Melting Mountains

[powslut]

Recieved this in my inbox today...thought i'd share as it's relevent to all of us.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

[powslut]

As far as the water bank is concerned, glaciers that once pinched their
pennies now behave like Vegas high rollers. Even the mighty Athabasca, one
of the three major glaciers flowing from the 325-square-kilometre Columbia
Icefield, is beating a Napoleonic retreat. In the past century, it has given
up 1.5 kilometres of ground and lost one-third of its total volume.

In his 20 years as a mountain guide, Peter Lemieux, 48, has watched it
happen. In summer, he walks the Athabasca every day, and swears that the
walk is getting steadily shorter. To illustrate his point, he takes visitors
to a bare spot marked by a sign that reads 1982 and asks them what they were
doing back then. When they're done, he points out that 20 years ago
Athabasca would have towered 300 feet overhead.

A melting glacier is a strange sight. The surface of Athabasca, for example,
looks like something on another planet. Sharp as glass, it's pockmarked with
holes an inch across and two inches deep, filled with dust and soot. Streams
rush across the face of the glacier like bright blue veins.

Melting glaciers also can be dangerous, a lesson that Bob Sandford learned
the hard way. In 1970, he was a 20-year-old park warden walking across the
Saskatchewan glacier after an exhausting day's climb. One minute he was
standing upright and the next he was riding down a blue course of glacial
melt like a kid on a water slide. The cold current carried him to the lip of
a crevasse and then darkness swallowed him as, banging his legs and head, he
plunged down a tunnel of ice into the heart of the glacier, a trip few men
live to describe.

He scraped along a series of cascades to the bottom where he joined another
raging current. "Just as awe was becoming sheer terror," he recalls, the ice
began to glow queerly. It switched from pale green to light blue. The
current then whisked him out the snout of the glacier into the cold arms of
the North Saskatchewan River. He was, he still proudly claims, born again.

Three decades later, Mr. Sandford is an author and recognized authority on
the Rockies. He also led last year's Canadian celebrations in recognition of
the United Nations' International Year of Fresh Water, and describes glacial
decline as "something profound."

More than a century ago, the pioneers of Canadian glaciology felt the same
way. William, George and Mary Vaux were industrious Quaker siblings from
Philadelphia, who first visited the Rockies in 1887 and found themselves in
awe of the ice. They wrote glowing pamphlets for the Canadian Pacific
Railway and were the first to notice that Canada's glaciers were retreating.

They measured the impact of what they took to be natural causes on a number
of giants, but their favourite was Illecillewaet, largely because it was
near Roger's Pass, just a half-hour's walk from the comfort of a CPR hotel.
"But sorrowful to say," Mary Vaux reported in the Minneapolis Journal on
Dec. 24, 1898, "the distance is constantly becoming greater, owing to the
very rapid melting away of ice."

In the last decade of the 19th century, Illecillewaet retreated no less than
452 feet. Since then, it has barely stopped to catch its breath.

Two years ago, Henry Vaux Jr., the grandson of George Vaux and a well-known
California academic who studies the economics of water resources, returned
to the spot where his ancestors had lovingly photographed the glacier.

Looking at a black-and-white image from 1902 he had brought with him, Mr.
Vaux could hardly believe his eyes. Nearly two kilometres of ice had simply
vanished. What had been for his ancestors an easy stroll to the toe of the
glacier was now "a four-hour technical climb, and absolutely dramatic."
Where his ancestors had seen majestic layers of ice, he saw only bare rock.

Then, when he went to snap an up-to-date version of his family's Peyto
photo, what's left of the glacier barely made it into the frame.

Today, tracking the decline of Rockies glaciers is no easy task. The Vulture
glacier in Banff, once a continuous ice river, split into fragments in the
1950s. The Crowfoot glacier is so named because, like the bird, it had three
claws; now it's down to two. The Victoria glacier above Lake Louise is a
ghost of its former self, and Angel glacier on Mount Edith Cavell has split
in two.

In Yoho National Park, the glacial runoff has been so heavy that it has
closed the Trans-Canada Highway many times, and the Peyto, Robson and
Saskatchewan glaciers have wasted away to such a degree that they have spit
out debris that includes trees 3,000 to 8,000 years old.

In the Upper North Saskatchewan River basin, the ground occupied by glaciers
has shrunk to 10 per cent from 12 per cent, and so much ice has been lost
from B.C.'s Glacier National Park, home of Illecillewaet, that the runoff
could fill a container five kilometres high and five kilometres wide.

South of the border, ecologist Daniel Fagre sees even greater devastation.
He works at the U.S. Glacier National Park, which is tucked into the
southernmost part of the Montana Rockies near the Canadian border, and very much resembles Banff and Jasper.

In 1850, the park boasted 150 glaciers that occupied 99 square kilometres.
Today, it has only 26, covering 27 square kilometres, and may have to change
its name because soon they'll all be gone. "It's going to happen in my
lifetime," says Mr. Fagre, 51.

Originally from Minnesota, he has been studying Montana's glaciers for 11
years, and offers no easy solutions. Unlike animals and even plants,
glaciers can't pick up and move when the climate changes, he says. Admitting
that "there is nothing we can do, directly," he nonetheless hopes that
humanity at least recognizes that losing the glaciers amounts to a warning.
"Maybe we might get smart about our footprint on the planet and how to
manage it."

How profound are the implications? Celebrated climber Pat Morrow bemoans the
fact that drab rock is a poor substitute for the Rockies' signature
glacier-draped scenery, and Mr. Demuth predicts that industry will very much
regret the loss of alpine water.

But some of the fallout is less apparent. For example, Mr. Fagre predicts
that fir trees, invigorated by warm weather, will invade mountain meadows as
they thaw and dry up, crowding out wildflowers, berries and even iconic
creatures such as the grizzly bear. (As he puts it, "Not too many animals
eat trees.")

As the tree line chases the retreating ice up the mountainside, Mr. Sandford
adds, old climbing routes will disappear. "How can Canada have an alpine
club if there isn't any alpine?" he asks. Anglers fear that mountain streams
will loose their chill, prompting cold-loving trout and salmon to search for
cooler water in vain. Dry land will just get drier and many of our valley
forests will burn like matches on a plate.

On the Prairies, water-starved hydro stations will produce fewer kilowatts
and irrigators that once grew water-slurping crops such as alfalfa for
cattle feed may switch to drought-proof carrots, or simply find another job.

And David Schindler, Canada's foremost water expert, adds that glacial
melting has already decreased prairie river volumes so dramatically that
water quality as far away as Lake Winnipeg is at risk.

All this couldn't be happening at a worse time. Lake fossils and tree rings
reveal that droughts are pretty much a staple of western living and that the
prairies were settled during the wettest century in 2,000 years.

In other words, no politician has ever stared true aridity in the face. The
Great Depression was just a warm-up, and climate bookies now give the West a
40-per-cent chance of being hammered by a massive drought that could arrive
within 25 years and last as long as 45. At the same time, snowfall on the
Rockies' eastern slopes has declined by 20 per cent.

Many scientists predict that glaciers are about to become a cause célèbre.
Before long, we'll be talking about them, and the mighty rivers they once
fed, in the past tense. Children will trade cards of disappearing glaciers
photographed by the Vauxes, and politicians will dream waterless dreams.
Governments will fund more studies and prepare for shortages. Tourist
operators will pull their hair out, and someone will write a fine opera.

[powslut]

But just because it may be too late to save the water banks, no one suggests
standing still. Sustained reductions in greenhouse gases could conserve
important ice sheets in the Arctic and Greenland, and thwart other havoc,
such as wacky weather that destroys $12-billion worth of roads and power
lines every year in Canada.

As Mr. Demuth notes, "Any action that reduces greenhouse gases is a good
thing."

In his recent bestseller, Boiling Point, Pulitzer-winning journalist Ross
Gelbspan calls for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies and a stringent
efficiency standard that would rise 5 per cent a year. Both proposals are
glacier-friendly measures.

Mr. Gelbspan also acknowledges that it's pretty late in the day to avert "a
cascade of major and destructive impacts," but he adds that "we do not know
where on the trajectory of disintegration we stand."

Mountain man Jimmy Simpson believed that glaciers humbled people. In the
presence of stone and ice, he said, we should feel "the utter helplessness
and insignificance of ourselves."

Mr. Simpson died in 1972 at the age of 95. Since then, the Bow glacier,
which dominated the vista facing his front yard, has shrunk and disappeared
from view. The source of Calgary's drinking water has lost 25 per cent of
its volume.

Clearly, climate change has reversed old Jimmy's equation, and glaciers are
now the ones being humbled. Which raises a question: How much more ice has
to disappear before humanity realizes the true scope of its impact on the
world?

[Hayduke]

An interesting but saddening read.........before any fundamental changes are made that could reverse this process it will be too late. As a species we are selfish and stupid.

[Dr. Gaper]

An interesting but saddening read.........before any fundamental changes are made that could reverse this process it will be too late. As a species we are selfish and stupid.

And doomed by nature's cycles.

We will survive, as most viruses do.

[Mountain Freak]

I hear the glaciers on Rainier are really fading fast. It will turn that peak into a rock climb rather than a Mountaineering experience.

[Game Over]

We will survive, as most viruses do.

Beautiful.

[joshbu]

No one cares. Not skiers, or Canadians, or Canadian skiers. Go back and re-read the sledhead article in the past Powder for proof...

[Trackhead]

No one cares. Not skiers, or Canadians, or Canadian skiers. Go back and re-read the sledhead article in the past Powder for proof...

This is undoubtably true, we are all raging hypocrites in one way or another. Myself included.

We all want the 'other' guy to sacrifice to make the world a better place, but we are unwilling to sacrifice ourselves. Typical environmentalist sentiment.

Our years as a species are finite.

[seldon]

More articles from Stanford:
http://pgnet.stanford.edu/home/rta/c...id=33183371605

http://pgnet.stanford.edu/home/rta/c...id=33183371605