In the heart of Utah’s Uinta Mountains, a team of scientists is re-creating historical pictures to study how much, and how quickly, ecosystems are changing.
By Kim Beil
Kim Beil, an art historian who teaches at Stanford University, hiked for four days through rain, sleet, hail and snow to report this story. (She sawed her pencil in half to save a little weight.)
March 5, 2025
For 30 miles we bounce along a dirt road in southwestern Wyoming, heading toward a jagged skyline. It’s early September and the aspens are starting to turn yellow. As we climb toward the mountains, the air grows colder. Soon the road will see snowfall.
Jeff Munroe, a professor of geology at Middlebury College in Vermont, is taking us back in time. Our small group of scientists and adventurers will be backpacking into the Uinta Mountains to recreate a series of photographs made in 1870 by William Henry Jackson, a photographer who worked for the United States Geological Survey under the direction of the geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. Jackson and Hayden documented the landscape and natural resources of the Wyoming Territory in support of U.S. expansion. We’re going to see exactly how the environment has changed.
Re-photography — capturing the same scene from the same location after a span of time — enables scientists to track long-term changes such as alpine tree-line rise, shoreline erosion and glacial retreat, which are difficult to study otherwise. The technique can be more challenging than it sounds. Finding the general location is the first hurdle, as place names change over time and descriptions are separated from historical images. Next, researchers must identify the precise coordinates of the original tripod placement, which can be especially vexing in landscapes prone to rockslides or erosion. Subtle variations in photographic equipment can also make it hard to create matching images as cameras, films and lens sizes change.
150 Years of Change: How Old Photos, Recaptured, Reveal a Shifting Climate
Greg