Weeping Crying Glacier Wall Face in Arctic Ice in 2009? Nick Gillespie of REASON magazine revisits his original post

HEADLINE BACK THEN WAS:

Weeping Face in Arctic Ice! Or, Global Warmingers' Version of the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich Revealed!

HEADLINE TODAY IS:

Was that photo I ridiculed photoshopped, maybe?


by ''Nick Gillespie'' (scare quotes mine)
Sept. 3, 2009 and 2012



Remember the good ol' days in Bush's  America when the religious freaks where shaming fetuses by making them ask morally outraged pharmacists for the Plan B emergency contraceptive after having unprotected sex? When we were awash in magical (read: religious) thinking and right-wing Christians were seeing the grim visage of apocalyptoid preacher John Hagee every time they split open a pomegranate?
And if you don't remember any of that, you surely remember the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich saga and the tale of the Jesus Potato, don't you? Those were signs of how gullible we were as a society, right?
Yeah, those sure were good times. But now that we've pushed past all that religious crap in everyday culture and can finally breathe good, clean, cosmopolitan air,  we can take a gander at secular versions of the same crap. Now in 2009 it's global warming that's making ''found'' sculptures. Can you say PHOTOSHOPPED?

THIS sad face of 2009, published by a UK tabloid famous for its altered states of photoshopped fotos, and now eerily etched into melting Arctic ice, has been dubbed ''Mother Nature in Tears'' by astonished environment experts. But fast forward to 2012 and let's see if that photo was ever a real photo, raw and untouched....

The weeping image was reported by the UK SUN newspaper, famous for its unprofessional faked photos by the wagonload, to be somehow "sculpted" by water pouring from a glacier retreating under the effects of global warming. The man who took the photo Mike S. Nolan of the USA, never said that. The UK agency that paid him for the photo and then did what it wanted with the photo, said all that. So don't blame Nolan. Blame Barcroft Media. They are notorious for this kind of thing!

Michael Nolan ALLEGEDLY ''captured'' the photo at Norway's Austfonna ice-shelf in 2009. The glacier has been vanishing at the rate of 160 ft a year for 12 years.
Michael, from Arizona, USA, and Alaska, regularly visits the area. He REPORTEDLY TOLD THE UK MEDIA via the interview fashioned by BARCROFT MEDIA and allegedly said: "Every summer there is less ice. I was struck by this image of a face - a saddened, motherly face, crying about our inability to reduce global warming." BUT Mike never said those words. They were put into this mouth by Barcroft's savvy PR mavens. And it worked! The entire world got punked.

But now it's 2012 and maybe some savvy forensics photoshop apps can find out if the photo in question was ever digitally altered for IMPACT. Might take another 3 years to get the truth out. Patience.

Seth Fiegerman in 2012 goes one step further, writing at MASHABLE:

''This Startup Can Tell You if a 2009 Iconic Photo Is Fake''


In the age of Photoshop, it’s almost impossible to say with absolute certainty whether any given image is real, but one former Photoshop employee hopes to change that.
Fourandsix Technologies, a startup founded by a former Adobe Photoshop executive and a digital forensics expert, unveiled its first piece of software this week, which promises to help law enforcement determine whether a photo is authentic or not.
The software, called FourMatch, analyzes the meta data in picture files to quickly determine if a photo has been modified. FourMatch relies on a comprehensive database of more than 70,000 “signatures” that are left on a file from each piece of hardware and software that goes into creating it. As the company explains in a description of the product, “Once an image has been edited and resaved from a software product, this signature is changed to match the software rather than the original capture device.”
FourMatch is primarily intended for police and lawyers who need to determine whether a photograph has been tampered with in any way between the time it was first captured and submitted as evidence. However, the software won’t tell you exactly how the image has been altered — if it has been at all — because it only analyzes the file data rather than the image itself. For this reason, it can just tell you if a file has been touched by another application.

“This first product we’ve put out is not a magic bullet that will tell you everything you need to know about an image,” Kevin Connor, the company’s president and co-founder who worked at Adobe for 15 years, told Mashable. “This is sort of a first step and there are certain scenarios when it will be very valuable, particularly in the law enforcement space.” Indeed, the software currently retails for US$19 so it’s clearly intended for the average consumer.

In the future, though, the startup plans to release other tools to determine the authenticity of pictures that should have broader use. In particular, Connor sees a growing need for technology that can detect photo fraud in medical research, help media companies assess whether their photographers have been too liberal editing their photos and sift through pictures going viral on social media to figure out whether they’re real. Likewise, he thinks tools like this could help banks verify the authenticity of pictures of checks and other payments taken by customers.
“People are using images more and more to communicate and facilitate transactions,” Connor said. “There will be more situations when you might want to be able to verify that it’s true.”