The 2016 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences was presented during a Town Hall co-organized by IEDA and Elsevier at the 2016 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco. The winning project, entitled “Revealing Our Melting Past: Rescuing Historical Snow and Ice Data,” is an ongoing effort to rescue and provide long-term access to snow and ice data from the Roger G. Barry Archive at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). These data, including the images below, provide an irreplaceable record of mass change of individual glaciers around the world over the last 150 years. To learn more about this data rescue effort, click here.

The International Data Rescue Award, which was co-organized by IEDA and Elsevier, includes a $5000 cash prize. The award was first given out in 2013 and “was created to raise awareness of the importance of securing access to science’s older research data, particularly those with poor preservation outlook or fragile storage conditions, and to urge efforts towards creating robust electronic datasets that can be shared globally via recognized repositories.” Read more about the 2016 award here.

Two photos of the Pedersen Glacier (Alaska). The top photo was taken in 1917, while the bottom was taken from the same vantage point in 2005. Credit: (top) Louis H. Pedersen/NSIDC; (bottom) Bruce F. Molnia/USGS