La Revista Digital 1 Versión Final Revista No. 2 - Prueva | Page 34

A. Byers
Blanca and its glaciers since my work in the 1990s,
now allows for a more focused, qualitative examination
of changes in glacier cover since the 1930s. These are
presented in the following photo essay as an addendum
to my previous work, in the interests of making available
these older photographs and their more recent replications
to future generations of high mountain social and physical
scientists.
seconds. Replicating a photograph during the same season,
time of day, and weather conditions can also enhance the
resultant photo comparisons. Finding the exact location of a
photopoint, however, is sometimes not possible in the high
mountain environment because of a range of contemporary
impacts of climate change, such as the formation of lakes
that did not exist 60 years ago (e.g., see Figures 6 and 7),
and/or natural hazards such as avalanches and landslides
that have occurred in the interim, obscuring or destroying
the original photopoint (Byers, forthcoming).
The Photographs
For the present paper, I used the 1932-1939 Schneider
and Kinzl photographs and replicates that I made in 1997,
1998, and 2009 to develop an expanded repeat photography
essay with a specific focus on the receding glaciers of the
Cordillera Blanca. Brief descriptions of the old and newer
photographs, and the changes that they illustrate, are
contained in the captions of each photo pair below.
Yanapacha (Figuras 2-5)
Figure 1. The 1932 German-Austrian Mountaineering and
Cartographic Expedition to the Cordillera Blanca. Standing
(left to right): Erwin Hein, Wilhelm Bernard, Bernard Lukas,
Hermann Hoerlin and Erwin Schneider; seated (left to right):
Philipp Borchers and Hans Kinzl. Photo: Historisches Archiv,
Innsbruck.
Methods
In 1997, I traveled to the Österreichischer Alpenverein
in Innsbruck, Austria, which is one of several archives in
Europe containing the glass plate negatives of the Himalayas,
Andes, and/or other mountain ranges taken by the Austrian
alpinist and cartographer Erwin Schneider (1906-1987) (M.
Achrainer, pers. comm. 2016; H. Schneider, pers. comm.
2016). In 1998, I sent the late alpinist and geographer
Adam Kolff, an American volunteer with the Instituto de
Montaña in Huaraz, Peru, back to Innsbruck to continue
the search. Together we collected dozens of Schneider’s
1932, 1936, and 1939 photogrammetric photographs
of the Cordillera Blanca used to produce the beautiful
Cordillera Blanca Alpenvereinskarte maps (Kostka, 1993),
and hand-held Leica photographs of expedition leader and
geographer Hans Kinzl. Thus began the task of relocating
the mountains, glaciers, villages, fields, and forests shown
in the older photographs, producing the replicates, and
interpreting and documenting the changes observed
(Byers, 1999, 2000).
Ideally, photo replicates are taken from the original
photopoint, which can often be located through the creative
use of expedition journals, old maps, interviews with local
people, one’s own familiarity with the landscape, and the
guidance of national experts (Byers, 1987, 1999, 2008).
The late Alcides Ames, for example, could look at any
of the Schneider or Kinzl photographs that Adam and
I showed him and identify their precise location within
32
Figure 2. Yanapacha (5469 m) ice cover in 1939. The
photopoint is located just off the trail to the Pisco refugio and
basecamp. Photo: E. Schneider.
Figure 3. Yanapacha ice cover in 1998. At the time, I was more
interested in landscape change than in glaciers, particularly
in the Polylepis forest in the lower left of the photograph. I
concluded that the forest had survived through the years
only because it was located on top of a huge, ancient rock
avalanche that was inaccessible to cattle, which otherwise
would have consumed all of the seedlings. Photo: A. Byers.
Revista de Glaciares y Ecosistemas de Montaña 2 (2017): 31-40