern (for it's time) church. IIRC the first masonry building in Iceland was a church, won't surprise me if in many of the more remote parts of Norway and Sweden that would be the case, unlike Iceland Norway and Sweden have had at least plenty of timber and didn't had to build houses out of patches of grass...
- arethuza 11y agoA lot of churches in the UK have been converted into houses or business premises.
- moogly 11y agoWhilst you're completely right, it's also worth mentioning that in Norway, quite a few (a dozen? two dozen?) of old wooden stave churches were (tragically) burned down in the 80s and 90s by, amongst others, arsonist members of the black metal scene.
- zobby 11y agoCan we see swedish playmates before/after instead?
- unixhero 11y agoSome of the translations are surely made by a Norwegian. Those are not corn, but wheat bushels. In Norwegian wheat is "korn", and corn is "mais".
- arethuza 11y agoIn UK English "corn" generally means wheat - we'd call "corn" "maize": http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96522/why-does-corn-mean-maize-in-american-english http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96522/why-does-co...
- unixhero 11y agoHmmm. The plot thickens!
- dogma1138 11y agoI don't think it holds true anymore, if you go to any store in the UK now Corn will be well maize, I'm pretty sure the American definition of corn has taken over the common British definition.
- baldfat 11y agoJust like how the British word Soccer took over in America. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/why-we-call-soccer-soccer/372771/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/why...
- HerpDerpLerp 11y agoI still think wheat when I hear corn... except corn on the cob, or sweet corn which are maize.
- Udo 11y agoIt's the same in German, probably all northern-european languages. "Korn" is a generalized term for cereal grain, and I think the best literal translation would indeed be "grain". I suspect it's related to the english "kernel".
- stevoski 11y agoI've been playing Banished a lot lately. In some of these photos, I found myself thinking that they had a well-located forester in a game of Banished.
- jacobwcarlson 11y agoSimilarly, I was struck by how much the older photos reminded me of Skellige in Witcher 3.
- benten10 11y agoIdea for computer-imagery/ML people: a method to realistically recolor old photos by sampling from new photos of the same place, with some caveats (for eg. the object must have a corresponding object, etc)
- biswaroop 11y agoCheck this out: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~zfrenett/CS886-Project.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~zfrenett/CS886-Project.pdf
- benten10 11y agoI remember seeing this/such papers elsewhere. They have appeared in conference/papers for the last few years too. Here I'm suggesting untrained coloring of 'new' images from existing though, so maybe what I'm asking is a simpler problem? "Transferring colors from base (new) image to target (old) image using such and such sampling" would be how I would put my problem. The paper you link to would be more "learning to transfer colors by looking at how grayscale images transfer to color", right? Am I missing something?
- tobr 11y agoFrustrating that the images are almost-but-not-quite aligned, especially in the foreground. I think that makes it look like the towns have changed more than they have. What would it take to get pixel perfect alignment in a big image like this? For starters, you'd have to figure out the exact lens and zoom level, and get to precisely the right spot...
- finnjohnsen2 11y agoI was thinking the same and concluded that creating lenses back then probably involved manual work, and were more hand made in general. So the distortion we're seeing is probably due the higher degree of imperfection in the lens sphere shape of the old lense. But theoretically this could be corrected further using software. If you correct one picture manually, and used the same distortion as a reference for other pictures. Maybe... No idea if there is software like this anywhere.
- lentil_soup 11y ago"If you correct one picture manually, and used the same distortion as a reference for other pictures" All the pictures would need to have been taken with the same old camera, though, which I think is not the case here.
- callesgg 11y agoOnly the camera position is required to get good alignment, lens and zoom level is fixable in photoshop, just crop and scale a bit.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- poslathian 11y agoUnfortunately, it's very hard to identify the exact camera position, since alignment of foreground objects can be matched from different positions at the expense of matching the original perspective. Old cameras had huge imaging plates, with low crop factors, I suspect what happens with a lot of these old/new match-ups is that the photographer is standing far from the original spot to achieve "best possible" alignment with the foreground crop - which of course screws up your perspective. You could align against the background, but then you'll have poor alignment on the foreground. Cleaning up the crop/zoom in photoshop does not help you unless you are shooting from the exact same spot to get the same perspective. http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2014/08/15/debunking-the-myth-that-focal-length-affects-perspective/ http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2014/08/15/debunking-the-m...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- anusburger 11y agoPhotoshopped. Where did the cows go genius?!
- swamp40 11y agoThe rocks are fascinating to me for some reason. Obviously they're not going to change over a mere 120 years, but the fact that you can see and touch the exact same spot as how many other thousands of people across the generations - that's the really interesting thing.
- intrasight 11y agoWhat is most striking is the return of the trees
- ck2 11y agoThis presentation needs that back/forth javascript partition slider that allows you to directly compare old to new.
- unicornporn 11y agoIf you like this, please check out Historypin[1], which is a less known Google backed project to overlay historical photographs with Google's Street View. [1] https://www.historypin.org/en/explore/geo/59.919462,10.745379,13/bounds/59.885244,10.69182,59.953645,10.798937 https://www.historypin.org/en/explore/geo/59.919462,10.74537...
- asw 11y agonice
- 4h53n 11y agoGlobal warming. Global warming is all I see.