This article was taken from the June 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Skirting the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the gateway to one of the most remote places on Earth: the Rwenzori Mountains.
Rarely visited or known outside moutaineering circles, the Rwenzoris' 1,000km2 of Unesco-listed national park contains six peaks above 4,600m, including Africa's fourth highest, Mount Stanley. The range is home to a wealth of fauna -- 177 species of birds alone can be found there.
For 500,000 years, the upper altitudes of these peaks were covered in a thick layer of ice -- glaciers that lie only 43km from the Equator. Now less than 1km2 of ice remains and some geographers estimate that there will be no ice left within a decade. This ecological deadline has spurred Danish photographer Klaus Thymann to form Project Pressure, a nonprofit collaboration of photographers, scientists, web developers and cartographers around the world who are working to create a record of ice on every continent.
Part digital archive, part atlas, part touring exhibition, part "mass-engagement tool" (think Google Earth for glaciers), Project Pressure is Thymann's vision for providing scientists with a permanent record of today's glaciers. "You could say, 'Why not just get some satellite images?'" Thymann says. "But I think it's very important to have an artistic impression of what the world looked like before these glaciers are gone forever. And thwireat's where the Rwenzoris fit in. It has been incredibly difficult to find out what's left and what's not. Even satellite images are scarce."
Detailed maps are hard to come by and glaciers are often so remote that data that's been collected in the past is outdated. This means that Thymann isn't just documenting -- he's discovering. Armed with a pair of Hasselblad 501cc manual film cameras, two GPS units, a compass, two Canon 5Ds as well as tripods, lenses, protein bars and water-purification tablets, Thymann has aimed to marry art and science to record a natural phenomenon in terminal decline.
Project Pressure has existed in beta since 2008 and the platform will launch fully in 2013 with geolocated photography of glaciers in 25 places, including Iceland, the US, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Ecuador, Greenland, Alaska, Norway and Uganda. Users will be able to access the organisation's Mass Engagement & Listing Technology platform from anywhere and capture a picture of a glacier that will automatically store time, location and compass direction as metadata. That photograph will end up on a virtual map along with other images of the same place.
All content will be open source, with high-resolution imagery free to scientists and educators.
To give his images context, Thymann approached London agency We Are What We Do, a non-profit that promotes social and environmental issues by encouraging behavioural change. The team had developed Historypin, an open-source online archive of tagged photos that brings to life how places have changed over time.
During his research, Thymann made some startling discoveries: in the Rwenzoris he wanted to see if there were any glaciers on the far side of Mount Stanley. So he used an old map that had been stitched digitally into the GPS data to locate a path leading into a trail that hadn't been used in decades. For three hours, he hacked his way through dense nettle and dead heather. Then, at the top
of a high ridge, he rounded a corner and gasped: before him was a patchwork of forgotten glaciers that were still clinging to the crenulations of Mount Stanley.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
