Curriculum
Students receive six (6) upper-division semester units for “Field Research Experience in Earth and Climate Sciences (ERS 499) from the University of Maine. Our faculty is available to support the transfer of these credits to students’ home colleges or universities.
Our curriculum explores climate-related changes to landscape processes, including glacier retreat, animal migration shifts, Arctic “greening,” permafrost thaw and consequent hydrological changes, and shifts in seasonal cycles. We see these as complex systems difficult to model or predict, linked by the flow of material and energy across wide temporal and spatial scales. Focus includes local ecology, geophysical processes, glaciology, complex system modeling, and land management in changing historical contexts. Local narratives and stories are important, as are seminars on readings.
When in McCarthy, we learn alongside guest instructors from around the region and take part in community events and workshops. In the backcountry, we use natural history field journaling and sketching techniques as tools to understand landscape processes occurring from rapid to geologic timescales. We travel across glaciers and through boreal forest into high mountain tundra, taking routes through striking terrain to reach sites for student projects. Climate change impacts to local landscape structures and processes, and to related social-ecological systems, are unifying themes we return to throughout the course.
Our surroundings are characterized by dynamic biophysical evolution, where ecosystem and Earth system processes are evident. We learn through direct experience with the land and from observations “in the field,” through a combination of faculty-led exercises and site-talks; natural history field journaling and sketching; and small-group student final projects over the course of the three-week backcountry trip. These final projects are presented in McCarthy at the end of the program.
We build a collaborative learning community, in which observation is a daily practice and critical thinking is supported. Academic emphasis is on the research process and context, and on the value of viewing systems through multiple ways of knowing. We engage with faculty and guest instructors intimately familiar with this place through their research and professional work, participation in regional stewardship and climate adaptation planning, and involvement in community governance.
We are nested in a small and remote community, in which people value and rely on interdependence and collaboration. Personal growth can be achieved in places like this through building trust, dialogue, and mutual support with peers.
The Landscape
From McCarthy, we trek up the glaciers and into the surrounding mountain terrain. The location is ideal for studying biophysical change on and along glaciers during climatic shifts past and present. We focus on the flow of material and energy through a landscape in disequilibrium. Landscape structures include sediment-covered and bare ice glaciers, rock glaciers, hydrological systems, permafrost, alpine tundra, boreal forest, and sites of human habitation. The Kennicott Valley reveals 230 million years of evolution and transformation at multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Along the glacier margins, we observe deglaciation and ecological succession, processes most evident following the 1860 Little Ice Age maximum. We see how older moraines indicate the extent of previous glacial highstands. Landslides, cliff faces, and massive sediment transport by rivers and ice demonstrate tectonic uplift, denudation, and ecological adjustment to unstable conditions.
Exposed metamorphosed basalt, limestone, and shale sequences reveal processes occurring during the geological formation of western North America, including island arc and oceanic plateau formation and migration. Marine fossils reveal the age and oceanic source of sedimentary rocks. Effects of ongoing Yakutat microplate collision with North America show in the volcanic high peaks at the head of the Kennicott Valley and in igneous facies, dikes, and sills; and in the ~2000 meter uplift of the terrain around McCarthy, exhumed by Pleistocene glaciations to form the present pattern of peaks, plateaus, and U-shaped valleys.
Ecosystems show adaptation to this instability and to seasonal extremes of productivity and energy imported from elsewhere by terrestrial and aquatic migrations. Human relationships to the land are part of landscape processes, and like our other systems of focus, they reverberate across space and time. Articulating links between these systems across temporal/spatial scales can be considered the “meta-narrative” of the program, our constant guiding framework.
