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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JANUARY 1, 2022
State’s smallest glacier has
disappeared, observers say
Mount Thielsen is seen in October 2019.
Brooke Herbert/The Oregonian
By CARISA CEGAVSKE
The News-Review
Until recently, Oregon’s southernmost
glacier was on Mount Thielsen, an extinct
volcano mountain in the Cascade Range,
east of Diamond Lake in Douglas County.
But sometime over the past half decade,
Lathrop Glacier disappeared.
Anders Carlson, president of Oregon Gla-
ciers Institute, said Lathrop Glacier was a lit-
tle less than half the size of a football fi eld,
just 0.002 square kilometers in area. It was
Oregon’s smallest glacier.
The glacier formed two arms going down
steep chutes.
“It looked like a very vertical water slide
at a theme park, basically,” Carlson said.
Because of that, it collected avalanche
slides, storing snow “almost like soda cans
in a vending machine,” he said.
The area is heavily shaded, with very lit-
tle direct sunlight.
It was well set up to build a glacier in
what is otherwise a hot, dry place — from a
glacier’s point of view, anyway.
A pool at the east edge of the moraine at
the glacier’s bottom-fed Thielsen Creek and
formed a miniature ecosystem.
“A lot of little vegetation living in a very
lush setting that would not exist otherwise if
there was not a glacier there giving it water
all summer, when there’s no snow otherwise
around,” Carlson said.
There’s likely enough buried ice to keep
the creek going another 10 or 20 years, but
then it will dry up and the little ecosystem
will disappear, he said.
An old glacier
The glacier had probably been in exis-
tence hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
“Since the Romans or something like
that, there had probably been some kind of
glacier ice formed on that area there,” Carl-
son said.
But it wasn’t discovered until 1966, when
Ted Lathrop spotted it on a hike.
Lathrop died in 1979, but The News-Re-
view spoke to his nephew Ralph Nafziger,
who returned with his uncle to the Lathrop
Glacier in 1968 and returned again many
times in the years after that.
Nafziger worked as a geochemist for the
U.S. Bureau of Mines in Albany until 1996.
He also enjoys hiking.
“I’ve climbed mountains all over the
world and most of them had glaciers on
them,” he said.
The year before he spotted the glacier
on Mt. Thielsen, Lathrop had served as the
resident physician on an expedition to the
Juneau ice fi elds and learned something
about them.
So when he looked down the mountain’s
steep north slope, he was pretty sure that was
what he was seeing.
Nafziger, Lathrop and a U.S. Forest Ser-
vice district ranger took a closer look in
1968.
They followed the Pacifi c Crest Trail,
climbed up to a ridge and looked right down.
“It was a sheer drop, almost 90 degree
drop. We were all young. We rappelled down
to the ice on the glacier,” Nafziger said.
A glacier must be, by defi nition, moving
ice. So they set up some stakes to measure
the movement.
The next year they returned and found
there was movement. But all their stakes had
slid down and were lying in a pile at the bot-
tom of the glacier.
Since the glacier was clearly too steep to
measure its exact movements with stakes,
Nafziger resolved to return regularly and
photograph the glacier to record its changes.
“We had to get there just at the right time,
because if we got there too early there was
still snow to be melted off the ice, and we
couldn’t get an idea of how big it was. If
we got there too late, then the new snow
started,” he said.
Some years there was new snow as early
as Labor Day. Other years it was the end of
October.
He learned that over time, the glacier was
shrinking. In 2016, the last year he saw it,
there wasn’t much of it left.
Nafziger can’t climb anymore for health
reasons, so he never saw it after that.
The exact date of Lathrop Glacier’s
demise isn’t known. But in 2020, when the
Oregon Glaciers Institute visited the site
again, it was gone.
So what was the culprit in Lathrop Gla-
cier’s disappearance? The chief suspects,
according to Carlson, are climate change
and the brutally hot summer of 2015.
It’s likely, he said, that they worked
together to melt Lathrop.
The Cascades have grown signifi cantly
warmer overall thanks to climate change.
The summer average has risen between 2
and 3 degrees Fahrenheit since the early
1990s.
“It’s dramatic warming that is not being
seen at lower elevations,” Carlson said.
As it gets warmer, the snowpack melts
out earlier.
Then came the summer of 2015. It was the
hottest summer on record in the Cascades.
The extra warm summer was due in part
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to it being an El Niño year.
Then, too, there was “the Blob,” a “weird
warm water mass” off the coast of Oregon
that both warmed the air and blocked the
snow, Carlson said.
That year had the lowest snowpack ever
on record.
With Lathrop’s disappearance, the state’s
southernmost glacier is now the Crook Gla-
cier on Broken Top Mountain west of Bend.
Could come back
While Lathrop Glacier has disappeared,
this doesn’t have to be the end of its story.
Portland State University professor
Andrew Fountain’s lifelong love of snow
and ice turned into a 40-year career study-
ing glaciers.
He said small glaciers like Lathrop often
disappear one year and reform in another.
“I’d be very surprised if it hadn’t hap-
pened before. On a good snow year I could
see it coming back,” he said.
Still, he said, 15% of the glaciers in Ore-
gon and Washington state have disappeared
since the 1950s, and climate change is the
“dominating force” in why that’s happened.
Fountain said he recently submit-
ted a study to the Journal of Geophysical
Research that suggests the glaciers of the
Olympic Mountains will largely disappear
by 2050 or 2060.
Oregon will still have some glaciers then,
but a lot of them will be gone, he said.
“It only dawned on me a couple of months
ago that, wait a minute, maybe in 50 years
nobody will be reading my papers because
there’s nothing to read about,” Fountain said.
Carlson predicted Lathrop could come
back if humans stop contributing to climate
change.
“We could start cooling down again if we
could reduce greenhouse gases in the atmo-
sphere. The state wants to grow glaciers, and
it wants to have snow,” he said.
With a cooler climate, the rain would turn
to snow and the snow would stick around
long enough to form a glacier.
“It’s not a done deal yet. We could go
back, and the glaciers will regrow,” he said.
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