ABSTRACT
Symbolising a fragile and visible nature at risk, the images also aestheticise nature, utilising discourses of the environment that gain legitimacy through scientific discourse. As such, NASA's satellite images of the Larsen B ice shelf reveal how the interrelated concepts of nature, vision and time in the construction of scientific and environmental knowledge concepts that have proven to be particularly problematic for the identification and communication of climate change provide the representational conditions from which the images gain their meaning. NASA's images gain their legitimacy not only from the indexical nature of the satellite technology used, but also from the knowledge-power relations invested in NASA as a governmental and scientific institution with the economic and technological means to collect and record data on a global scale. By visually recording particular moments in time in order to show, retrospectively, the passing of time, they map ecological time through industrial time, premised upon visible matter and measured motion in space.
