Video
Studying Glaciers: 1945-1950
Descriptive Transcript
STUDYING GLACIERS – DESCRIPTIVE TRANSCRIPT
Title card: Studying Glaciers 1945-1950
Title card: Starting in 1931, the park began annual measurements of several glaciers.
Title card: The park’s Chief Naturalist joined these trips from the mid-1940s to 1950s and recorded the clips seen here.
Text label on color footage: Sperry Glacier, 1945
Two people standing on the glacier surface. One is holding an ice axe, and hands it to the other person when they slip.
Text label on color footage: Grinnell Glacier, 1947
A person walks across the glacial ice carrying a long stick-like object.
Text label on color footage: Sperry Glacier, 1948
A silhouetted park ranger walks into view in the foreground, with the mass of ice that is Sperry Glacier stretching behind him. He walks down and stops to look out over the glacier as shadows from overhead clouds pass over it.
Title card: On August 31, 1948, park naturalists took annual measurements on Sperry Glacier.
A person leans over a flat table-like surface mounted on tripod legs on rocks next to the glacier ice.
A person carrying a large T-shaped piece of equipment walks along the margin of the ice, with a person wearing a large backpack following behind.
Title card: Survey techniques involved using a plane table alidade and stadia rod to create a topographic map.
Close view of two people working with survey equipment. One uses the plane table, a small portable table set on a tripod. Mounted on the table is a piece of telescopic equipment the user looks through and then draws measurements. The other is crouched down doing something else. A third person walks into frame carrying a long measuring stick about 8 feet high.
Closeup of the plane table user peering through the telescope device. He points and gestures while looking through the eyepiece.
The person holding the measuring stick stands with it upright at the edge of a large crevasse.
A woman approaches the edge of a crevasse, braces one hand on a boulder, and peers over the edge.
Title card: They kept track of the yearly position of specific rocks on the ice. This showed how the ice had moved.
A large flat rock sits stuck onto a small mound of ice on the glacier surface. The woman climbs up onto it with her ice axe.
Title card: The 1948 Annual Glacier Measurements Report notes: “The ice wall at the front of Sperry Glacier was about 50 feet high.”
A park ranger approaches a large wall of glacial ice ending in a meltwater pool, snacking on something as he peers at the ice. The ice wall is blue-tinted and filled with creases and cracks.
Title card: In 1950, thanks to grants and donations, the park took aerial photos of 30 of the park’s glaciers for the first time.
Title card: From September 12-23, staff from Glacier, the Forest Service, and the Geological Survey camped out and established ground control points for the aerial points.
Text label on color footage: Heading to camp below Sperry Glacier.
A man heads down through a narrow, rocky passageway, carrying some equipment.
A group of four head down a rocky path, carrying survey gear.
A canvas tent on the edge of a pond.
A woman cooks on a camp stove underneath a tarp shelter. She sees the person filming and starts banging on a pot with a spoon and smiling.
Text label on color footage: Jackson Glacier.
Two men trudge up an inclined rock slope next to the glacier, where slabs of blue-tinted ice calve off.
The two men stand in front of the ice, one holding a big measuring stick and the other standing next to him, perhaps propping him up.
Title card: The following is a 1950 aerial photo of Jackson Glacier, marked up to show ground control points. Field observations and aerial photography were then combined to make detailed topographic maps.
Still black-and-white aerial photo. A red dotted line marks the margins of the glacier. Black circles with numbers and letters, on the margins of the glacier and various point surrounding it, denote ground control points.
The photo fades into a black-and-white topographic line map of the glacier. The map zooms out to show the surrounding topography. It is labeled, “United States Geological Survey. Jackson Glacier, Glacier National Park, Montana.”
Description
This collection of archival film clips from 1945-1950 highlights field work carried out by Glacier and U.S. Geological Survey staff to monitor changes in some of the park's glaciers.
Duration
4 minutes, 15 seconds
Credit
NPS Video
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