Repeat photography: Pokhalde glacier

 

 1956  |  2007
 Pokhalde Glacier Himalayas

1956 picture taken by Erwin Schneider, courtesy of the Association for Comparative Alpine Research, Munich. 2007 image photographed by Alton Byers of the Mountain Institute.

The preliminary studies done through repeat photography shows the loss of glaciers in Himalayas. The rapid glacier melting due to climate change is one of the drivers that accelerate the delta- building processes in the active delta in Bangladesh.

A landscape built by water

 

A landscape built by water

Bangladesh delta, that is a landscape built by water. Water formed its landscapes through centuries of sediment transportation from the Himalayas, making it a tide-dominated delta. Water constructed its cultural landscapes by nourishing its soil with rich silts. Here, water created life and became a source of living. Then, water became the connector for the landscapes and the livings by flowing literally everywhere... in every corner, as if reaching almost every home. It created cities: the capital city dates to 400 years ago, originating by the river Buri-Ganga and all the major cities became significant connection points through river or seaports.

The extremely fertile landscapes and abundance of fresh water supply made it a productive and densely populated region. In return creating a need for more cultivated lands and dense cities, leading to loss of forests. For a land where 80% lies in a flood plain, 1/4th under 2m elevation, having a forest coverage of 11% is rather alarming. The accelerated climate change will impact the delta from both ends, the changes in river streams due to glacier melting in the Himalayas, as well as increased salinity and flooding due to sea level rise creating backflow of tidal surges from Bay of Bengal.

 

This is the shifting landscape of Bangladesh delta, where water builds, but it is also a threat.

 

It is a contemporary uncertain landscape, a tide dominated delta, where historically the landscapes produced conditions for widely distributed inhabitation.

 

Landscape representations

 

Matthew Seibert, Dredge Research Collaborative and Louisiana Coastal Sustainability Studio

'From 1931 to 2010, the Mississippi Delta lost roughly a quarter of its landmass.' 

The way we look at landscapes depend on limitless variables, such as perspective, scale and time period taken into account. The maps shown from above can highlight various aspects. For example, the Mississippi map focuses on the land loss and land gain within a particular period of time.

“How we represent and model landscapes influences how we perceive and engage with them. Designers such as James Corner, Alan Berger, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Jane Wolff, and Bradley Cantrell have repeatedly demonstrated this point. In particular, Mathur and da Cunha have advanced a critical inquiry of cartographic conventions and received habits of landscape representation. Their work — a self-described activist practice — emphasizes the ways that conventional mapmaking and planning suppresses movement, variability, and flux. They problematize the drawing or projection of fixed boundaries onto inherently dynamic landscapes, showing “how these divisions and lines can harden in the landscape, in civic administration, and indeed in the design disciplines.”  -Milligan Brett, 2015, Migrations of the Mississipi river’ in Landscape Migration, Environmental Design in the Anthropocene.