Cascade Glaciers Melting Faster - Blue Glacier (WA) Losing 65' Of Height Annually

[hatrack]

EDIT

When Army Lt. August Kautz first described the Nisqually Glacier as part of a trip to the summit in 1857, it completely covered the spot where Highway 706 now carries tourists over the Nisqually River on their way to the Paradise Visitors Center. Today the glacier's bottom section can't even be seen from there. Like all glaciers, the Nisqually is essentially a river of slow-moving ice. Instead of snow packs, which come and go every year, a glacier acts like a savings account. It stores water as ice, and lets it out slowly when it melts.

The trouble is that Washington's glaciers have increasingly been overdrawn. The Nisqually is no exception. Between 1913 and 1994, the Nisqually and an icy tributary, the Wilson Glacier, together shrank by 9 percent, according to a study co-authored by Fountain, the Portland State researcher. Since 1994 it has continued to shrink. The Nisqually is in no immediate danger of vanishing because it is so high on the mountain. But Stefan Lofgren, a Park Service climbing ranger who has been working on the mountain since 1992, ticks off other glaciers that have vanished, or are about to: the Stevens, the Williwakas, the Lower Paradise, the Van Trump, the glaciers on nearby Unicorn and Pinnacle peaks.

Even the snowfield around Camp Muir, the overnight stopping point for thousands of Mount Rainier climbers on their way to the summit, is shrinking. Lofgren predicts the entire 230-acre snowfield will be gone within half a century. It's happening all around the state's high mountain ranges. The total volume of the glaciers in North Cascades National Park fell by 8 percent between 1958 and 1998, according to one of Fountain's studies. That would be enough ice to fill Lake Sammamish more than twice. In the same period, only 2 percent of the glaciers in the North Cascades grew in size.

The South Cascade Glacier, a remote ice field near Glacier Peak, has shrunk almost every year since 1959, when the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began tracking it closely. In 2003, it was half the size it was in 1923, scientists estimate. On the north side of Mount Olympus, in the Olympic Mountains, the depth of ice on the Blue Glacier has dropped an average of 65 feet annually since 1987, according to estimates by University of Washington researchers.

EDIT

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003334195_glacier01m.html

[kestrel91316]

1. I guess I should garage sale my ice axe and crampons while

I can still get a few bucks for them. Soon there won't be anyplace left to snow climb.................