
Norway: photographs taken of the same places separated by long periods of time - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/11/norway-then-and-now-tilbakeblikk/413710/?single_page=true
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hellofunk
Interesting caption to one of the photos regarding how the temperature of the
environment has changed:

>Axel Lindahl’s picture of Engabreen from 1889 shows the foot of the glacier,
where there was only ice, glacial gravel, water and bare mountainsides in a
seemingly cold and hostile landscape. Now, more than 120 years later, the
valley has become far more fertile. Birch forest, shore meadows, willow
thickets and marshland have established themselves, while the glacier arm has
retreated far back up the mountainside.

~~~
baldfat
I don't know about the forest being caused by climate as much as just
technology. In US in New England we see the exact same thing in old pictures
and new
pictures.[http://serc.carleton.edu/vignettes/collection/24682.html](http://serc.carleton.edu/vignettes/collection/24682.html)

"Imagine a time machine that could take you back 150 years. Open the door and
look out at the slopes of Vermont, the Green Mountain State. In 1850, the
slopes would be anything but green. Most would be barren, stripped of their
trees, and trampled by grazing sheep."

~~~
jofer
Changes in landscape and colonization by various plants as glaciers retreat is
a very, very well-documented process. The vegetation changes in the picture
shown are unambiguously due to the retreat of the glacier.

Global changes aside, it takes awhile to form soils that will support plant
life. Near the foot of a retreating glacier, you'll always have till and
moraines. If they've been recently exposed, they'll always be bare. It takes a
few decades for forests, etc to get established.

~~~
baldfat
[http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/scandinavia/xnorway.html](http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/scandinavia/xnorway.html)

Deforestation was happening in the 1600s and 1700s and required the stopping
of many saw mills.

I just say this because humanity really did horrible environmental things
throughout our history. For example the ceders of Lebanon being completly cut
down by 800 BC and the deforestation of Israel during the crusades which never
came back.

~~~
jofer
That's all very true, but for that particular picture, the lack of vegetation
is because the area was covered by ice only a few years before. Note the lack
of soil in the older photo. There's only rocks and silt.

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reustle
Wow, these are really cool. I lived in the farmhouse on the other side of the
bridge in #16 2 summers ago. What a beautiful country.

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benten10
Idea for computer-imagery/ML people: a method to realistically recolor old
photos by sampling from new photos of the same place, with some caveats (for
eg. the object must have a corresponding object, etc)

~~~
biswaroop
Check this out:
[https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~zfrenett/CS886-Project.pdf](https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~zfrenett/CS886-Project.pdf)

~~~
benten10
I remember seeing this/such papers elsewhere. They have appeared in
conference/papers for the last few years too. Here I'm suggesting untrained
coloring of 'new' images from existing though, so maybe what I'm asking is a
simpler problem? "Transferring colors from base (new) image to target (old)
image using such and such sampling" would be how I would put my problem. The
paper you link to would be more "learning to transfer colors by looking at how
grayscale images transfer to color", right? Am I missing something?

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unicornporn
If you like this, please check out Historypin[1], which is a less known Google
backed project to overlay historical photographs with Google's Street View.

[1]
[https://www.historypin.org/en/explore/geo/59.919462,10.74537...](https://www.historypin.org/en/explore/geo/59.919462,10.745379,13/bounds/59.885244,10.69182,59.953645,10.798937)

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bnegreve
It's interesting to see how churches are fixpoints in most pictures.

~~~
dogma1138
People rarely tear down a church, churches in many places especially in Nordic
countries where often the only "real" building in town as they were initially
built by Lutheran missionaries you can see the same thing from very old
pictures in Iceland you'll see a village with pretty much only turf(sod)
buildings and then a more or less modern (for it's time) church. IIRC the
first masonry building in Iceland was a church, won't surprise me if in many
of the more remote parts of Norway and Sweden that would be the case, unlike
Iceland Norway and Sweden have had at least plenty of timber and didn't had to
build houses out of patches of grass...

~~~
moogly
Whilst you're completely right, it's also worth mentioning that in Norway,
quite a few (a dozen? two dozen?) of old wooden stave churches were
(tragically) burned down in the 80s and 90s by, amongst others, arsonist
members of the black metal scene.

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unixhero
Some of the translations are surely made by a Norwegian. Those are not corn,
but wheat bushels. In Norwegian wheat is "korn", and corn is "mais".

~~~
arethuza
In UK English "corn" generally means wheat - we'd call "corn" "maize":

[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96522/why-does-
co...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/96522/why-does-corn-mean-
maize-in-american-english)

~~~
dogma1138
I don't think it holds true anymore, if you go to any store in the UK now Corn
will be well maize, I'm pretty sure the American definition of corn has taken
over the common British definition.

~~~
baldfat
Just like how the British word Soccer took over in America.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/why...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/why-
we-call-soccer-soccer/372771/)

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swamp40
The rocks are fascinating to me for some reason.

Obviously they're not going to change over a mere 120 years, but the fact that
you can see and touch the exact same spot as how many other thousands of
people across the generations - that's the really interesting thing.

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stevoski
I've been playing Banished a lot lately. In some of these photos, I found
myself thinking that they had a well-located forester in a game of Banished.

~~~
jacobwcarlson
Similarly, I was struck by how much the older photos reminded me of Skellige
in Witcher 3.

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ck2
This presentation needs that back/forth javascript partition slider that
allows you to directly compare old to new.

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unsigner
Some of the pictures show signs of warming (although in one of the text
descriptions it's attributed to planting of trees), but there's virtually no
sea level rise evident?

~~~
kbart
Also, more trees might relate to stricter environmental laws (you can't simply
take an axe and chop a random tree nowadays) and more advanced and energy
efficient heating sources that use biomass briquettes, electricity and gas
instead of tree logs from the nearby thicket.

~~~
evgen
Interesting. The bit that I found most noticeable in the then/now comparison
was that people in the past really did not like trees :)

Every bit of human habitation was surrounded by open areas denuded of trees.
It actually looked unpleasant and sterile to see the lack of trees near
everything man-made. Roads, fields, home...no trees anywhere in the vicinity.

~~~
WalterBright
> Every bit of human habitation was surrounded by open areas denuded of trees.

I theorize that is due to the nearby trees all being used for firewood.

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tobr
Frustrating that the images are almost-but-not-quite aligned, especially in
the foreground. I think that makes it look like the towns have changed more
than they have.

What would it take to get pixel perfect alignment in a big image like this?
For starters, you'd have to figure out the exact lens and zoom level, and get
to precisely the right spot...

~~~
callesgg
Only the camera position is required to get good alignment, lens and zoom
level is fixable in photoshop, just crop and scale a bit.

~~~
poslathian
Unfortunately, it's very hard to identify the exact camera position, since
alignment of foreground objects can be matched from different positions at the
expense of matching the original perspective. Old cameras had huge imaging
plates, with low crop factors, I suspect what happens with a lot of these
old/new match-ups is that the photographer is standing far from the original
spot to achieve "best possible" alignment with the foreground crop - which of
course screws up your perspective. You could align against the background, but
then you'll have poor alignment on the foreground.

Cleaning up the crop/zoom in photoshop does not help you unless you are
shooting from the exact same spot to get the same perspective.

[http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2014/08/15/debunking-
the-m...](http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2014/08/15/debunking-the-myth-
that-focal-length-affects-perspective/)

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btiede
Stunning photos! Number 11 is particularly striking because it captures global
warming in action!

~~~
Asbostos
Keep in mind that this is natural shrinking of glaciers that's been going on
for 10,000 years. Nothing to do with the newer AGW.

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intrasight
What is most striking is the return of the trees

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4h53n
Global warming. Global warming is all I see.

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anusburger
Photoshopped. Where did the cows go genius?!

