June 9th, 2026
The Columbia Icefield terrain model combines airborne LiDAR data, projection mapping, and glacier research to help visitors explore one of North America’s most important freshwater systems. The exhibit is now on display at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre in Alberta.
The first thing most people notice about the Columbia Icefield is the scale.
Standing beside the Athabasca Glacier along the Icefields Parkway, it’s easy to feel dwarfed by the mountains, the ice, the sweep of the landscape itself. But understanding the full extent of the icefield—what lies above and beyond those visible glacier tongues—is much harder from ground level alone.
The Columbia Icefield spans hundreds of square kilometres in the Canadian Rockies. From ground level, visitors can see the glacier tongues, but understanding the full extent of the icefield is much more difficult.
Keith Holmes remembers that feeling from a bike tour he did across Canada back in 2010. He rode the Icefields Parkway, stopped at the Athabasca Glacier, stood there looking up, and still couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing.
“You can kind of get the glacier tongues,” he said. “But the whole icefield above, I never really understood the scope of it.”
Years later, Holmes and his colleagues at the Hakai Institute would build something designed to solve that exact problem—and in doing so, create something Jim Elzinga, one of the founders of Guardians of the Ice, describes as unlike almost anything else in the world.
The result is a glowing 6-by-6-foot terrain model of the Columbia Icefield, now installed at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre. Using airborne LiDAR data, projection mapping, and custom-built visualization software, the installation allows visitors to watch glaciers retreat across decades, trace watershed boundaries, and see scientific data projected directly onto a physical landscape.
More than a static exhibit, it functions as a living map of a changing icefield.
Months of testing and refinement were required to align scientific data with the physical terrain model. Keith Holmes worked closely with collaborator Taylor Denouden, who developed the alignment software remotely from Edmonton, to ensure projected maps and imagery accurately matched the three-dimensional landscape.
Hakai and its research partners have been monitoring glaciers and snowpack throughout British Columbia and Alberta, including the Columbia Icefield, since 2014. The primary data source is laser altimetry data, or LiDAR, and high-resolution imagery collected by Hakai’s Airborne Coastal Observatory (ACO). The researchers also collected satellite imagery, glacier velocity measurements and records of glacier retreat stretching back more than a century. The data collected by the Airborne Coastal Observatory feeds into scientific literature and international climate reporting, but Holmes and his colleagues wanted to find a way to bring it directly to the public.
Airborne LiDAR surveys conducted by Hakai’s Airborne Coastal Observatory provide the high-resolution elevation data used to build the terrain model.
“We were collecting all this incredible data, but a lot of it was just sitting there, being used for academic purposes,” Holmes said. “We were looking for another outlet, a way to share it in a more meaningful way.”
The opportunity to develop a 3D model emerged through conversations involving glacier researcher Brian Menounos at the University of Northern British Columbia, Parks Canada, and Guardians of the Ice, the organization supporting educational programming and exhibits at the Discovery Centre.
Elzinga had long wanted something like this for the gallery. The exhibit had grown dated—a hand-painted plaster terrain model that had served its purpose but belonged to another era. When Menounos mentioned that Hakai had built a 3D model for another project, Elzinga immediately saw the possibility.
“I feel like we went from the 19th century to the 21st century,” he said.
Parks Canada felt the same way. Holmes quickly assembled a concept image showing what a modern projection-mapped terrain model might look like. The response was immediate.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, do it,’” Holmes recalled. “So we just started doing it.”
Taylor Denouden works on the assembled terrain model during installation at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre. Holmes describes the project as feeling more like building a giant set piece than a traditional science project.
The terrain model at the heart of the installation was built from airborne LiDAR data collected over years of glacier monitoring flights. Holmes designed the table dimensions specifically to maximize coverage of the dataset, fitting the surrounding peaks, valleys, glaciers, and the Icefields Parkway itself into a single coherent landscape.
The Columbia Icefield terrain model was divided into 36 individual blocks for printing before being assembled into a single three-dimensional landscape.
Turning that data into a physical landscape took 3 months of nearly continuous 3D printing.
The model consists of 36 interlocking blocks, each requiring two to three days to produce. Holmes’s collaborator Marc deMontigny at Toolpath Design, a cabinetmaker and fabricator with a talent for precision design, developed custom alignment pieces so each section would snap cleanly into place. Once printed, the sections were assembled, glued, sanded, painted, and mounted into a finished landscape weighing close to 200 pounds.
The completed terrain model travelled to the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre by U-Haul. Installation took two and a half days.
“It became much more of an arts-and-crafts project than I expected,” Holmes said. “There was glue everywhere. Ratchet straps. I ended up building a stretcher just to transport it. It felt more like building a giant set piece than a normal science project.”
The technical challenges extended far beyond the model itself.
Projecting imagery accurately onto an uneven three-dimensional surface required custom software, careful optics calculations, and constant adjustments to account for ceiling height, projector throw distance, and terrain exaggeration. At one stage, Holmes discovered the original ceiling measurements for the exhibit space were wrong, forcing last-minute design changes to ensure the projected imagery would fully cover the model.
Custom projection and alignment software was developed to accurately match scientific datasets to the physical landscape. The finished system allows glacier extents, watersheds, ice flow, and other information layers to be projected directly onto the model.
His collaborator Taylor Denouden, working remotely from Edmonton, developed the projection and alignment systems while communicating with Holmes through a webcam taped onto the projector in Holmes’s workshop.
“There were definitely moments where we were wondering if we were going to pull it off,” Holmes said. “But once we saw it align on the model, we knew it was going to work.”
The finished display cycles through 22 different visualizations over an 8-minute loop. Light moves across the terrain in shifting layers: glacier retreat from 1919 to the present day, projected changes toward 2100, ice flow velocity, satellite imagery, albedo data, and watershed boundaries. At times, the model glows softly in deep blues and whites, turning scientific datasets into something visitors can absorb almost instinctively.
Interpretive guides have been known to sit with the installation for an hour or two, working through every layer. Couples stop and talk quietly with one another, pointing things out.
One of the most striking visualizations shows the Columbia Icefield as a continental water source, where meltwater flows toward the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic oceans—a freshwater system feeding rivers that communities and ecosystems depend on far downstream.
For many visitors, that connection isn’t obvious until they see it mapped. Elzinga has watched the moment land.
One of 22 visualizations in the exhibit’s 8-minute display loop, this watershed layer reveals the Columbia Icefield’s role as a continental freshwater divide.
“Most people, if you ask them where water comes from, they’ll say, well, I get it from my tap,” he said. “When you put it in context that this is water that feeds millions of people—that’s a really big aha moment. That really connects people at a visceral level.”
The display doesn’t just show the glaciers themselves. It reveals the broader system they are part of, and how that system is changing.
“I think it really helps people understand the magnitude of the icefield and why it matters,” Holmes said. “You can see the glacier tongues from the highway, but it’s hard to understand the whole thing. The table helps with that.”
Because the model is software-driven, new satellite imagery and updated datasets can be added remotely. Holmes thinks of it as a living platform rather than a finished exhibit—one that can keep pace with a landscape that is itself moving quickly. Elzinga sees that flexibility as one
of its greatest strengths, ensuring the gallery stays current as the science develops and the icefield continues to change.
Holmes and Taylor Denouden installed the model at the Discovery Centre over two and a half days, arriving after a road trip in a U-Haul with no air conditioning—which Holmes noted, with some appreciation, was at least thematically appropriate given the cargo.
Projected imagery transforms the three-dimensional terrain model into an interactive visualization of the Columbia Icefield. The exhibit cycles through glacier extent, watershed, ice flow, and climate layers, allowing visitors to explore scientific data across the landscape.
When the gallery reopened, the reaction from partners was immediate.
“Their socks were knocked off,” Holmes said.
Elzinga is more measured, but no less direct. “I’d be hard-pressed to find anything like it anywhere else in the world,” he said. “At least, that’s what I’m telling everybody.”
After months of design, fabrication, testing, and installation, the Columbia Icefield exhibit was unveiled in the Glacier Gallery at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre. Pictured from left are Taylor Denouden, Keith Holmes, Roger Vernon and Jim Elzinga.
For Holmes, the proudest moment came on the last day of installation, before he drove back to Victoria. He returned to the table one final time and quietly signed his name underneath it.
It is, he said, a little like sending something out into the world. The projector will cycle. Visitors will move through. The icefield will keep changing. And somewhere under a glowing terrain model on the Icefields Parkway, there’s a name—from someone who wanted people to finally understand what they were looking at.
