Using Repeat Photography in Geoscience Education to Build a More Informed Citizenry

One public policy issue that is receiving a tremendous amount of international attention is the question: "Is climate changing?" In order to provide simple visual evidence of how Alaskan landscapes are responding to a well documented multi-decadal increase in temperature, a project was developed to both quantitatively and qualitatively examine landscape change and dynamics. Simply put, historical photographs, some made as much as 120 years ago, were located and the sites where the photographs were taken were revisited and rephotographed. The resulting pairs of images were compared and differences noted. As most sites examined are located in U.S. National Parks and National Forests, the results are being shared with appropriate Federal resource managers, interpreters, and education and outreach specialists to maximize the distribution of results and the usefulness of the project. Additionally, example pairs with descriptive captions have been presented to the National Snow and Ice Data Center so that they can be freely accessed by educators and the general public. Similarly, CD-ROMs with 15 example pairs were shared with >200 print and broadcast media outlets. The resulting image pairs document that although there are significant trends in the response to changing climate (i.e. most glaciers are shrinking and once ice-free, most newly exposed areas rapidly become vegetated), different areas respond at different speeds and in different ways. This annotated photographic database can be successfully included in geoscience courses and programs at all levels to visually document one approach used to address the question of climate change and to provide students with an unambiguous data set that they can easily understand.