|
During 1977-1982, Jim Ellis hiked across the Brooks Range of northern Alaska with Dr. Parker Calkin and graduate students from University of Buffalo, Department of Geological Sciences. He created maps of many cirque glaciers and rock glaciers, compiled physical data on each landform, and surveyed 3 glaciers and 3 rock glaciers with a theodolite. He's converting these paper maps to digital files and georeferencing them into GIS to increase access to this unique climatic-change archive. As far as he knows, no one has gone back over the past 25 years!
Data were collected in four areas: east-central Brooks Range (centered about Atigun Pass and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline), Arrigetch Peaks, Anatuvuk Pass, and Northeastern Brooks Range. This website provides maps and photographs showing the extent of glaciers during 1977-1982.
Regional maps of the 4 study areas and Landsat images are formatted to display in Google Earth. Zips of .kmz files are at the bottom of this page. Download the zip, open the .kmz and the GIS layers will display in Google Earth. You can fade the map over the image. At each glacier there will be a posting with a ground photograph from 1977-1982 and physical characteristics listed.
Jim hopes some energetic earth scientists are able to take a hike and
revisit some of these glaciers, moraines, and rock glaciers to find out what is happening to these landforms as the 21st Century
evolves. Resurveying the 5 Holocene Glacial landforms would provide accurate information on landform changes over the past ~30 years. In 1978 we found relict vegetation emerging from the toe of a retreating glacier. The vegetation was dead, buried during a glacial advance ~1150 years ago. Time is running out for scientists to find relict vegetation emerging from the rapidly disappearing (?) glaciers in the Brooks Range.
|
 |
| 1979 Buffalo Glacier |
|
|
