Seeing Climate Change Through Time

Seeing Climate Change Through Time: Why Historical Archives Matter for Polar Literacy

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—and 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.

One striking example comes not from the polar regions themselves, but from the European Alps. Around 1895, the Wehrli brothers—Harry, Bruno, and Artur—established one of Switzerland’s 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.

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—one that can be directly compared with the present.

This is where contemporary photographic work builds a bridge across time. Photographer Jürgen 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—sometimes assisted by drones where the original terrain has vanished—he 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.

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—the ice beneath their feet has melted away. No graph or abstract model can convey this transformation as directly as these side-by-side images.

Although these photographs depict Alpine rather than Arctic landscapes, their relevance for polar literacy is profound. The physical processes driving glacier retreat—rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, feedback mechanisms involving ice and albedo—are 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.

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—it unfolds across generations, reshaping landscapes within a human lifetime.

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.

In this sense, historical photographic archives are more than repositories of the past. They are instruments for the present and future—helping 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.

Jürgen 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.

Follow him on www.abstract-landscape.com or Instagram (@glacionaut).

21 March 2026