12A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 2016
Forum: Riedel’s research goes back to the last Ice Age
Continued from Page 1A
“Our water supply is
changing, and we have seri-
ous issues in Skagit Valley —
which is a really wet place —
over the availability of water
in the summer,” he said.
Climate change
casualties
Riedel’s audience gasped
incredulously as he compared
black-and-white photos from
the early and mid-20th cen-
tury of formerly majestic gla-
ciers to color photos taken
in the same sites within the
last several years. In many
areas, the glaciers have all but
disappeared.
“The data’s pretty clear
that the glaciers are show-
ing us the climate’s getting
warmer,” he said. “You can’t
do that to a glacier unless
you change the climate pretty
substantially.”
Glaciers and the habitats
— ¿sh, fowl, human — that
depend on them are becoming
a creeping casualty of climate
change.
In the past 100 years, the
North Cascades range lost more
than half of its glacier-covered
area, the Olympic Mountains
lost 52 percent, and Mounts
Adams, Baker and Rainier lost
49 percent, 30 percent and 22
percent, respectively.
“The glaciers are probably
smaller now than they’ve been
for 2-3,000 years,” he said.
Scientists project that the
lower-altitude glaciers, such
as those in the valleys of the
Olympic Mountains, will van-
ish within the next century.
In addition, many 3aci¿c
Northwest glaciers are slowly
sliding off their mountain
bases because of meltwater
lubricating the massive bod-
ies of ice.
Mount Rainier’s Emmons
and
Nisqually
glaciers,
for example, are moving
downslope roughly a meter
and a half per day, “which is
really fast for a glacier,” he
said. “It’s kind of a fright-
ful thing to think of if you’re
standing on that glacier.”
“In the 10 years or so that
we’ve been monitoring these
glaciers, they seem to be
accelerating,” he said.
Photos by Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
Jon Riedel, a National Park Service geologist at North Cascades National Park, talks about how they collect data during a talk at the Columbia Forum
on Tuesday.
‘A lot to lose’
Riedel — whose research
reaches back 30,000 years
to the last Ice Age — esti-
mates that roughly a quarter,
and possibly a third, of the
warming that’s occurred in
the last century is natural and
would have happened any-
way because of Àuctuations in
solar activity.
The rest is man-made.
“There’s a fair amount of
uncertainty, in some of these
valleys, about how fast the
glaciers are going to disap-
pear because we really don’t
know if we’re going to turn
the corner with carbon emis-
sions,” he said.
The slight changes in tem-
perature have already caused
huge transformations.
Snow and ice generally
reÀect sunlight back into space
without heating the atmo-
sphere. But once temperatures
rise, the snow starts to melt,
exposing dark rock. The rock
then absorbs the heat, which
makes the snow and ice melt
faster, exposing yet more rock
... and so on in a self-reinforc-
ing feedback loop.
“The changes that we’re
seeing in these glaciers are
really dramatic,” he said.
And the situation will likely
get far worse because the
amount of runoff isn’t ¿xed
As the glaciers melt further,
the water will run out to the sea
and won’t be fully replenished.
“That water’s gone,” he said.
And, as in Skagit Val-
ley, the reservoirs of moun-
tain freshwater, which trick-
les down in the summer when
it’s needed most, will gradu-
ally run dry.
“We have a lot to lose,” he
said.
National Park Service geologist Jon Riedel explains data that show the gain and loss of
ice each year at the North Klawatti Glacier in North Cascades National Park during the
Columbia Forum on Tuesday.
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