I made this image from terrestrial laser profiler data collected on Langjökull, Iceland during a project that Neil Arnold, Ian Willis and I were undertaking in 2008 to investigate the surface properties of glaciers. This image is the projection onto a horizontal plane of the point cloud, i.e. the set of points where the laser radiation was reflected from the surface. The spacing of the points, and hence the average brightness of the image, depends on the orientation of the glacier surface relative to the beam of the laser profiler, so there is some sense of the surface topography in this image. (The topography can in fact be extracted in great and precise detail from the point cloud.) The truck in which scientists and equipment were carried onto the glacier is also visible in this image, at the bottom right.
The image is quite large, and may not display in all its aesthetic glory if your monitor doesn’t have enough pixels.
The image is on display in the Beyond Images exhibition as part of the Cambridge Science Festival 2016.
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