Sound Water Stewards of Island County, WA
Working for a healthy, sustainable Salish Sea marine environment
Maritime glaciers are a critical component of the landscape at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Changes to these glaciers affect terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems and physical properties, and glacier retreat and associated ecosystem changes in Kenai Fjords National Park will likely impact ecotourism associated with the park. Therefore, monitoring these glaciers is important for understanding how they are changing over time. Satellite remote sensing has enabled glacier monitoring over a range of spatial and temporal scales and can greatly enhance field observations of glacier changes. We used images from the Landsat satellites to trace glacier margins twice annually from 1984 through 2021 for 19 glaciers within Kenai Fjords National Park. In this talk, I will discuss what these glacier margin observations have revealed about the behavior of different types of glaciers in the park over the past several decades.
The Environmental Speaker Series is free and open to the public. Talks are held each Thursday at 4:30 pm in Academic Instructional Center West, room 204. Paid parking is available in lot C. Or join us online on Zoom!
More information about the speaker series is available here, and past Environmental Speaker Series recordings are available here.