Bad weather was good for Alaska glaciers
MASS BALANCE: For decades, summer snow loss has exceeded winter snowfall.
By CRAIG MEDRED
cmedred@adn.com
(10/13/08 23:08:04) Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008.Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August.
“In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound,” said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. “On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.
“In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.”
Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.
“It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance,” Molnia said.
That’s the way a scientist says the glaciers got thicker in the middle.
Mass balance is the difference between how much snow falls every winter and how much snow fades away each summer. For most Alaska glaciers, the summer snow loss has for decades exceeded the winter snowfall.
The result has put the state’s glaciers on a long-term diet. Every year they lose the snow of the previous winter plus some of the snow from years before. And so they steadily shrink.
Since Alaska’s glacial maximum back in the 1700s, Molnia said, “I figure that we’ve lost about 15 percent of the total area.”
What might be the most notable long-term shrinkage has occurred at Glacier Bay, now the site of a national park in Southeast Alaska. When the first Russian explorers arrived in Alaska in the 1740s, there was no Glacier Bay. There was simply a wall of ice across the north side of Icy Strait.
That ice retreated to form a bay and what is now known as the Muir Glacier. And from the 1800s until now, the Muir Glacier just kept retreating and retreating and retreating. It is now back 57 miles from the entrance to the bay, said Tom Vandenberg, chief interpretative ranger at Glacier Bay.
That’s farther than the distance from glacier-free Anchorage to Girdwood, where seven glaciers overhang the valley surrounding the state’s largest ski area. The glaciers there, like the Muir and hundreds of other Alaska glaciers, have been part of the long retreat.
Overall, Molnia figures Alaska has lost 10,000 to 12,000 square kilometers of ice in the past two centuries, enough to cover an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Molnia has just completed a major study of Alaska glaciers using satellite images and aerial photographs to catalog shrinkage. The 550-page “Glaciers of Alaska” will provide a benchmark for tracking what happens to the state’s glaciers in the future.
Climate change has led to speculation they might all disappear. Molnia isn’t sure what to expect. As far as glaciers go, he said, Alaska’s glaciers are volatile. They live life on the edge.
“What we’re talking about to (change) most of Alaska’s glaciers is a small temperature change; just a small fraction-of-a-degree change makes a big difference. It’s the mean annual temperature that’s the big thing.
“All it takes is a warm summer to have a really dramatic effect on the melting.”
Or a cool summer to shift that mass balance the other way.
One cool summer that leaves 20 feet of new snow still sitting atop glaciers come the start of the next winter is no big deal, Molnia said.
Ten summers like that?
Well, that might mark the start of something like the Little Ice Age.
During the Little Ice Age — roughly the 16th century to the 19th — Muir Glacier filled Glacier Bay and the people of Europe struggled to survive because of difficult conditions for agriculture. Some of them fled for America in the first wave of white immigration.
The Pilgrims established the Plymouth Colony in December 1620. By spring, a bitterly cold winter had played a key role in helping kill half of them. Hindered by a chilly climate, the white colonization of North America through the 1600s and 1700s was slow.
As the climate warmed from 1800 to 1900, the United States tripled in size. The windy and cold city of Chicago grew from an outpost of fewer than 4,000 in 1800 to a thriving city of more than 1.5 million at the end of that century.
The difference in temperature between the Little Ice Age and these heady days of American expansion?
About three or four degrees, Molnia said.
The difference in temperature between this summer in Anchorage — the third coldest on record — and the norm?
About three degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Does it mean anything?
Nobody knows. Climate is constantly shifting. And even if the past year was a signal of a changing future, Molnia said, it would still take decades to make itself noticeable in Alaska’s glaciers.
Rivers of ice flow slowly. Hundreds of feet of snow would have to accumulate at higher elevations to create enough pressure to stall the current glacial retreat and start a new advance. Even if the glaciers started growing today, Molnia said, it might take up to 100 years for them to start steadily rolling back down into the valleys they’ve abandoned.
“It’s different time scales,” he said. “We’re just starting to understand.”
As strange it might seem, Alaska’s glaciers could appear to be shrinking for some time while secretly growing. Molnia said there are a few glaciers in the state now where constant snow accumulations at higher elevations are causing them to thicken even as their lower reaches follow the pattern of retreat fueled by the global warming of recent decades.
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Well then, let us hope the glaciers don’t start advancing. That could mean a much colder and hostile climate than that which we’ve been accustomed to for the past couple hundred years.
“In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.”
Wait. I thought AGW was “bad.” If AGW is bad then this last summer was the BEST in the last 20 years.
“It’s different time scales,” he said. “We’re just starting to understand.”
Bit of a coincidence though – 200 years since the invention of the AC unit.
2 centuries after the discovery of pepperoni. 20 decades of gas fired power stations. The 2400 month anniversary of the first nucular submarine sorties to the North Pole.
Seriously though, that’s 6.66666* times a permissible trend so we only have to wait another 29 years.
Seems very un-hysterical does mr Molnia in the article on glaciers.
Why are the Elite Global Warmers making this up? Any ideas from those who agree!
The article clearly acknowledges the warming and retreat of glaciers has occurred over the last 200 years. Finally some recognition in what appears to be a mainstream press article, that the warming started long before humans started burning serious amounts of fossil fuel. It begs the obvious question – could it be a part of a natural cycle?
The other major acknowledgement is that the warm period since the LIA helped in the growth and development of the US. Maybe, just maybe, warmth is a good thing.
Hummm,
I just re-read the Anchorage story. Ya know these poor people need to come south more often. They have no concept of how to use words like “climate change” and “global warming”. In this context, they are (incorrectly) using climate change to signify a – get this – change in climate. They use the discarded term “global warming” to indicate the earth has warmed in the recent past. Obviously not with the in crowd. And not one word on CO2 – how could they have forgotten that!
Seriously, one of the most balanced stories seen to date. Kudos to the reporter who actually attempted to pass along some of the science and theory behind what’s going on. If all reporters were as sharp as this one, maybe one could actually believe what appears in the mainstream media.
Mike
hi,but the “albedo” effect?
[…] Read more click below link http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/14/alaska-glaciers-on-the-rebound […]
hi,but the “albedo” effect?
Neva Niagra?
Well according to the folks in New Zealand (as of Christmas 2006) both the fox, and the Franz Joseph glaciers are advancing; although over the long range (200 years) they have been receding as a result of emergence from the last ice age.
And as for the singinficance or desirability of it getting colder; nobody seems to get the big picture; that the emerging science is establishing that the Arhennius 150 year old explanation of “Global warming” via the CO2 mechanism; is quite wrong; which does not mean that CO2 doesn’t produce a greenhouse effect; but that it is completely overridden by the effect of water, which as a vapor causes positive feedback warming (without any need for a CO2 trigger), but as a liquid or solid (clouds) produces negative feedback cooling. (via albedo enhancement, and ground level insolation reduction).
Only water as a GHG exists in the atmosphere in all three phases, to produce such a temperature regulation mechanism.
Other effects, such as CO2, aerosols, Cosmic Rays, Solar magnetism, volcanic ash, etc simply readjust the equilibrium amount of cloud cover to regulate the temperature at some new cloud cover percentage, and mean global temperature.
Direct solar radiation is absorbed mostly deep in the ocean (73% of area), and takes a long time via convection to return to the surface. However reradiation of Earth IR from atmospheric GHG including water, is absorbed in the top 10 microns of the ocean, and causes immediate prompt evaporation which eventually produces a higher percentage cloud cover.
Total global evaporation has to equal total global precipitation, and precipitation equals clouds, and dense clouds at that, which block sunlight.
So why is this important? Well if CO2 is not the devil incarnate; which it isn’t; despite the IPCC and Al Gore; then suddenly the USA can be completely self sufficient in energy in the future since we have more usable fossil fuels than anybody else on earth.
So I say let it freeze till the IPCC and Al Gore decide to tap out, and call off their scaremongering scam.
This is what really confuses me. I know people don’t really want the return of the Little Ice Age, where glaciers would advance causing serious economic harm to places like that ski resort in Alaska, bury Juneau and its evirons in ice and snow, bringing untold ruin and radical change to landscapes. I know people want some sort of equilibrium, but the problem is that Nature is not attuned to the desires of people. While it is not going to runaway one way or the other, short of some catastrophe like world-wide volcanic upheavel or the Earth getting hit by a large meteor, there is quite a wide latitude. And most of our progress of recent years, as has been noted by and on this blog, has been under the benign influence of the Warm phase of the PDO. In a very real sense, we do not know life apart from this, though we are undoubtedly about to experience it in the coming months and years. People have this odd notion that “this is the way things should be and they should always stay this way.” But the nature of Nature is to change. It does not and should not stay the same. Ever.
Consider that if the coming changes drop global temperature by 1 degree C, and there is a major volcanic event that, for a year or so, global temperatures could drop by another degree C, things could get rather interesting (in the Chinese proverbial sense). That scenario is not at all a stretch of the imagination as many know.
Too many years ago, I worked a commercial fishing boat one summer in Icy Strait and we ported in Hoonah. An interesting job that I have no desire to do again. Nonetheless, thanks for the trip down memory lane, Anthony.
Icy Strait is one gorgeous area and I recommend a cruise ship ride up through there. We were happy the glaciers were retreating as the water temp got up to about 12 degrees centigrade and at that temp we could go swimming for about 30 seconds instead of 15 seconds. Icebergs just get in the way and act like big icecubes.
And no La Nina in sight. What’s going on?
Anthony you are missing the point, it is warm in San Francisco and GW caused wildfires are ravaging the land (ok California, but to AGWers that is all of America.
Besides Alaska is “that state” where Governor Palin, the only one of the four with any sense about climate issues and who is so EVIL that she is suing to get the Polar Bear de-listed from the endangered species act, is from.
So you know that Alaskans all make up stuff like this because they are ALL in the pocket of big oil.
Here is a link where you can get the complete book “Glaciers of Alaska”, by Molnia as a pdf file:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/p1386k/
Direct link:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/p1386k/pdf/1386K_complete.pdf
Its 90.3MB, so it will take a few minutes to download. Nice addition to your e-library.
There has been a large pool of cold water in the northern Pacific off North America for about 2 years straight now – the infamous negative PDO shift I guess.
Its looking a little bigger and a little colder right now.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.10.13.2008.gif
George E Smith…
Yep, you are on the mark there George. I was all set to tap out a similar post myself. But you sir, have stated it so much more elegantly and substantively than could I.
Water. It’s what makes this planet Unique…. In a lot more ways than first meets the eye.
Very nice article. Nobody knows.
Nobody knows what will happen, we only have hints of what has happened in the past. Heck we were only smart enough to start recording temperature 130 years ago, and anyone who visits this site regularly knows those records are a more than a tad weak. Why is it so hard for people to admit, we don’t know?
If an ice age sets in we’ll be hoping for a little greenhouse effect that’s for certain.
I beat up the hockey stick graphs some more using GISS data as the correlation curve.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/famous-hockey-sticks-in-history/
I made positive and negative hockey sticks from the same data as the masters using their own math.
OT: One of Anthony’s friends at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., climatologist Thomas C. Peterson, has done his own survey of cooling vs warming articles in the 1970s.
Cooling climate ‘consensus’ of 1970s never was says in part:
I was there, I remember talking with Dad about an Ice Age being kicked off by snow not melting during a cold summer keeping the albedo high and starting runaway cooling. After flying across the country soon after that, I decided the snow would have to cover evergreen trees to keep the albedo high.
After the Mauna Loa data was published in 76 or 77, then everyone turned their attention to warming and I started pointing that nuclear plants didn’t emit significant amounts of CO2.
“I know people want some sort of equilibrium, but the problem is that Nature is not attuned to the desires of people. ”
There is a set of people who believe that we can control anything, including the climate. They believe that if just enough money is thrown at something (and it always comes down to money with them), couple with a lot of regulations we can change the climate. And if the climate doesn’t change, then by-golly, toss the politician in charge out of office and put another one in until he gets the climate right.
How much is the US currently investing in ice? If we got serious with our spending, we could surely get it to do what we need it to do.
[…] Read the original: Alaska glaciers on the rebound […]
Missing from the AK glacier story are a few fun facts for the AWG skeptics. The recession of the Grand Pacific Glacier from Icy Strait in the 1700s to present was most rapid prior to 1879 when John Muir first visited the place on R/C Thomas Corwin. Going even further back, say to the 14th Century, the Mendenhal Glacier covered Gastineau Channel and the Stikine Glacier reached the Alexanders. The first indigenous peoples that populated the area were apparently extirpated by the Little Ice Age. As legend has it, the Tlingit Athabascan ancestors who repopulated the area traveled over the Stikine from the east (Canada). One group, the Hutznuwoo Tlingits traveled under the Stikine Glacier on the glacier’s melt water river to end up in Frederick Sound and settled on Admiralty Island. The point is that from roughly the 15th Century to the early 19th Century, the Southeast Alaska glacial melt was more significant than that during the Industrial Age. The AWG story won’t go back far enough to cover that earlier period because it doesn’t fit their agenda of blaming Northern Hemisphere industrialization as the cause of all the world’s ills.
By the way, we REALLY don’t want to see a cold snap like this if you live someplace like California. Periods like the LIA are generally associated with mega-droughts. There have been periods during this interglacial where we have had periods of extreme drought that lasted for centuries. During these periods, the level of Lake Tahoe dropped along the order of tens of meters. We know this because the trunks of trees that grew then are still there on what was then the shore of the lake. It is not uncommon for California to experience drought periods lasting for hundreds of years.
I remember reading about that at Climate Audit a couple/few years back. Ah, here it is. Apparently we have in the past couple of centuries been living in an unusually wet period and our expectation of what “normal” is, is based on having lived during an unusually wet few centuries in this region.