Taryn Black

Taryn is co-teaching the Earth and Space Research Summer Institute (ESR-SI) in 2025. She is a postdoctoral associate in the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, through a cooperative agreement with the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland, and works remotely from Seattle. She studies ice sheets and glaciers, focusing on satellite observations of how they are changing on various time scales. Currently she is using data from ICESat-2 to estimate Antarctic surface mass balance. She has also worked extensively in compiling and analyzing records of glacier retreat in Greenland and Alaska. Taryn has also participated in a variety of science education and outreach activities, including classroom visits, public lectures, and guided educational trips. She currently organizes a speaker series at a Seattle brewery.

Education:

Research Projects:

• Estimating ice sheet surface mass balance from ICESat-2 measurements.

Publications

For a complete list of publications, see Taryn Black on Google Scholar.

Moon, T., Cohen, B., Black, T.E., Laidre, K., Stern, H., and Joughin, I. (2024) Characterizing Southeast Greenland fjord surface ice and freshwater flux to support biological applications. The Cryosphere, 18, 4845-4872, doi:10.5194/tc-18-4845-2024.

Black, T.E. and Joughin, I. (2023) Weekly to monthly terminus variability of Greenland’s marine-terminating outlet glaciers. The Cryosphere, 17, 1-13, doi:10.5194/tc-17-1-2023.

Black, T. and Kurtz, D. (2023) Maritime glacier retreat and terminus area change in Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska, between 1984 and 2021. Journal of Glaciology, 69 (274), 251-265, doi:10.1017/jog.2022.55.

Goliber, S., Black, T., Catania, G., Lea, J., Olsen, H., Cheng, D., Bevan, S., Bjørk, A., Bunce, C., Brough, S., Carr, J.R., Cowton, T., Gardner, A., Fahrner, D., Hill, E., Joughin, I., Korsgaard, N., Luckman, A., Moon, T., Murray, T., Sole, A., Wood, M., and Zhang, E. (2022) TermPicks: a century of Greenland glacier terminus data for use in scientific and machine learning applications. The Cryosphere, 16, 3215-3233, doi:10.5194/tc-16-3215-2022.

Black, T.E. and Joughin, I. (2022) Multi-decadal retreat of marine-terminating outlet glaciers in northwest and central-west Greenland. The Cryosphere, 16, 807-824, doi:10.5194/tc-16-807-2022.

Spector, P., Stone, J., Balco, G., Hillebrand, T., Thompson, M., and Black, T. (2020) Miocene to Pleistocene glacial history of West Antarctica inferred from nunatak geomorphology and cosmogenic-nuclide measurements on bedrock surfaces. American Journal of Science, 320 (8) 637-676, doi:10.2475/10.2020.01.

Datasets & Code

Cohen, B., Moon, T., and Black, T. (2024) Glacial and fast ice distributions in southeast Greenland fjords (NSIDC-0796, Version 1). Boulder, Colorado, USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi:10.5067/GWJ0PLI2UF6E.  

Black, T. and Joughin, I. (2022) MEaSUREs Weekly-To-Monthly Greenland Outlet Glacier Terminus Positions from Sentinel-1 Mosaics (NSIDC-0781, Version 1). Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi:10.5067/DGBOSSIULSTD  

Black, T. and Kurtz, D. (2022) Satellite observations of maritime glacier terminus positions at Kenai Fjords National Park. NPS Integrated Resource Management Applications DataStore. Geospatial Dataset Code 2293309. https://irma.nps.gov/Datastore/Reference/Profile/2293309  

Goliber, S. and Black, T. (2021) TermPicks: A century of Greenland glacier terminus data for use in machine learning applications, Version 1. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.6557981  

Joughin, I., Moon, T., Joughin, J., and Black, T. (2021) MEaSUREs Annual Greenland Outlet Glacier Terminus Positions from SAR Mosaics (NSIDC-0642, Version 2). Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi:10.5067/ESFWE11AVFKW  

GitHub Repositories

• https://github.com/tarynblack/