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SSC professor shows satellite images of changing Earth

By Amanda McGregor
Staff writer
Published: March 25, 2008

SALEM — Stephen Young has lived in the forests of China and the Alaskan tundra, pursuing his fascination with Earth, its climate and its vegetation.

"When I was 17, I went camping in the Catskills, and I looked out over the Hudson River and saw a brown haze," he said. "I remember thinking, 'Something is wrong here.'"

In his 20s, he moved to southwest China and directed an ecology study while living in alpine forests and rainforests. Years later, he lived in Australia, studying the tropical forest there.

Now Young, who heads the geography department at Salem State College, uses satellite imagery to study changes in Earth's vegetation. His most recent project was just unveiled in an exhibit in the college's Winfisky Gallery called "The Earth Exposed."

In four incremental images, Young details what Salem Harbor will look like if climate change causes ocean levels to rise. At 10 meters (illustrated in the fourth image), the ocean has swallowed the Salem power plant, all that remains of the Salem Willows is a speck of an island, and Pickering Wharf has vanished. The city's new shoreline is Salem Common.

"Talk about disruption to the economy," Young said. He said that if all of Greenland melts, sea levels will rise 7 to 8 meters. "People often say, 'When's this going to happen?' It's hard to say. Changes are happening faster than recent predictions."

Before Young prints satellite photos, he spends hours combining, layering and colorizing images. The Salem Harbor series took him 80 hours over five months, starting with the first digital elevation model to the final product.

"Google Maps has something very crude with sea level rise," he said. "This series is as accurate as you can be given the current data."

"Satellite images are my Playboy," Young said with a laugh, gesturing around his exhibit filled with views of Earth taken from space. "The Earth is absolutely beautiful."

Worldwide exhibits

Young, who is 48 and has a long, graying mustache, has been teaching since 1995 at Salem State College, which has a state-of-the-art digital geography lab that was recently renovated. He lives in Swampscott (up on a hill) with his wife, Tara Gallagher, and three sons, Dylan, 13, and Nathan and Joshua Young, who are 9-year-old twins.

He organized his first satellite image exhibit at Salem State 10 years ago. He's had 12 exhibits since in the United States and abroad, and he will host an exhibit in Tunisia in northern Africa this August.

In the current exhibit, another wall of the gallery features a picture Young created by sewing together 100 images of Earth into a whole-Earth view of vegetation, full of vibrant greens and bright browns.

"I am partly dyslexic, so I had trouble reading," he said, "so I was always into visuals. I always saved my money to buy nice 35 mm cameras. I have a wall filled with boxes of slides."

Young has a master's degree in environmental studies from Yale and a doctorate in geography from Clark University. Scientific observations and predictions of climate change alarm him.

"We live in an oblivious oasis," he said, his brown eyes turning serious. "I mean, really ... a student here studied the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro — 70 percent have melted in the '80s and late 1990s."

He said this region has been spared to date from drastic changes like the unprecedented ice-shelf melt in Greenland and the Arctic. Still, he sees change.

"I was hiking in Salem Woods this year at the end of October, and plants were blooming everywhere," Young said. "They shouldn't be doing that."

Cape Cod from space

A satellite image of the Grand Canyon — rough and veiny, marked by black spots that indicate old lava flows — is featured in the exhibit. Nearby hangs a large picture of Cape Cod, its curled arm viewed from space.

"Cape Cod has got to be the most beautiful physical feature," Young said with excitement. "From space, it really is just pretty gorgeous, and the scale and the size of the spit is amazing."

An image of Iceland looks like a psychedelic painting of swirled rainbows.

"I call that the Timothy Leary school of remote sensoring," he said, referring to the late icon of 1960s counterculture and psychedelic drug experimentation.

In the Salem Harbor series, Beverly's coast isn't swallowed as drastically as Salem's, and Marblehead is at a higher elevation and fares better.

"I did this to help people visualize the future we're headed toward," Young said. "We're on a trajectory."

If you go

r What: "The Earth Exposed"

r Where: Winfisky Gallery in the Ellison Campus Center, Salem State College

r When: Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., or by appointment. Open through April 10.

r Admission: Free

r Questions: For more information or directions, call 978-542-7890 or visit www.salemstate.edu/arts

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