Measuring and melting glaciers in Alaska

I've been offline the last two weeks to do a volunteer vacation/vacation in Alaska. As Stoat has mentioned somewhere, volunteering is a great way to ignore your air travel emissions, and this was the third time I've done it by taking GPS measurements of glaciers.

The photo above isn't photoshopped, btw, nor is it my natural complexion. The electric blue lighting inside glacial ice has to be seen to be believed. That photo wasn't inside the glacier we measured though, but a glacial iceberg we recreated in, near Valdez in an outfall lake. As you can see from the photo after the jump, we wouldn't be able to get inside the glacier we measured except by unfortunate accident. Since my niece accompanied me this time, I was somewhat determined to make sure that wouldn't happen.

So this is the glacier we measured, a source glacier for the Teklanika River in Denali National Park. The snow bank at bottom left hangs off the terminus, despite all the rock debris. It continues all the way to the ridgeline horizon, although the bedrock outcrops in the middle show the glacier's about ready to melt down into two smaller glaciers. Only the widest connection is glacial ice, I think, the rest just looks like snow bands.

We walked up to the cirque you can barely see just below that connection, taking measurements along the way. Half of that cirque and almost all of the rest of the bottom glacier has already lost its snow cover, before July. This bottom glacier is doomed. Still, it's helpful to get ground measurements, and walking a centerline like we did might get the actual researchers a little closer to mass measurements. You have to backpack to get to these glaciers, so we vactioneers can save some time for the researchers.

I was a little disappointed not to measure other glaciers, but a sow grizzly and two cubs were in the way on the previous day. I argued to my family team that we could get around them, but apparently I was unpersuasive (and this was before the unfortunate mauling in Yellowstone).

Great vacation otherwise - I used to work in Alaska, and I love getting back. A boat trip from Valdez by the Stan Stephens tour was slightly marred by a captain who pointed out two glaciers that haven't retreated while failing to mention the retreat that's happening generally. One of them was a tidewater glacier, a type that goes through cycles mostly unrelated to climate.

All else was fine, though, and I just need to get caught up.

The European Glacier Weight Loss Diet, in pictures

A dieting company that could post this many Before/After pictures would make millions.

I found this in a comment on a denialist blog - the other commenters said it should be ignored. Best possible response.

Asking the wrong question about Al Gore's lifestyle

I disagree with criticism by Stoat and many others about Gore's "jet-setting" lifestyle, consisting of his riding commercial airplanes to give presentations about global warming, and occasional travel to exotic locations to see the effects of warming.

First and less important, Gore buys offsets to balance his carbon footprint, a fact noted by Stoat's commenters. Stoat makes a legitimate point that Gore might have addressed his lifestyle in his movie, but in turn, any critique of his lifestyle should also address his attempt to fix the problem.

There are questions about the effectiveness of the offsets, but it's unlikely that they're completely useless. I expect the market for voluntary purchases of emission credits will be driven by quality, and chintzy frauds will find themselves exposed by their competitors. Early adopters speed up this process. And yes, the whole world can't buy carbon offsets. I really wish that were the problem we face right now, though - we'd be in a much better shape if it were.

But more important than offsets is the better question to ask of Gore - whether he's doing the best possible job of reducing emissions overall (another issue noted by a Stoat commenter). I suppose that instead of travelling to presentations, Gore could stay home and do them by live teleconference feeds. He'd then get less than half the people to attend, and there would be no movie that has now been seen by millions worldwide. Overall, emissions would be worse.

Travelling to the South Pole is a somewhat closer question, but it has its justifications. One of the few things I remember from reading Earth in the Balance fifteen years ago was Gore's description of flying over the Amazon treetops in a tiny plane, watching clouds develop from the moisture of the rainforest. Instead of travelling there, he could've reproduced a conversation about the rainforest that he had with some professor, but bozos like me would retain no memory of that lesson. Eyewitness testimony is much more memorable.

Of course I've got my own biases, having travelled on two volunteer vacations to Montana and Alaska related to global warming. I certainly have less justification than Gore in travelling - millions of people won't learn about melting glaciers from me. I probably could have done more about global warming from home than by adding a tiny amount of data by lugging a GPS unit around glacier edges. But I'm imperfect, not a saint, and would not have spent my two-week vacation writing letters to the editor. Given the alternative, it was pretty good. Given how Al Gore chooses to spend his time compared to the vast majority of the elite, what he does is more than pretty good.

UPDATE: Stoat's response is here.

A Glacier vacation

So I'm back from a very nice, not-at-all relaxed, two-week vacation. I ended up spending a week in Glacier National Park in Montana, helping (or pretending to help) two friends and their co-workers doing field research. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one friend is with the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, doing field work and analysis of glacier retreat. The other is a botanist at the park. As a general comment, the right-wingers who say government workers are lazy should try keeping up with these folks; it sure wasn't easy for me.

So: the first day, we did repeat photography of Grinnell Glacier from the summit of neighboring Mt. Gould. This is the same picture posted in Real Climate's first posting on glacier retreat, and a "poster child" of climate change. Of course, to do the picture you have to GET to the summit of Mt. Gould, and you need to do it before the afternoon shadows eliminate the light. We went from 5700' to 9500' in 2.5 hours, much of it off-trail on loose, sliding rock. You can see the contrasts between 1938 and 1981 photos here (scroll to near the bottom), and NRMSC has taken additional photos they also plan to publish. Ours were the first since 2001 - alot of retreat has occurred in just four years.

Next day, the glacier people were in the office, so I went out with my botanist friend and her co-worker, who are building a database of plants found at randomly chosen sites throughout the park. We ended up at two sites where a glacier had recently retreated; the database will be helpful for current research and for future researchers who can return to the locations to see what has changed over time.

Third day was a late start up for three of us up to a ranger cabin near Sperry Glacier. The next day we crossed a pass near Sperry Glacier and one person went off to do more repeat photography. The other two of us took ice axes, put on crampons, roped up and went on to the glacier to find stakes that had been drilled in to the glacier. We found all of them and measured the ice that had melted in just one month. I'm not sure what I should say here because I believe they plan to publish their results, but I can say there was an impressive loss of ice - that glacier is thinning quickly. We could see the "firn" area, the area of remaining winter snow that would become glacier ice. A healthy glacier needs roughly 60% firn coverage to be stable. I'd say that Sperry had less than 20% coverage now, and will have still less in the future with increasing temperatures.

After measuring stakes, we walked the bottom margin of the glacier with GPS units, creating a line that can again be used for comparison in the future as the glacier retreats. I'd guess the bottom margin was a mile in a straight line, and it took us about four hours - the bottom of a retreating glacier is anything but a straight line, and none of it is on a trail. By the end of the day, the weather already started to turn. We got back to the cabin, and the other two decided to do a forced march out in the rain and fading light. I decided to enjoy the cabin and left the next morning, walking through several inches of fresh snow.

The weather was expected to stay bad for a week, cancelling the high-altitude field work. So I changed plans and went south. I had a nice, brief visit with science blogger Kevin V from no/se/nada in Missoula (first blogger contact that I've actually met in person). Then did a few day hikes in Yellowstone, a four-day backpacking trip in Grand Teton National Park and the Jedediah Smith Wilderness, and drove back home to the Bay Area.

I've got more to say but I'll save it for later posts. I had a great time doing a volunteer vacation, and would encourage other people to do the same. Personal connections sure are helpful, but sheer persistence can also make a connection. Virtually every American national park has a Volunteer in Parks program; that's one way to get started.


key: science, global warming