This could be a game-changer for fake news

… plus curiosities from Western Antarctica, a SpaceX Mission, and more.

Welcome back to another edition of The Detour! My name is Kelly, and I’m the founding writer of The Detour. We created this newsletter to cut through the noise of the internet and deliver journalism that sparks curiosity from all corners of the globe. We're so grateful for the time you spend with us each week.

To support this mission and ensure we can keep creating The Detour, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year. You’ll receive top-to-bottom access to the newsletter every week (instead of just a teaser), and your subscription will go directly toward The Detour’s creation! Not to go full Wikipedia on you, but if 10% of you reading this got a monthly subscription today, we could keep publishing The Detour for a year.

As ever, thank you for reading,

Kelly

---

Without further ado, here’s what’s on deck:

This week we have something really special for you in the cover story: Scroll down for an exclusive story with photojournalist Nora Savosnick and creative technologist Corey Tegeler, who are creating a tool that will wrap real news photos in verifiable data to reveal how the images were made. Think of it as a kind of nutrition label for photography amid the advent of AI and misinformation. They’re on a mission to establish a new global standard for verifying visual storytelling, empowering both newsrooms and readers like you to trust what they see.

Creative technologist Corey Tegeler (left) and photojournalist Nora Savosnick (right). // Courtesy of Roshni Khatri

Plus, stick around for:

🔥 A dispatch from Frame contributor Marcus Gabbert from California’s fire country.

💭 Way up high and way down below: SpaceX’s next mission and the latest Antarctic research.

💃 The power and peril of JOMO

Here’s a closer look at what’s been going on around the world lately:

This is The World in Numbers: SpaceX astronauts, melting glaciers, Ukrainian drones, and work-life balance in Australia. // Kelly Kimball for Frame. // Wikimedia Commons

74,000 square miles — The heaping size of West Antarctica’s ice sheet, a stretch of land bigger than Florida. For over a decade, researchers worried that human-driven climate change would melt this ice sheet to such an extent that it could plunge into the ocean, sparking a catastrophic global sea level rise by the century’s end. But that’s what they thought. This week, scientists may be singing a different tune following the latest work from a group of researchers at Dartmouth College. Mathieu Morlighem, the leader of this research and a professor of earth science at Dartmouth, offers an olive branch of nuance to this long-held belief about the imposing Thwaites Glacier:

“We found that Thwaites would remain fairly stable at least through 2100. We also simulated an ice shelf collapse in 50 years, when the glacier’s grounding line – where its grounded ice meets the ocean – would have retreated deeper inland. Even then, we found that marine ice cliff instability alone would not cause a rapid retreat.”

— Mathieu Morlighem in The Conversation this week.

Thwaites may not be the “doomsday glacier” that researchers fear. But it is indeed unstable due to rising global temperatures. The United Nation’s most recent climate assessment shows the world may pass 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels in the next 20 years, even with significant reductions in carbon emissions. This increase above 1.5 degrees would likely accelerate the widespread fires, hurricanes, ice melt, and floods we’re already seeing. You can read the UN report here.

Research shows the Thwaites Glacier is undergoing the largest changes of any ice-ocean system in Antarctica. // Source: The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration

4 — The total number of astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission that launched Tuesday. Those privy to the new wave of the space race see Polaris Dawn as a major step in the development of commercial spaceflight. The four astronauts will conduct around 40 experiments to study how the human body reacts in low-gravity environments (tldr, it reacts a whole LOT), measure the amount of radiation their space capsule receives (because radiation apparently messes with the human brain??), and test communications between it and Earth via Starlink satellites.

There’s so much more to this week’s Detour. Beyond the paywall below is our cover story, which is about two journalists’ mission to re-invent how we verify photos in news stories. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year to read this and many, many more stories to come.

Plus, I dive into our latest story by Frame contributor Marcus Gabbert. It’s not one to miss. Here’s a preview:

The Logging Quagmire by Marcus Gabbert. // Frame, 2024

With every newsletter we send to your inbox, we hope to limit the overwhelm and underscore the power of curiosity-invoking journalism.