Earth and Space Science - Earth and Human Activity

Purpose

In this activity, you will use satellite images from the NASA Landsat team to quantify changes in glacier cover over time. This lesson utilizes change pair images of Bear Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park, located on the southeastern portion of Alaska’s Kenai (pronounced: Key-nigh) Peninsula, bordering the Gulf of Alaska.

Learning Objectives

To enable students to analyze changes in glacier cover over time using satellite images.

NASA Phenomenon Connection

Satellite images provide scientists aerial views of glaciers, and a major source of these images has been provided by the Landsat Program. The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Since 1972, Landsat satellites have collected information about Earth from space by taking specialized digital photographs of Earth’s continents and surrounding coastal regions. The Landsat program has been collecting images for over three decades, enabling people to see and study the dynamic changes caused by both natural processes and human practices. One way to evaluate these changes is to compare images of a single area over an extended period of time. Two satellite images taken at different times of the same location are called change pairs and are frequently used by glaciologists to evaluate changes in a glacier.