Imagine traveling 3,400 miles to the top of the planet (78°N or thereabouts) to see some of the world's most endangered and dramatic glaciers. It is unusually warm. In fact, there is a fine mist; it is raining in the desert. Locals implore us not to refer to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard as a desert anymore, despite what the textbooks tell you. Anyway, the warmth and the mist created a dense fog. Undeterred, we left the ship on small rubber watercraft to try to get a glimpse of what we could hear and sense but not see.
I was eager to see the renowned glacier at Hambergbukta. Currently, this glacier spans a mere 2.5 kilometers in width. However, due to the warming climate, it is rapidly retreating and is expected to disappear entirely in the near future. This loss will result in the formation of a new channel, effectively splitting the main island of Spitsbergen into two distinct landmasses.
Back in my cabin, I opened my RAW file and began editing the images. A RAW image captures all the information that the camera sensor receives at the time of taking the photograph. Each photon that hits the sensor is recorded on a grid of 45.4 million pixels, each addressable pixel contains 16 bits of colour information, recording billions of different values for each pixel. Because of this vast data set you can instruct software to further analyze each and every pixel and enhance the separation and colour differences. Below is the same image as above but edited to seek out details in the mist.
This second and third examples below are more dramatic and these were the examples that took my breath away. These glaciers which I had seen some 8 years earlier and yearned to see again were brought into view through this technological transformation. When I made these edits, I was still anchored exactly at this same location.
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