Iceland’s glacier losses mapped by 3D drone imagery
Dr Kieran Baxter is combining archive aerial photography with new drone imagery to measure the impact of climate change on Iceland’s glaciers. Nicole Kobie reveals what he’s found
The drone whirrs high above the blue ice that’s melting into frigid water, taking high-resolution images of some of Iceland’s most famous glaciers. But this glorious aerial photography isn’t for a tourist brochure: it’s an effort by a British research team to track the impact of climate change on the massive slices of ice using a combination of archive photography, drones and 3D modelling techniques.
Dr Kieran Baxter, a researcher from the 3DVisLab at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee, has been travelling to Iceland since he was a child on family holidays. “I have this connection from those visits, so there’s a kind of emotional element to watching these landscapes I have developed a fondness for disappear,” he said.
Now, he’s returning for work – and it’s a sad business. The country even held a funeral for the Okjökull glacier, in the hopes of spurring action about climate change.
And that’s the idea behind Baxter’s drone photography. For example, the Vatnajökull ice cap where the project is centred is a behemoth covering more than 7,700 square kilometres; it’s lost 20m in height in 30 years, the organisation says. At its edge, the ice has retreated by as much as 150m, with losses in the tens and hundreds of metres every year, reducing its total size by 400 square kilometres in the past 20 years. That’s hard to picture so Baxter uses a new technique to re-angle decades-old mapping imagery and pair it with modern drone photographs, letting us see the extent of the damage. “We’re producing these images to illustrate those measurements which are being done by other scientists,” Baxter said.
To do so, he’s making use of his background in photography and animation to highlight the ice loss in a dramatic and artistic fashion, hoping
to inspire action. “We’ve started looking at the ways and methods of doing aerial photography, to try to take in the scale of the changes that are difficult to see from the ground, to track the changes over time that are difficult to see over a day-to-day basis,” he said. For the project, Baxter worked with the University of Iceland as well as the Icelandic Meteorological Office, which not only forecasts the weather but also studies and manages the country’s collection of glaciers and volcanoes.
High-flying art
Flying high-altitude drones over melting glaciers to make 3D photos to add to the evidence base for climate change may sound cutting edge, but the drone itself is a standard piece of kit, said Baxter. Building 3D images from drone photography has also been done before. “The bit that’s novel is an adaptation of an existing process that is rematching that drone footage with historical imagery,” he explained. Glaciologists have long used archival photos to build 3D models to act as control data to measure the change in ice. Here, the project is adding a technique called “match moving”, which aligns those images with modern-day footage.
Baxter has done a previous project in the Alps, comparing Mont Blanc’s
“The bit that’s novel is an adaptation of an existing process that is rematching drone footage with historical imagery”
ice 100 years ago to now, but that region has plenty of older overhead photographs from aircraft. That’s not true in Iceland. “But we have some really good survey data,” he said. “Those are mapping photographs for programmes that started in the 1940s, but we’ve been using the sets of images from the 1980s in particular.” Those photos were taken from a plane flying overhead with a specialist camera embedded in its base, snapping highresolution images looking straight down on the landscape. As some of the images overlap, they can be used for 3D modelling.
That lets the team find whatever angle it needs to match up with modern images. “We can almost pose new photographs of the 1980s landscape,” he said.
Emotional plea
The 1980s was chosen because of the wealth of imagery from those decades. “But it’s also a really interesting period of time, because it’s when we start to see an acceleration in melt due to climate change – and it’s within living memory for many people,” said Baxter. “It’s very poignant.”
And that’s the purpose of the project. While the images help track the damage done to the glaciers, they also have the power to stir a response – or that’s what Baxter hopes, at least. “The aesthetic of the landscape and what the landscape is like to visit has completely changed,” he said. “In this project in particular, we want to show that side of it.”
The alarming differences in the images has even caught the attention of locals, who have been on hand to see the changes day by day. “It’s particularly interesting for us to see the reaction from local people who know very well the changes,” Baxter explained. “I’m at a conference [in Iceland] at the moment, and speaking to local people and showing them these images, we get an emotional reaction.”
In the future, Baxter and the rest of the project’s team members will be making a video version of the images, in the hopes that animating the 3D models will help visualise the impact of climate change. “The most important stories in the world right now are these landscapes that are being affected by climate change,” said Baxter.
“It’s particularly interesting for us to see the reaction from local people who know very well the changes”