Traveling climate exhibit reaches Fairbanks library

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU/KTVF) - A series of displays showing the effects of climate change is currently showing at the Noel Wien Public Library in Fairbanks after traveling to a series of locations across the U.S., including California, Missouri, and South Carolina.

The exhibit also just wrapped up in small Southeast Alaska community of Wrangell.

The exhibit, which is spread across the inside of the library, was developed in 2019 and discusses topics related to climate change, including rising sea levels, thawing permafrost, and the chief causes of the changes being seen.

The exhibit asks visitors to share their own experiences with climate change by writing about them on notes.

The traveling exhibit is being put on by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a consortium of universities that help to manage the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and is involved with research and study of earth systems.

It opened at Noel Wien on April 4 and is scheduled to continue there until May 16.

Becca Hatheway, Director of the UCAR Center for Science Education, said the goal of the display is to help people learn more about how our world is changing.

“We want people to learn more and understand the impacts that we’re experiencing based on changing weather patterns around the country and the world, and how that’s affecting people, plants, and other animals,” Hatheway said. “What people are doing about it, how we can be more resilient, things that we can adapt to and change.”

She explained that for each location visited by the display, a locally-focused panel is added.

“We co-create that panel with people in the community, both at the exhibit host location as well as other community members that the host location introduces us to, so we work on that in the months ahead of when it gets installed in that location, and we want to tell stories from that community about how people are being impacted by climate change and changing weather patterns,” Hatheway added.

The exhibit next heads to Talkeetna from May 26 to July 4, then to Homer from July 16 to Aug. 29, before capping off its Alaska tour in Anchorage from Sept. 6 to Nov. 2.

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