I’ve enjoyed the great privilege of being involved with the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Program for several years. The scientific reports that we have delivered included surveying the sub-surface debris field, projecting future snowfall and surface melt, and surveying ice flow at the site. I’ve met tonnes people who are interested in Camp Century: researchers and academics, journalists and authors, politicians and policymakers, and, of course, folks who live (relatively!) nearby in Qaanaaq and Savissivik. There’s clearly a lot of different reasons to be interested in Camp Century today. Every so often, however, I get an email from someone who worked at Camp Century during its 1959-1967 operational period. Exciting!
When you’re standing at Camp Century today, you see nothing but flat white horizon in every direction. Every trace of the base is buried. Quite buried! The 1967 snow surface is now about 35 meters below today’s snow surface. So, without ever having laid eyes on the base myself, the mental impression that I have of the ‘City Under Ice’ is just stitched together from historical fragments that I’ve collected along the way. Talking with someone who has actually walked the tunnels of Camp Century really helps fill out my mental picture. Wow! I love those emails! You can get a sense of this by listening to Jim Fennell talk about his experiences at Camp Tuto, which is, of course, just down the road from Camp Century.
As you can see from some of the comments on this blog, I sense that many Camp Century ‘old timers’ are pretty keen to reach out and share their part in the Camp Century story. I’ve had heaps of photos shared with me through these interactions, with the hope or expectation that I “can perhaps do something” with them. For example, I’ve used a couple photos from Søren Gregersen when reporting on historical activities at Camp Century. There are, sadly, fewer Camp Century veterans every year. I’ve now received some emails from children of Camp Century veterans similarly asking me what to do with old ice-sheet photos. These are exceedingly unique memories that should be preserved.
I propose that we create a Camp Century Community Photo Archive. The goal of which is to digitize ‘private’ photos from Camp Century – meaning photos taken by individuals rather than agencies – and get them into an open-access Wikimedia Commons collection. In the past five years or so, a bucket of photos have accumulated on my computer drive through these delightful opportunistic and informal interactions. I never really had the intent to curate a public photo repository, so I haven’t had the foresight to systematically collect the metadata and permissions that something like Wikimedia Commons requires. Leaving them on my own computer drive doesn’t do much for anyone!
So, if you are interested in contributing to the Camp Century Community Photo Archive, great! You can send me an email via the contact form on this website to get started. To organize this effort, I have created an online project drive into which photos (and their accompany permissions!) can be uploaded. (If you can’t digitize your photos, you can post them to me and I will get them digitized and post them back to you.) Within the project drive, there is a spreadsheet into which the appropriate metadata can be entered. I have also created a template and instructions for completing the permission required by Wikimedia Commons. Finally, I have created this GoogleGroup for email discussions to keep everyone involved up to speed on the project. You can request access directly, or I can add you via email.
Thanks for your interest in my first foray into data rescue!