Recieved this in my inbox today...thought i'd share as it's relevent to all of us.
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Hi All,
Just wanted to let you know we will soon be launching the Melting Mountains
website (not yet active www.MeltingMountains.org
<http://www.MeltingMountains.org> ) and announcing the Melting Mountains
presentation schedule throughout BC and Alberta this fall and winter. Also,
I wanted to highlight Andrew Nikiforuk’s article in this weekend’s Globe and
Mail and Explore Magazine (Sept issue).
Please distribute to your mountain friends.
For more information on the upcoming Melting Mountains Awareness Program
please email: info@meltingmountains.org
Thanks
Chris Joseph
Rocky Mountain Meltdown
The famous glaciers of Banff and Jasper are disappearing at such an alarming
rate the experts are kissing them all good-bye. ANDREW NIKIFORUK says the
big alpine thaw is being felt around the world -- and doing a lot more
damage than just spoiling the view
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, Sep 18, 2004
By ANDREW NIKIFORUK
In 1898, a soft-spoken remittance man and mountain guide named Jimmy Simpson
followed the Bow River, which flows through Calgary, to its origins in Banff
National Park. Smitten by the Bow glacier and its glorious lake, he leased
five acres from Parks Canada and in 1922 built a home facing the great river
of ice.
As an inveterate trekker, Mr. Simpson could see that the glaciers in the
Rockies were retreating and breaking apart. In 1952, when he was 75, "the
grand old man of the mountains" predicted that they would melt out "in not
much more than 100 years." He forecast that Lake Louise would become
"a big muddy sinkhole" and that both the Bow and Saskatchewan rivers wouldn't be able to float anything bigger than "a good-sized shingle."
A half-century later, I decided to see just how much of a prophet he was.
One morning in July, I set out for Peyto, about 90 kilometres north of Lake
Louise. It's one of Canada's more carefully studied glaciers, so I assumed
it would be easy to find. Wrong.
When explorer Walter Wilcox first photographed Peyto in 1886, its tongue
extended for several kilometres, almost licking the shore of emerald-painted
Peyto Lake. I started from the lakeside observation point, but even after
tramping down the slopes of an old spruce forest, across a boulder-strewn
plain, up a gorge roaring with the sound of its runoff, the glacier was
nowhere to be seen.
Only after crossing a log bridge, scrambling up a moraine, climbing for
another kilometre and entering a broad alpine bowl did I finally spy it: a
gnarly and unhealthy block of ice not much more than a kilometre long and
gushing like an open fire hydrant.
In just a couple of decades, Peyto has lost 70 per cent of its volume and
bled 3,000 years' worth of stored water. It has packed its bags and is ready
to leave. Jimmy Simpson was a prescient fellow after all.
The average Canadian doesn't think a lot about glaciers, but for millions of
westerners this inattentiveness will soon end.
We may see these huge masses of ice, formed by the compacting and
re-crystallizing of snow and driven down a slope by their own weight, as
permanent features of the landscape and eternal sources of fresh water. But
scientists say climate change is shortening radically the lifespan of Peyto
and its 1,300 relatives on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Global warming
has made them like big ice cubes on a hot sidewalk. My grandchildren may
never see one.
The decline threatens the Prairies' agriculture-based economy as well as the
drinking water of major cities such as Edmonton, Calgary and Saskatoon. And
the phenomenon is hardly limited to North America.
The world is slowly waking up to the fact that all glaciers -- the source of
half of its population's drinking water -- are slipping away.
Those in the Swiss Alps could be gone by 2050, causing great disruption to
tourism, irrigation, hydro production and even the cooling of nuclear
reactors. In the Andes, glacial wasting away has already created water
crises in Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. And in the Himalayas, entire villages
have been moved to escape flooding from glacial lakes.
Twenty-five thousand years ago, glaciers blanketed most of Canada, and,
according to some rough estimates, the country still houses about 44 per
cent of the world tally. In terms of total coverage, we have about 298,000
square kilometres of ice, of which the Rockies' glaciers account for more
than 38,000 square kilometres. This puts us behind only frigid Greenland and
Antarctica, but it's a distinction that Mike Demuth of the Geological Survey
of Canada doesn't think we'll keep for long.
At 43, Mr. Demuth is Canada's leading glaciologist, a former rock climber
who last year wrote a disturbing paper on climate change's impact on the
glaciers of the Rockies' eastern slopes. He concluded that glacier cover in
western Canada has reached its lowest point in 10,000 years,
and the ice-fed rivers are in steep decline.
Much as Jimmy Simpson predicted, Mr. Demuth expects that, in 25 years,
late-summer water flow in the Bow, an essential thirst quencher for
Calgarians, will have been cut in half. The water supply, he says, has
already lost much of its "reliability," and he suggests that prairie parents
take their children to a glacier soon and tell them just how it acts as a
"water bank."
Glaciers store water with an incredible economy, he explains. Every winter,
there are repeated deposits when it snows in the mountains. Over time, the
layers of snow form an interest of compressed blue ice. In the heat of
summer, some of these savings are withdrawn just when everyone, from city
dwellers and hydro stations to bull trout, need them most.
As long as enough snow falls to replace the summer melt, the glacial
accounts remain balanced. But Peyto now collects only
about one-sixth of the snowfall it received annually from 1955 to 1976. At the same time, the melting rate has nearly tripled. "Everything is thinning," Mr. Demuth says.
This shrinkage began to happen naturally in the 1850s as the Little Ice Age
came to an end, he notes. But man-made events clearly are to blame for the
rapid decline of the past 30 years. One-quarter of Peyto's dramatic retreat
has come since 1966 and is "on par with what we would expect from the
greenhouse effect."
For nearly 10,000 years, the atmosphere's level of carbon dioxide (like most
greenhouse gases, CO{-2} is a natural heat trap and formidable ice eater)
remained constant at 280 parts per million. But because of the generous
emissions of the fossil-fuel industry, the volume of greenhouse gases
started to rise quickly in the 19th century. Now, the CO{-2} level -- 379
parts per million -- is almost double what the atmosphere contained when
glaciers covered most of the Earth. Bubbles of ancient air trapped in
Antarctic glaciers clearly show the planet hasn't experienced this level
since a hot spell 420,000 years ago.
Records show that, in the past century, average mountain temperatures have risen a full degree. As a consequence, winters rarely get cold enough to
give the glaciers a good freeze, and summer temperatures no longer drop
enough at night to interrupt the melt.
