USING GIGAPAN IMAGERY AND GOOGLE EARTH PATH AND PROFILE TOOLS TO ENRICH ALASKAN LANDSCAPE INTERPRETATION IN AN INTRODUCTORY GEOMORPHOLOGY COURSE

An undergraduate geomorphology course for Environmental Science and Geography majors at University Alaska Southeast, incorporated skills and resources demonstrated at the 2011 GSA Penrose Conference on Google Earth Visualizing the Possibilities for Geoscience Education and Research. Students were able to identify large and fine-scale geomorphic features using the Path and Profiling tools in Google Earth 5.0 after they had learned to generate topographic cross-sections manually, using topographic maps, rulers, and graph paper.

Using Google Earth enabled undergraduate students who were not yet familiar with ArcGIS and digital elevation maps, to “virtually” visit watersheds of interest from all over Alaska and analyze them for geodynamic influences. This was especially useful for the class final project that required an analysis of a watershed located in one of the nine National Parks located in the 49^th state.

Alaska’s USGS topographic maps were generally produced from aerial photographs taken in the late 1940s; often with resolution no greater than 1:63,360. Google Earth allowed students to easily access 21^st century satellite imagery and gave them the ability to calculate such watershed attributes as total surface area of the drainage basin, basin bifurcation ratio, stream length ratio, maximum and minimum watershed elevation, relief ratio, hypsometric integral, drainage basin asymmetry, transverse topography symmetry factor, stream length gradient, and mountain front sinuosity to assess the effects of active tectonics in the region. Viewing seafloor bathymetry through GOOGLE Oceans, helped them to identify Alaska’s tectonic plate boundaries along the Okhotsk Plate, Aleutian Trench, Yakutat Block, Fairweather-Queen Charlotte Transform Fault, and the Explorer Ridge-North American Plate-Pacific Plate Triple junction. Students also viewed periglacial and glacial landscapes located around the world and off planet using GOOGLE Mars.

High-resolution Gigapan composite images, were taken and stitched by the instructor, of local tectonic and glacially over-steepened landscapes. Students visited the sites during lab sessions and classified Juneau area landslides and avalanche path types by combining their field data with the enhanced features in the Gigapan images.