Explore several glaciers (your choice) on the Pacific coast of Alaska, using the Historical Imagery slider to move back and forth in time

One of the major themes of SIO 10 is that Earth is a dynamic system that is perpetually in a state of change. For your final project, you will use Google Earth to document the recent evolution of some of the fastest-changing landforms on our planet: the glaciers on the Pacific coast of Alaska. Many of these glaciers flow all the way to the ocean, some terminate on land. Almost all of them have experienced major changes over the past decades. To do this assignment, you will have to be familiar with the “Historical Imagery” functionality of Google Earth Pro. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials (e.g. ) to help you with this, at a cost of 5-10 minutes of your time.

For this assignment:

1.) Explore several glaciers (your choice) on the Pacific coast of Alaska, using the Historical Imagery slider to move back and forth in time. By doing this, you’ll develop intuition about what glaciers look like when they are advancing (moving downslope or outward) or retreating (moving upslope or inward) over time. Look in particular for changes between brown/black (rock), blue/green (water), and white (ice) as you click through the timeline. Also click on “Terrain” and pan/tilt your view so you can get an idea of the 3-dimensional shape and the elevation change associated with these glaciers.

2.) In the “Layers” section at the bottom-left of your Google Earth window, click to turn on “Google Earth Community” under the “Gallery” menu. This will cause an “i” icon to appear over each major glacier. Clicking on an “i” will show the name of the glacier beneath it.

3.) Find a named glacier that shows a lot of change (either advance or retreat), and which has at least three historical images going back 15 years or more. Take a screenshot or export the Google Earth image of each historical image, being sure to write down the image date (month/year) from the time slider. Also write down the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the glacier, which you can find at the bottom of the Google Earth window.

4.) Create and post to Canvas a PDF with:

your name and PID
the name and geographic coordinates of your glacier
at least three images of the glacier over time, along with the date of each image.
no more than a half-page of text with A.) a description of the changes you notice between images and B.) your assessment of whether the glacier is advancing or retreating (you should explain your reasoning).

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