By Charly SHELTON

The travelling exhibit “Antarctic Dinosaurs” opened at the beginning of April and will run through January at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Visitors can learn not only about the very cool (pun definitely intended) dinosaurs like Cryolophosaurus and the yet-unnamed sauropods A and B that were found in Antarctica, but also about the human paleontologists and what they had to do to remove the bones from the frozen ground while surviving the harsh conditions of the Antarctic summer.

Those harsh conditions – the howling wind, the below freezing temperatures, the lack of overland access – make paleontology difficult. In a wasteland of frozen ice, accessibility is scarce but beauty is abundant: the towering ice shelves, the cracked glaciers of clear ice, the drifts of snow dunes that could be mistaken for a Tunisian desert if not for the white of the snow. Photographer Diane Tuft first ventured to Antarctica in 2012 to shoot the continent’s unique light but quickly found a new angle when she realized that Antarctica is a record of Earth’s past climates. Ice layered year by year into glaciers revealed, like layers of sedimentary rock or the rings of a tree, when a new chunk of ice shelf breaks off for the first time in centuries due to global warming. These frozen snapshots hold air bubbles from the past, held in place until the ice melts. This became her focus on her trips to the lowest continent.

The photographs are all without scale, showing that a small crack in a hand-sized piece of ice looks exactly the same as a large ice crevasse when shot at the same angle and relative distance. This provides a feeling of oneness to the photos – there is no small or big, there is no direction, there is no scale. Everything is exactly as big as everything else. This captures the intimidating nature of the ice continent and the feeling of being lost in the ice. But there is also definite commentary on climate change in that one small change, one small crack, can be gigantic when looked at from a different point of view and it’s not until you see things in a different way do you know how big that impact can really be.

Tuft’s photographic exhibition, “Frozen in Time: Images of Antarctica” is now on display at NHMLA in the Rotating Gallery as an addendum to the “Antarctic Dinosaurs” exhibition or just as a beautiful art display on its own.

For more information, visit NHM.org.

  Charly Shelton