Joanna Young

University of Alaska Fairbanks · International Arctic Research Center

Inspiring Girls* Expeditions is a global organization that empowers 16-to 18-year-old youth through 12-day backcountry science and art expeditions, including in the US Arctic and Sub-arctic. Because science and outdoor fields are historically white-and male-dominated, Inspiring Girls* follows an intersectional approach to welcome youth with margina...

With a unique biogeophysical signature relative to other freshwater sources, meltwater from glaciers plays a crucial role in the hydrological and ecological regime of high latitude coastal areas. Today, as glaciers worldwide exhibit persistent negative mass balance, glacier runoff is changing in both magnitude and timing, with potential downstream...

The global climate crisis continues to endanger the well-being of natural environments and the people who depend on them. Building elements of environmental identity may better connect youth to the changes underway. However, little work has investigated how experiencing a climate change-impacted landscape may support environmental identity shifts....

Glaciers spanning large altitudinal ranges often experience different climatic regimes with elevation, creating challenges in acquiring mass-balance and climate observations that represent the entire glacier. We use mixed methods to reconstruct the 1991–2014 mass balance of the Kahiltna Glacier in Alaska, a large (503 km2) glacier with one of the g...

P-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data at 5 m resolution from Kahiltna Glacier, the largest glacier in the Alaska Range, Alaska, USA, show pronounced spatial variation in penetration depth, δ P. We obtained δ P by differencing X- and P-band digital elevation models. δ P varied significantly over the glacier, but it was possibl...

Like many remote mountain ranges in Alaska, British Columbia and the Yukon, the Central Alaska Range is a highly glaciated but relatively sparsely monitored region in terms of glacier mass balance and meteorological ground measurements. To date, long-term trends and balance gradients are poorly known, though these are of particular importance for c...

In Arctic, sub-Arctic and high-Alpine settings the ablation area of many mountain glaciers is rarely entirely temperate, and a cold near-surface layer of variable thickness, whose temperature remains below freezing throughout the year, can be found. This occurs when summer ablation rates do not melt the near-surface ice enough to remove the cold la...

This study will develop a set of modeling tools to provide estimates of melt evolution for the Kahiltna Glacier and glaciers of the Central Alaska Range (CAKR), over a number of future climate change scenarios. To parameterize the model, field measurements of mass balance and meteorological variables are being collected on the Kahiltna Glacier. The...