The Disappearing Giants: A World Without Glaciers

[Social Media]

 

Gideon Brosowsky had always imagined glaciers to be immense, awe-inspiring masses of ice, the kind he had seen in movies like “Titanic.” But when the incoming high school junior arrived at Alaska’s Juneau Icefield during a family cruise in August, reality struck him with a wave of disappointment.

 

Expecting to see something colossal, he found himself staring at what he described as a “small, dinky piece of ice” perched on a mountain. He had trouble even recognizing it as a glacier, especially after seeing historical photographs in local museums that painted a much more dramatic picture of the landscape just two decades ago. “I was in disbelief,” Brosowsky recalled. “I was assuming global warming is starting to eat away at these glaciers little by little, [but the pace was] a lot faster than I expected.” The thought that this once-majestic glacier might disappear entirely within a few decades left him stunned.

Unbeknownst to Brosowsky, while he lamented the shrinking glacier before him, at least 64 other glaciers in the Juneau Icefield had already melted away since 2005. For years, scientists have been warning that glaciers are melting, a visible consequence of our warming planet. But now, many glaciers have already vanished. Venezuela, for instance, became glacier-free this year after losing its last glacier.

 

 

New Zealand has seen at least 264 glaciers disappear. In the western United States, about 400 glaciers have been lost since the mid-20th century. In Switzerland, researchers have counted more than 1,000 small glaciers that have melted away. East Africa now has less than two square kilometers of glacial ice left.

 

Throughout history, glaciers have occasionally disappeared, particularly in mountainous regions, but the rate of glacier loss has skyrocketed in recent decades. This rapid acceleration has melted many small, often nameless glaciers, leading scientists to grapple with a critical question: When does a glacier lose its label as a glacier? The disappearance of these glaciers signals the onset of a long-dreaded phase of global warming: glacial collapse.

 

Much like cataloging extinct species, scientists are now, for the first time, mapping the glaciers that have vanished worldwide due to climate change. This effort has resulted in a living list of dead glaciers, a grim reminder of the ongoing effects of global warming.

 

In August 2019, around 100 people made a two-hour trek to the top of an Icelandic volcano to attend a funeral. The glacier they came to mourn, Okjökull, had once been known as the "Ok glacier." It had reduced to a thin, stagnant piece of ice five years earlier, becoming the first glacier in Iceland to disappear because of climate change. Despite its significance, there was little recognition at the time. Years later, however, some people wanted to commemorate its loss in a more visible way. Dominic Boyer, a cultural anthropologist at Rice University, co-produced a documentary about Okjökull and helped organize the glacier’s funeral with his colleague Cymene Howe. Boyer was intrigued by the paradox that Iceland, a country named for its ice, was now losing its glaciers. 

 

The mourners said their goodbyes with moments of silence, poetry, and speeches about the need to combat climate change. Children at the site installed a memorial plaque that recorded the atmospheric carbon dioxide level at the time: 415 parts per million, about 20 percent higher than in 1979. The plaque also carried a message for future generations: "This moment is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."

 

A few weeks after the Okjökull funeral, another group of 250 people gathered in Switzerland’s Glarus Alps for a similar event. They had come to mourn the Pizol Glacier. Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss, who had visited the Pizol Glacier more than 50 times, saw the glacier begin to fragment after a particularly warm year in 2018. By 2019, he no longer considered it a glacier. While it’s uncommon for glaciologists to attend funerals for their subjects of study, Huss acknowledged that the event, organized by the Swiss Association for Climate Protection, was an “interesting ceremony to commemorate the disappearance of this glacier that also [brought] quite some public interest.”

 

These ceremonies served not only as a way for communities to connect with the frozen relics of their past but also as a wake-up call for scientists, prompting them to start documenting these extinct glaciers.

 

The funeral in Iceland, for example, inspired glaciologists to go beyond merely assessing glacier retreat. It pushed them to begin counting dead glaciers as well, said Howe, an anthropologist and professor at Rice University. While scientists don’t know exactly how many glaciers have disappeared across the globe, some groups have begun creating inventories to get a better understanding. Last year, the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) database, a premier resource for tracking glaciers, added an “extinct layer” that includes a little more than 150 extinct glaciers, primarily in the United States and Europe.

 

In August, Howe and Boyer launched a Global Glacier Casualty List, which displays 15 extinct and endangered glaciers around the world, including in South America, Asia, and India. Some of these glaciers aren’t even included in the GLIMS map. Andrew Fountain, a glaciologist at Portland State University, started the first inventory of glaciers in the western United States and estimated that at least 400 glaciers have disappeared since the mid-20th century. Huss, who estimated that 1,000 glaciers have been lost in Switzerland alone, extrapolated that perhaps 10,000 glaciers might have been lost globally. Chinese glaciologists estimate that their country has lost more than 8,000 glaciers by itself.

 

As scientists work to track these changes, they must also determine when a glacier ceases to exist. During his family cruise in Alaska, Brosowsky listened as his guide pointed out slabs of ice around Glacier Bay. Some were unmistakably large, magnificent glaciers, but others appeared to be mere ribbons of ice. “It’s kind of rude to the real glaciers, in my opinion, if we’re calling everything a glacier like that,” Brosowsky joked.

 

Not all ice qualifies as a glacier. By definition, a glacier is essentially a moving river of ice formed from years of snow compaction. The movement of this ice, flowing downhill, is often too subtle for a person walking over it to notice, but scientists can measure the flow with instruments, according to Fountain. If a glacier becomes too small and stops moving, it’s no longer considered a glacier. The scientific term for such stagnant ice is “dead.” When an entire glacier is declared dead varies depending on the region, with size and flow thresholds differing across countries. Technicalities aside, there are more obvious signs that glaciers are starting to fall apart before our eyes.

 

For the past 41 years, glaciologist Mauri Pelto has visited the Ice Worm Glacier in the Mount Daniel-Mount Hinman complex in Washington every year, witnessing its decline firsthand. The small glacier lost mass gradually until around 2015, a year marked by a warm summer and relatively low snowfall. Starting in 2021, however, an unprecedented series of warm years accelerated the glacier’s decline. Pelto began to see rock appearing at the bottom of the glacier, with holes forming in the ice, resembling Swiss cheese. In 2023, he declared that it was no longer a glacier. Just a year earlier, he had witnessed the disappearance of the larger Hinman Glacier — after thousands of years, all that remained were a few patches of snow and ice. “The end happened so fast,” said Pelto, a professor at Nichols College. “Whether it’s a pet or a person, they get near the end, a lot of things can happen really fast.”

 

Pelto has personally witnessed the disappearance of 31 glaciers in the Pacific Northwest, although he believes there are many more that have gone undocumented. He expects another glacier in the Mount Daniel-Mount Hinman complex, the Foss Glacier, to lose its status as a glacier this year or next. For scientists, documenting extinct glaciers often feels existential. “A thought occurred to me that in a few decades’ time, nobody will read my papers because why bother? There are no glaciers,” said Fountain, comparing glacier inventory work to documenting dinosaurs. “I’m documenting what was.”

While it’s theoretically possible for extinct glaciers to grow back, the reality is far less hopeful.

 

In the Pacific Northwest, Pelto explained that snowfall would need to increase by at least 20 percent on average for many years, coupled with cooler summers, to reverse the trend. Considering that Earth has been experiencing record-breaking heat for over a year, such a scenario seems unlikely. “The ongoing disappearance of the smallest glaciers is not something we can just turn around, even if we stop [carbon dioxide] emissions today,” Huss said. “It’s too late for the small glaciers.” However, he added, it might not be too late for the bigger ones.

 

Credit: W.P. 2024-08-27

 

 

 

Get the ASEAN NOW daily NEWSLETTER - Click HERE to subscribe

[Freddy42OZ]

One of my good friends is an award winning documentary filmmaker, he made the film "A Plastic Ocean" that won several major awards.

He's made a documentary about the World's glaciers that you can watch here - https://thelastglaciers.com/