Washington Group

Dr. Bruce Molnia FN80 showed photographs of 100+ years of changes in glaciers in Alaska at the November ECWG dinner meeting on Saturday the 21st.

 A Melting Landscape:    Using Repeat Photography to Document Alaskan Glacier and Landscape Change

The DC Chapter of the Circumnavigator’s Club joined ECWG members at the meeting.The presentation consisted of numerous decadal and longer time-lapse images of natural features of the landscape, glaciers, and habitats that have been affected by the warming climate. Bruce Molnia documented how he had to track down the locations from which the photos taken over a 100 years ago were taken by early tourists and scientists in the 19th century, often time bush-wacking hours through undergrowth and trees that have grown in areas that were barren 100+ years ago. It documents the changes that have been taking place that may be too slow for the significance of the changes to be immediately obvious over a short period of time.

Forthcoming 2015 ECWG Dinners at the Cosmos Club: December 5.  Professor Chris Palmer, “Confessions of a wildlife filmmaker.”

Dr. Bruce Molnia FN 80

Dr. Bruce F. Molnia is the U.S. Geological Service Senior Advisor form National Civil Applications and an award-winning research geologist. He conducts glacial, marine, and coastal research with a focus on innovative uses of remotely sensed data, and the response of glaciers in Alaska, Chile, and Afghanistan to changing climate. His object is to present understandable science to the public, policy makers, the news media, and his peers. He has been awarded: the USGS Lifetime Communications Achievement Award, the Geological Society of America’s Career Achievement and Public Service awards, the International DVD Association’s Government DVD of the Year Award, and three USGS Eugene Shoemaker External Communication Awards.

Dr. Molnia has been studying and photographing glaciers for 50 years. For the past two decades, his focus has been on repeat photography, a technique in which a historical photograph and a modern photograph, both having the same field of view, are compared and contrasted to quantitatively and qualitatively determine their similarities and differences. Molina is using ground-based repeat photography at a number of locations in Alaska, including Glacier Bay and Kenai Fjords National Parks, western Prince William Sound, and the Juneau area, to document and understand changes to glaciers and landscapes as a result of changing climate. Since the earliest known photographs of glacier-covered Alaskan landscapes date from the early 1880s, repeat photography is useful for documenting as much as a century and a quarter of Alaskan landscape change.

Dr. Molnia is also using airborne-platform-based repeat photography throughout glacier-covered Alaska to augment ground-based assessments and to monitor change at geographic scales ranging from individual glaciers, to entire mountain ranges. Since the earliest Alaskan aerial photographs date from the late 1920s, aerial repeat photography documents kilometers of rapid glacier change. Join Bruce Molnia to examine how the use of repeat photography is systematically documenting glacier and landscape change at more than 200 locations.

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Speaker for Saturday December 5 Black-tie dinner, Professor Chris Palmer, “Confessions of a wildlife filmmaker”.

Reminder:   Please make checks payable to: “ECWG”

Send Payment to Arnella Trent at: 115 Willis Street, Cambridge MD 21613  Email: arnellat@gmail.com    Mobile Phone: 301-526-0822

ECWG website: www.explorersclubdc.com