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(Reading...)
Glaciers are elders of the landscape
The rhythms of the mountains recorded by glaciers are cycles of climatic change
They are the annual rhythms of seasons
Climatic cycles spanning tens of thousands of years
The ultimate force shaping the mountains and causing change to land and life
Despite this power
the rhythms are imperceptible, the beat slow and complicated, but inexorable.
They can be seen and heard only by those who take the time
to look and listen for them
I've had the privilege and the resources as a geologist to listen and learn
I came here because my father had been
in Fort Lewis at the end of World War Two
and he told me that this was the wildest place left in the lower 48 states
My first real impression of the place
was kind of built on that drive over the pass and I was pretty humbled, pretty
awe-struck by it all
As a geologist I'm interested in glaciers I'm interested in
landslides, rivers and how they shape the landscape
Glaciers are extremely
sensitive to climate change because they're affected by temperature and
precipitation
So when climate changes, the glacier changes When the glacier changes, particularly when it gets bigger,
it leaves pretty
indelible marks of how big it used to be
The glaciers record
the cycles of climate change over many different time scales
and those are the rhythms that I spoke of in the book
The fact of the matter is that there is a lot
to learn from this place.
You know it is ironic that we use fossil fuels to monitor the glaciers
but spring avalanche danger and the weight of our gear require us to use helicopters in
this country in spring and fall
(Helicopter rotor sounds)
(Helicopter sound fades as ship departs)
(Silence... except for a light breeze)
I've never seen anybody else up here
never heard anything else. It feels to me like you're in a desert
The snow is sand and there's no
trees or vegetation anywhere
So glaciers form where it is cold enough for the winter snow to last through the summer
Year after year of snow piling upon snow eventually builds a glacier
We come in in the spring with a backpack mounted steam drill
that we use and it's got about a 12-meter long hose
and a fiberglass rod with a brass nozzle on it
It jets steam out at pretty good pressure, usually 20 psi or more.
And that will melt through the snow through last year's snow which we call firn
into the ice and in that we can drop these melt stakes
So our only job here today
is to measure the height of that stake which should give us
an idea how much melting has occurred since we put it in at the end of April
That is telling us what's happening in a near real-time basis
we're basically measuring how much snow the glaciers accumulate in the winter
and then how much that snow and ice beneath it that they lose in the summer
We remove these stakes because we won't find them next spring under thirty feet
of snow
and we need to break them into smaller pieces to get them into the helicopter
In many years
up but this higher part of the glacier we'll see 5 or 6 meters of melt
in a really warm sunny summer
Noisy Glacier is the lowest elevation glacier
in our 4 glacier network here and
we're at about 5,600 feet. The lower in elevation you are the warmer it
is and the more melting there is
and for Noisy Glacier it's now
cut off from the high accumulation zone to the south and
east of us. In many years when we come back at this time a year
what we're seeing is that there's no snow left on this glacier from the
previous winter
OK. And so as a result of no ice feeding into this glacier it's stagnating
Ok and it's just sort of melting in place. It's not being replenished by ice from
higher up.
So Noisy Glacier is probably
among the four that we're monitoring in this park is doing the worst
Climate change has the power to melt glaciers but it also has
the power to affect almost everything else in this valley including
lower elevations and my garden.
Well, the garden I started
you know I cleared the land made the fence because there's a lot of animal
pressure here
deer, bears, coyotes, bobcat
So I made a big fence and it took me a long time to build the soil up
and after that I built the orchard and I just built this pole building
The winters used to be a lot more severe in Marblemount a hundred years ago
Awfully cold and wet. Awfully big avalanches awfully big
piles of snow to shovel. I think you probably could have grown a garden here
but you know the season would have been a lot shorter
and this is a tough place to grow things because
when we get a really good accumulation of snow in the winter the
glaciers build a lot in the winter. Often that weather persists into May and June.
So when the sun normally is highest we have 30,000 feet of clouds.
Not only is that retarding the glacier melting its
limiting the growth of my garden.
Place is very important to me
Without a doubt. Getting your feet in the soil.
You know, sending some roots down and living close to the land.
To me that's a big part of a
fulfilled life is having some roots. Right?
(Reading)
Throughout this area glaciers have shrunk dramatically in the last century
The loss of these should not be taken lightly. As they melt we
lose a vital part of these mountains Obelisks of time.
Elders of the landscape. Glaciers add immeasurably to the North Cascades
In fact the modern cover of glaciers defines the region. Strung out like
pearls on the backs of the mountains. The 700-plus glaciers in the North Cascades
add greatly to the quality of lives by providing
challenge and inspiration as well as consistent run-off
for salmon, irrigation and hydroelectricity.
Apparently our glaciers will continue to wither in the heat of human consumption.
Part of my current job is to monitor the health
of four glaciers in the North Cascades. Noisy Glacier
is one of the glaciers we visit three times every year.
Since the late 1970's there have been few good years for this glacier.
The geologic records that I've been looking at
and some of the other records of temperature and climate that go back a
thousand years show there's been about
4 or 5 tenths of a degree Fahrenheit variation naturally in our
temperature over the last 1000 years. And
what we've seen since 1900 is an increase of about a degree and a half Fahrenheit.
So for me, I'm willing to accept that about a third of the warming we're seeing
is natural and the other two-thirds are likely caused by
humans and greenhouse gases.
So one of the things we like to do if there's snow left on the glacier is
is try to probe to last summer's surface
and this will give us an independent measurement on our melt.
We're headed that way
same elevation
I named my daughter after that mountain
middle name
Shuksan
These measurements of change in glacial volume are directly linked to
other research projects in the network of national parks in Washington
including the outburst flood study by Paul Kennard
and the ice velocity measurements by Laura Walkup at
Mount Rainier National Park.
The reason that alpine glaciers flow downhill is because they have so much mass
that they're being pulled by gravity downslope.
My research is looking at the velocity field
of the Nisqually Glacier and what we're doing is we're coming out
at the same time each week and we're surveying in the locations of individual rocks
that are either riding along on top of the glacier or even entrained in the glacial ice
And then coming back week to week we can calculate how much that rock has moved
and we can take all that data together and figure out what the velocity of the
glacier is
So the upper part of our survey zone is moving a little over two feet per day
and then the lower portions some are moving a couple inches
a day. So the front of the glacier is moving a whole lot slower than the
higher portions
One of the reasons that we care about this
is because the speed of the glacier can be related to whether or not the glacier
might kick out a glacial outburst flood and
that can cause a lot of flooding downstream
With climate change you have warming temperatures and you also have more
precipitation falling as rain rather than snow so the glaciers are shrinking
and the summer's warmer and the summer's longer
Then you'll get more melt which means that you have more water underneath the
glacier
that has a potential of being stored up and released
as an outburst flood.
It's going to be substantially warmer fifty or a hundred years from now.
If you think a people that live on an island in the Pacific
that's five feet above sea level
they're gonna lose a lot. They're going to lose their culture, they're gonna lose their land, they're gonna
lose everything
Now here locally what we're seeing is
less snowfall in the winter A rising winter snow line
and as a result of that tree line is rising. The spring melt season is
starting earlier and earlier
and basically with the loss of glaciers we're losing our water resources.
It's important to do this over a long period time in part because our climate
is so variable
If you just did this for 5 or 10 years you could get a pretty
different picture of what's been happening
The parks present a great opportunity because
not only do we have glaciers but a lot of our park systems are fairly well intact so
when we measure change it's easier to relate it to to the cause.
I think the Park Service has a pretty important role to play because
we do a lot of interpretation to the public and we're seeing these changes in the park
and so it's kinda natural for us to put those two together
and present this information to the public
and give them an idea of what's happening.
(Reading...) The rhythms of our lives may seem weak especially in the din of the city.
In these mountains the earth's rhythm is strong and its pattern is a big part of this place
and our lives in it. Glaciers and their creations remind us of our helplessness
in the face of ice ages and our dependence on the inter-glacial
climate for food for the development of our civilizations and cultures
Here the big ice ages dominate the rhythm at 100,000 year intervals
We exist dependent on the warmth between ice ages
Fainter less frequent beats remind us of other patterns to life here
Some come by the millennium others by the decade
but each is recorded in the glaciers in glacial landscape in the North Cascades.
They remind us of our past and give perspective to our future
Who wrote that?!