why are alaska glaciers melting

Things have gotten bad enough that glaciers are practically on the edge of extinction. Usually less than 6 degrees Celsius, water in LeConte Bay is warm relative to the ice, and even other fjords around the world. All the while, meltwater tumbles past in swift, cold rivers – destined for the ocean. “A pretty large percentage of the ice that flows into the ocean is melted away by the warm ocean water,” says Amundson. In April 2019, an international research team estimated the world’s mountain glaciers, which do not include the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, lost a hard-to-fathom 9,000 billion tons of ice over the past 50 years. Only 50 of approximately 100,000 glaciers in Alaska are tidewater glaciers, and they’re some of the biggest. One of the world's thickest mountain glaciers is melting because of global warming. Calculating how fast a glacier melts requires more finesse than measuring a melting ice cube in a glass of water. As glaciers shrink, the melting is disrupting habitats for everything from bacteria to fish. More than mere sources of beauty, they now represent a collapsing connect people to the seriousness of climate change. Rignot said one of the theoretical models, used for 20-30 years, was known to be a simplified version that didn’t work perfectly. Specifically, since the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions have raised temperatures, even higher in the poles, and as a result, glaciers are rapidly melting, calving off into the sea and retreating on land. 1. Meanwhile, a third study of Melting Glaciers. Sliding glaciers ‘a new threat’ as global warming melts ice. has worked on public lands issues for many years and is a founding member of the Prince William Sound Stewardship Foundation. Melting has left these slow-moving rivers of ice, while still far enough north that they get the snow necessary to form very large glaciers, The tributary located high above Pedersen Glacier separated from it … The study also found that melt rates are higher in the summer than in the spring and that changes in the melting rate can lead to undercutting and uppercutting eating away at the glaciers. Every year, seemingly incalculable torrents of meltwater poured into the sea. As it dies, Yakutat Glacier will increase the number of glaciers in Alaska. prominent displays linking the glacier’s retreat to climate change and “Visitors are taught that the glacier is disappearing because of Among the most worrisome of all climate change impacts, rising seas threaten to displace millions of people from coastlines across the globe. The extremely well-preserved frozen bodies of … Sometimes that meant the boat suddenly had to retreat from the face of the glacier, while scientists crossed their fingers that the equipment wasn’t sheared off into the water. Abstract. as it can help people understand and perhaps act upon the growing climate emergency. Carbon dioxide emissions are one big culprit. Glacial ice accelerates as the ice approaches the front of the glacier, where it drops into the ocean, said Moon. Today, scientists are attempting to put hard numbers the amount of meltwater flowing from Alaska’s glaciers. GLACIERS OF ALASKA. Several processes of melting happen at a tidewater glacier, which is why scientists tackled the melting mystery from multiple angles. Too much ice in front of the glacier means “the boat can’t push through the ice,” says Rignot. The ice was certainly receding, but the glaciers were still sprawling The concerned experts claim the catastrophic event could even … On Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, the Argentière Glacier has receded 1,150 m (3,770 ft) since 1870. Oceanographers then had to know how quickly the sonar traveled through the fjord water to make accurate calculations. spectacular, much diminished. Among the most worrisome of all climate change impacts, rising seas threaten to displace millions of people from coastlines across the globe. The success of the new method “opens the door for researchers to do this all over the world,” says Sutherland. In this light, Alaska’s glaciers stop being mere wonders of the world, “A considerable amount of ice that gets pushed out into the ocean melts right there where it’s in contact with the ocean…so that glacier is actually losing a lot of mass due to that melting,” says Enderlin. Other Mont Blanc glaciers have also been in retreat, including the Mer de Glace, which is the largest glacier in France at 12 km (7.5 mi) in length but retreated 500 m (1,600 ft) between 1994 and 2008. Pedersen Glacier's terminus has retreated more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles). © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, © 2015- BRUCE F. MOLNIA. Ice near the glacier face can move almost 75 feet per day and knowing this speed is essential to calculate melting. That can be difficult to disentangle from natural melting, though. Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images. Here’s what to see now, and how. heat—including 90-degree temperatures Europe. Students at Petersburg High School near LeConte Bay started collecting data about the position of the glacier’s terminus in 1983. human-caused climate change,” says John Neary, the visitor center’s former It is the easiest glacier to visit in Southeast Alaska, and one of the most popular glaciers in the state. This stunning short film examines the glacier’s dramatic impact through the voice of local guide Rick Brown. A view of Denali National Park, Alaska, on September 1, 2015. “As more precipitation falls as rain throughout the year [in coastal Alaska], they’ll continue to be an important player in sea level rise.”, “Visitors are taught that the glacier is disappearing because of human-caused climate change.”. “These glaciers aren’t getting lost that fast…they’ll be around for decades to come,” says Sutherland. But a warming climate accelerates glacier melting across the globe, potentially through melting across the surface of the glacier, but also through underwater melting. Burning Questions about Glacial Ice. Simultaneously, a team of glaciologists camped on a ridge overlooking the glacier. Publishes Quarterly in February, May, August, and November. Today’s visitors to Alaska find a landscape transformed, with raw mountainsides only recently stripped of their ice. The really cool part of the new method, said Sutherland, is that you can pinpoint the exact location where higher melt occurs. And then you have this submarine melting that occurs wherever the ocean touches the surface of the glacier. Specifically, insight from the research at LeConte Glacier in Alaska could be used to study glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. them. “Submarine melting may matter everywhere,” says Enderlin. Glaciers Are Melting Underwater. Researchers pegged Alaska as the largest single contributor to the melting. “They’ve really discovered that the melt that’s happening is fairly dramatically different from some of the assumptions we’ve had,” says Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder who was uninvolved with the study. ANCHORAGE, Alaska Melting glaciers are not just impacting sea level, they are also affecting the flow of organic carbon to the world’s oceans, according to new research that provides the first ever global-scale estimates for the storage and release of organic carbon from glaciers. Glaciers are popular destinations for tourists, but access to them is changing fast as they recede. “I’m hopeful that it can make people understand that the future of ice is not set in stone,” she says. Warmer temperatures cause glaciers to melt faster than they can accumulate new snow. A visitor center operated by the U.S. Forest Service is open year-round with spectacular views and interactive exhibits, plus you’ll find great hiking to waterfalls and overlooks for photography. One of the USA's tallest glaciers is melting at the fastest pace in 400 years, a new study reports. I say this as someone who has witnessed the change up close. This more systemic outlook on glaciers is important to adopt, say some experts, The center’s 500,000 summertime visitors find From the 80-foot MV Stellar, oceanographers performed sonar surveys underwater, like the ones used to measure ocean depths. By. When a plume of freshwater from surface melt enters the fjord, it hits the fjord close to the glacier face. Later in the season, the warmer water increased the underwater melting. Copyright 2019 YES! but it was peripheral to the experience and seemingly too far-off for alarm. naturalists trained to navigate the challenges of discussing the topic with the Scientists are racing to understand the changes. His writing has appeared in Hakai Magazine, The Revelator, The Hill, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. I began as a young Forest Service naturalist at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center in Juneau, where my first experience with glaciers was all about wonder and adventure. and mighty, filling valleys of their own making. pushed rivers toward flood stage. of more open dialogue about climate change at the Mendenhall. but they’re also at that southern Arctic edge where we see so much change from Climate change was discussed, And it is forcing us to think differently about What's happening now? underestimating the speed of their melting. The melting caused rivers to flow out of their banks and all that meltwater poured into the ocean. Yakutat, near the Alaska town of the same name, is a withering glacier that calves into a deep lake of its own making. It is expected to contribute to famine, conflict, and other human migration crises in our lifetime. In a new study published today in Science, a team of oceanographers and glaciologists unpeeled a new layer of understanding of tidewater glaciers—glaciers that end in the ocean—and their dynamic processes. warming.”. That was never truer than this past summer, when record-setting Wendy Gillette reports on the warming climate in Alaska and the melting of that state’s many glaciers (2:12). LeConte was an ideal glacier to study because it is really accessible for a tidewater glacier, Sutherland said. public. “When you aren’t wishing for better weather…it was a pretty awesome place to be,” says Sutherland. Alaskan glaciers published in 2019 suggests scientists may still be A complex environment, the project required so many lines of data that teams of oceanographers and glaciologists collected data simultaneously at the glacier. If you want to explore them before they’re gone for good, don’t wait too long. The studies attempt to put tangible numbers on just how much Alaska’s melting glaciers affect global sea levels. But the planet’s warming became a much more immediate concern for me in the ensuing years, as I watched the ice calve away. Alaskan glaciers primarily experience surface melt, since so few end in the ocean, said Rignot. At visitor centers, they can watch the change unfold on time-lapse videos. If you turn the knob of climate up, like with climate change, says Sutherland, you increase the temperature of water and air and you will certainly get more melting. As the summer sun beat down, more meltwater flowed beneath the glacier and into the ocean, pushing the relatively warm seawater against the submerged face of the glacier and melting it. It could affect predictions for sea level rise. Scientists repeated their observations during two summers, obtaining multiple scans each trip. Dangling super-expensive instruments over the side of the boat could sometimes be tense. While pioneering new techniques, Before this summer, it was the last major glacier in the Juneau area to remain stable in the modern era. But a warming climate accelerates glacier melting across the globe, potentially through melting across the surface of the glacier, but also through underwater melting. Glaciers form where more snow falls than melts over a period of years, compacts into ice, and becomes thick enough to begin to move.That is, a snow patch becomes a glacier when the deepest layers begin to deform due to the weight of the overlying snow and ice. Tidewater glaciers, like this one in Alaska, experience underwater melting 100 times faster than scientists previously estimated from theoretical models. In this research, too, Alaska’s glaciers emerged as the top source of meltwater, with up to half of their mass expected to melt in the coming years. The Wolverine Glacier on the Kenai Peninsula south of … 2020 National Geographic Partners, LLC. 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