Taryn partnered with Kenai Fjords National Park to create a StoryMap that illustrates how glaciers in the park have changed over the past several decades or even the past century. They aimed to communicate how quickly glaciers can change and how they affect their environment. This is a capstone in fulfillment of the UW PCC Graduate Certificate in Climate Science.

How do you overcome the idea that glaciers change at “a glacial pace”? Although glaciers flow forward slower than a snail crawls, the combination of glacier flow, melting, and other processes can add up to very visible changes of the course of decades, years, and even single seasons. In Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park, these glacier changes are recorded through a variety of methods, including satellite and aerial imagery and ground-based repeat photography. Visitors to the park often want more information about the park’s glaciers and seek it out online or by asking the park’s interpretive staff. To facilitate communication about the park’s glaciers, I created a StoryMap that details observed changes at 19 glaciers along the park’s coastline. I evaluated the StoryMap’s effectiveness in communicating about glacier change by surveying a group of students in an introductory geology course (ESS 101) before and after they read the StoryMap.

I first connected with Kenai Fjords National Park through a research internship in the summer of 2020. During my internship, I used satellite images to map twice-annual glacier boundaries in the park and measure how the size of each glacier changed over time. My internship supervisor, Deb Kurtz, wanted to use the data I collected to develop a StoryMap about glaciers in the park to share with the public. I wanted to take on this project, but it didn’t fit in the time available in my internship, so I decided to continue working with Deb to make it my GCeCS capstone project instead.

StoryMaps are a tool from Esri, the makers of ArcGIS software, which allow users to create a narrative that can combine interactive maps with other media, such as photos and videos. We chose this method because it allowed us to pair our geospatial data (mapped glacier boundaries) with repeat photography of glaciers and other relevant images. Our goal was to convey how dynamic glaciers are and how they affect their surroundings to the general public, primarily visitors to the park’s website.

In our StoryMap, readers can use header links to navigate to a glacier of interest. The glaciers are organized by glacier type (whether they end on land, in a lake, or in marine waters), and for each group there is an introductory paragraph that discusses how that glacier type interacts with its environment. Then for each glacier there is a set of visuals: an interactive map that displays how the glacier boundaries have changed over time; a chart based on the glacier boundaries that shows how the glacier length has changed over time; and a pair of repeat photographs of the glacier from different years, at least a few decades apart. The repeat photographs take advantage of a “swipe” feature available in StoryMaps wherein two photos taken from the same location are overlaid on each other, and a vertical slider bar allows the reader to swipe back and forth and compare the two photos. This is a valuable visual tool for showing how features such as glaciers change over time. In addition to these different visuals, for each glacier I wrote a short block of text describing how the visuals show that it has changed, as well as other relevant facts.

While the StoryMap has not yet been advertised to the general public (although it is available), it has been well received by park staff. Interpretive staff can use the StoryMap to learn more about the park’s glaciers and share that information with visitors. In order to evaluate how effectively the StoryMap communicates our goal – that glaciers are dynamic and affect their surroundings – I shared the StoryMap with a group of introductory geology students and asked them to fill out a survey before and after reading the StoryMap. The survey questions included:

• Describe how you feel about climate change.
• How do you think that climate change affects glaciers?
• How do you think that glaciers affect their environment?
• Why do you think that glaciers and glacier changes are important, for example, in national parks?
• (pre-survey) How much do you think glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park are changing?
  (post-survey) Are the glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park changing the way you expected? Explain your answer.
• (post-survey only) How do these glacier changes make you feel?

These questions were designed to assess students’ knowledge of how glaciers are changing and how they affect their environment and to evaluate how their responses changed before and after reading about those topics in the StoryMap. In general, students expressed some familiarity with glaciers and climate change in the pre-survey, but in the post-survey they provided more detailed responses that addressed specific points that were made in the StoryMap. For the most part, the students expressed negative feelings about glaciers and climate change, although a few noted their surprise in learning about potential benefits of glacier retreat (e.g., habitat creation) which were mentioned but not heavily emphasized in the StoryMap.

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of turning research data into a public-facing communication product and I look forward to seeing it get used by park staff and visitors alike. To anyone else who might want to make a StoryMap, I would advise 1) organizing all of your visuals beforehand, and 2) exploring the variety of formats and capabilities offered in StoryMaps before settling on a style. I am happy that I had the opportunity to continue collaborating with Deb Kurtz, who has been an excellent supervisor and mentor. I am also grateful to Miriam Bertram for providing advice and feedback throughout the capstone process.

Taryn Black is a recent PhD graduate of the UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences. Her dissertation research focused on using satellite images to map glacier change in Greenland and Alaska. During her degree she had an opportunity to take an internship with Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. This experience led her to create the StoryMap described here for her capstone project for the Graduate Certificate in Climate Science.