Melting
Once, there were 29. Now at least one is gone, maybe three. Those that remain are almost half the size they used to be.
Mount Rainier is losing its glaciers. That is all the more striking as it is the most glacier-covered mountain in the contiguous United States.
It doesn’t look as if it’s losing its glaciers from down here in Seattle. It still looks like a giant ice cream cone. But appearances can deceive.
Mountain glaciers are vanishing as the burning of fossil fuels heats up Earth’s atmosphere. According to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, total glacier area has shrunk steadily in the last half-century; some of the steepest declines have been in the Western United States and Canada.
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In a stable climate, glaciers dance to the rhythm of the seasons. They grow every winter with snow and ice. They melt every summer, supplying chilled water to the creeks and rivers downstream, and the plants and animals that rely on them, in the dry season.
Climate change has upset that balance. Spring snowpack has declined since the mid 20th century. Temperatures have gone up. Even when the winter snow is good, an unusually warm spring melts the snow quickly, as it did this year.
So long Tahoma.
When I was an undergraduate, roughly 1965, I accompanied a Zoology grad student to the Nisqually Glacier, then a very short hike from the highway bridge. We were collecting ICE WORMS, yes, literally little black annelid worms that live in the “permanent” snow… I returned to the site just a few years ago, and of course the glacier had melted back a mile or so, just about out of sight from the highway. There may yet be iceworms there, but I doubt they will make it to the next century.
Did you mean to use your name? I reverted to initials in case, will change back if instructed.
A mile is a lot of melting.
The last time I climbed Rainier (about a decade ago) the Emmons glacier (one of the largest) was almost entirely “dry” by August, which was unusual. (A dry glacier is one with no snow cover on it.) This made climbing the route extremely treacherous and painstaking, to a degree that I swore not to climb it by that route ever again. My previous ascent by that route, just a few years earlier at the same time of year, had been uneventful. I haven’t seen any recent pictures but I imagine the halfway camp there, Camp Schurman, is now ikely a shooting gallery of volcanic bowling balls from the nearby cliffs that were formerly frozen in ice most of the days.
Many of NZ’s glaciers are low altitude and close to the coast. When precipitation falls as snow they grow, and when it falls as rain they shrink. Most over my lifetime have shrunk, many dramatically so. Last year I went and stood where the tongue of one glacier had been when I was about 10 and couldn’t even see the current terminal face as it had retreated around the end in the valley and was still quite a walk away. The Tasman glacier near Mount Cook has also retreated dramatically as well as thinning. This has resulted in a new glacial lake forming. It’s also destabilised the lateral moraine resulting in removal of at least one hut and increasing risk to users of the access track (which was once a road). For glaciers like Fox or Franz Josef, while there are periodic advances, each retreat has been further and the glacier thins each time.