Exit glacier
Warning from a warming world
Hiking Alaska’s Kenai peninsula offers a physically challenging way to witness our warming world. I spent the past week with wife Karen, two old friends (both retired physicians) and a small group of new friends clamboring over rocky trails surrounded by lime-green lichen, red-orange fireweed and the low-rise alder trees that are the first plant life to grace the rocky outcrops revealed by retreating glaciers.
When I relaunched GoozNews nearly a year ago, it was my intention to expand my repertoire to include environmental reporting. Alas, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns noted on the eve of the industrial revolution, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Given Covid and the never-ending perfidies of the medical-industrial complex, my attention since relaunch remained riveted on health care — the issue I’ve covered as a writer and editor for most of the past quarter century.
But as I return to my computer after a few weeks away, the time has come to renew my vow. The galloping storms of an environmental crisis 200 years in the making have taken center stage in recent weeks: the never-ending forest fires ravaging California; the hurricanes flooding Texas, Louisiana and large swaths of the Northeast; the reservoirs in the Southwest falling to levels not seen since the dams creating them were built in the 1930s.
Alaska, often called the country’s last frontier, provides the slow motion view of global warming. As our excellent young guides from Backroads constantly reminded us, there are only nine highways traversing its 665,384 square miles (2 1/2 times the size of Texas and a fifth the size of the lower 48 states). Many of its coastal towns are only accessible by pontoon plane or boat. Glaciers (there are about 27,000 in the state) cover about 5% of its landmass.
Those glaciers are in rapid retreat. The 700 square-mile Harding icefield that sits atop the Kenai peninsula feeds 13 named glaciers. Though it’s been slowly retreating since the end of the last Ice Age 23,000 years ago, its surface area fell a staggering 5% between 1950 and 1985. That translates into a reduction each year of about 70 feet in thickness and 0.47 meters in elevation. In the 1990s, the elevation loss rate rose nearly 50% to 0.72 meters per year. Ice loss has been even faster in this century, as this marker on an observatory ledge overlooking the appropriately named Exit glacier shows.
While retreating glaciers do provide spectacular views and hiking trails, the more pernicious effects come from their contribution to rising seas. The world’s oceans are rising about 1.3 inches per decade. The expansion of their warming waters accounts for about 87% of that rise. Icemelt makes up most of the rest.
We’ve all seen dramatic pictures of gigantic icebergs breaking off from Antarctica and the rush of melting water falling off Greenland’s icesheets. But their contributions to ocean rise pale besides the melting glaciers of Alaska and western Canada. Our continent accounted for approximately 9% of sea level rise in the past half century.1
National Park Service map shows the icemelt from the Harding icefield between 1950 and 1990s.
No one has yet suggested pumping the water flowing off Alaska glaciers back onto the top of their icefields, a strategy suggested for Antarctia in sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel The Ministry for the Future. While some geoengineering scientists have suggested such projects might be feasible near the South Pole (a lot colder than Alaska), others have suggested the greenhouse gas emissions required to generated the energy for such a huge undertaking would far outweigh its benefits. Robinson, anticipating that criticism, predicted nuclear-powered submarines and ships would be used to generate the power.
Glacier Lake in Kachemak Bay State Park, looking toward the retreating Harding icefield
Of course, the easier solution would be to engage in a massive campaign to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which brings me to the current debate over President Biden’s $3.5 trillion plan. Most of the press has focused on the politics of convincing centrist Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support a far-reaching program.
One has to wonder, is Manchin’s objections about protecting the incomes of the 14,000 people who still work for coal mining companies in his state, or is it about the half million dollars he collects annually from his energy company stocks? If the former, he should propose guaranteeing every one of those people their current inflation-adjusted income for the rest of their working lives. The cost wouldn’t even come to a rounding error in a $3.5 trillion bill.
Okay, I digress. I’m back from Alaska and back to posting on GoozNews. In the weeks ahead, as this crucial debate unfolds, I will try to take a look at some of the technologies that may get a boost if the Democrats in Congress get their act together to pass a comprehensive Infrastructure II plan to deal with our ongoing and rapidly escalating climate crisis.
First fireweeds emerging near retreating Exit glacier.
http://npshistory.com/publications/kefj/harding-icefields.pdf (accessed Sept. 14, 2021).