Virtual Tours

Kennicott Glacier Virtual Interactive Tour

Kennicott Glacier Virtual Tour

Follow researchers around Kennicott Glacier on an interactive website virtual tour to learn how National Park Service staff monitor changes in the size of the glacier! Explore with the geologists and helicopter pilot at https://virtualice.byrd.osu.edu/Kennicott/

Thank you Dr. Michael Loso, Dr. Lia Lajoie, and helicopter pilot Leigh Coates. Thanks also to Dr. Tim Bartholomaus for providing the data to share, and to Kira Harris for building the interactive tour website!

 

Terrestrial LiDAR Scanning Project at Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark

Terrestrial LiDAR Scanning Project conducted by Joel Cusick, GIS Specialist from the NPS regional office, August 2017. The 3-D data collected provides precise measurements needed for the Stabilization Project of the mill structures.

 

Historic American Engineering Record photograph with high-definition laser scan data overlaid.

NPS

Alaska Park Science Volume 20 Issue 1 - Parks as Proving Grounds ARTICLE:

High-definition Laser Scanning for Documenting Cultural Resources, Kennecott Scanning Effort

In the fall of 2017, a pilot project was initiated by a multidisciplinary team, in partnership with Trimble, Inc. and local survey company Frontier Precision. The project sought to test the capabilities of two laser scanners at the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark (NHL) site, located within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The NHL includes the Kennecott mill town, a sprawling collection of structures built for the purposes of processing copper ore and sustaining a workforce necessary to accomplish this task in a remote location. Five objectives were set and prioritized for a three-day on-site survey: General survey and scan of (1) the mill building from street level, (2) the upper tram deck, (3) ore chute, (4) interior spaces, (5) and adjacent glacier. The mill site spans nearly 15 acres of complex terrain and provides generally narrow line of sight corridors, which required careful planning by the team to make the most of the time available on site.

The equipment being evaluated was the Trimble SX10 Scanning Total Station and the Trimble TX8 3D Laser Scanner. The remote setting of the location, combined with the scale and topography of the site, presented an interesting challenge and opportunity to put the devices to the test. While the SX10 excels at long range, the TX8 excels at speed and high-resolution scanning. By incorporating both units on the same project, the team was able to register and compare the resulting data while still in the field and present their findings to park staff.

The project resulted in a successful achievement of all five objectives, as well as a satisfactory evaluation of the benefits and drawbacks in certain applications for both devices (Figure 4). The pilot project also served as an extreme example of what a documentation project could attempt. The objectives were broad and ambitious by design in order to produce a widely applicable technique that could be adopted by a range of professionals and modified for various sites and scenarios.

Figure 4. Overview of the combined dataset for the Kennecott Mill Site. The overall site shown here is approximately 50 acres, with the mill site occupying approximately 15 of those acres. Data on the left side shows the scan positions and RTK (Real Time Kinematics) vectors for the site. The right side shows the scan data overlaid. This project was tied to real-world coordinates using Survey Grade GPS and a local Bureau of Land Management control network.