Receding Glaciers

One of the biggest shocks in returning to Alaska was seeing how far the glaciers had receded. Not only had they receded but more visually obvious, they had thinned. If a glacier thins by say, 100 feet, that is 100 feet of ice that has melted away. However, rocks don’t melt and glaciers are laced with all the rocks that have been plucked from the bedrock by the gouging glacier or have fallen from the cliffs above. As the ice melts away, all the rocks once within that ice accumulate on the surface of the glacier. It is a shock to look on a valley that, in your memory, had curving white flows and see a vast field of black and gray rock instead.

I had read an article in the Wall Street Journal a year ago talking about how global warming seems to be accentuated in Alaska. But to see the change in the glaciers brought it home. At first I was caught off guard that significant geological change had happened during my lifetime. “Has that much time gone by?” Have I grown so old that glaciers have receded? There is a tendency, perhaps, when talking of millions of years to assume that the world we know will remain the same. Uplift of a mountain range of an inch or two a century is thought of as invisible to us. Yes, we know that the change is happening and that it will accumulate into significance over the eons but I tend to think of the accumulation as happening somewhere “out there”, not in the space of my lifetime. But it’s happening in my own lifetime. However, the other feeling is shock at how fast the change is happening. Climate change so dramatic stuns me. I’m stretched between two lines: a monetary bottom line trance state heavily invested in the momentum of the status quo and the awakening to the natural world that treats short-term financial gains as blink-of-the-eye aberrations that will be brought back in balance.