Ken Tape is a PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks studying climate warming and landscape changes in the Arctic. Ken traveled to New Jersey to visit Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Chatham High School.
On 28 April Ken visited the AP Environmental Science, Honors Earth System Science and Concepts Earth Science students at Chatham High School. On 29 April he visited Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and met with faculty and students in the geography department. He also presented a seminar open to the university and public titled: "The Changing Arctic Alaskan Landscape." The seminar was followed by a reception. The seminar took place from 3:00 – 4:00 pm in the B120 Lucy Stone Hall, the public was encouraged to attend.
All of Ken's lectures focused around landscape changes in the Arctic including: the expansion of shrubs and the effect on herbivores (namely ptarmigan), fluctuations in the erosion regime, heterogeneity of vegetation change, and the implications of these changes to the broader arctic system. His work uses repeat photography to document expanding shrubs, migrating tree-line, shrinking glaciers, and deteriorating permafrost in the Arctic. He recently finished a book called, "The Changing Arctic Landscape" that highlights repeat photography in the Arctic. Repeated photographs can be interpreted by anyone, thus removing the complicated layer of interpretation that is associated with most measurements of terrestrial change. Students in New Jersey have very limited knowledge about the Arctic environment and the combination of photography and science was particularly appealing to the students.