Magnifying What Matters: Seeing Climate Change Through a Glass Orb
Sophia Kim
Award: Top 100
School: thomas jefferson high school for science and technology
Teacher: elissa levy
Category: Contrived
Photo #21022
Magnifying What Matters: Seeing Climate Change Through a Glass Orb
This photograph was born from a simple question: what if physics could make an invisible crisis impossible to ignore? Inspired by a ScienceDirect article about climate change's impact on polar bears, I set out to frame their endangered reality through the lens of optics.
Polar bears depend entirely on Arctic sea ice, a delicate resource threatened by Arctic temperatures rising nearly four times faster than the global average. The IUCN currently lists them as vulnerable, and models project a loss of more than 30% of the global population by 2050 if warming continues at its current pace.
The photo setup was simple: I cut out the magazine photograph and positioned it behind a glass orb against a black cloth backdrop, then used a flashlight to direct focused light onto the scene. The drama in the final image, though, comes entirely from physics. As light rays pass from air into the glass orb, they slow and bend according to Snell's Law: n₁sinθ₁ = n₂sinθ₂. Glass has a refractive index of roughly 1.5 compared to air's 1.0, so rays bend toward the normal upon entry and away from it upon exit. The spherical geometry causes rays from many angles to converge, making the orb function as a thick converging lens that magnifies and inverts the image within.
The flashlight introduced a bright specular highlight on the orb's surface, pulling the viewer's gaze inward toward the bears. I hope solving the crisis feels as urgent as the image inside that glass.
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