[Dramatic view of changes between 1932 - 1988]
Every language should have a word to convey the specific, heart-splitting thrill you feel when a jagged spire of frosted, aqua blue ice the size of a 20-story building splits off the face of a massive frozen river and thunders into the sea. * "It's alive, it's absolutely alive," says a South African visitor who recently traversed half the earth with her fiancé to be married on a small ship, Cruise West's Spirit of Endeavour, near the foot of South Sawyer Glacier in Alaska's Tracy Arm Fjord. *As the captain turns the ship toward the wave raised by the crashing ice and threads a path through the biggest bergs, the smaller bits fizz and pop or play a syncopated thunk-plink-plunk against the hull. Framing the tableau: that ever rumbling, fiercely complaining wall of ice.
"I never expected a glacier to have so much character," the new bride saws. "And that color! We flew 32 hours to get here, and this hour has made the trip absolutely worth it."
Every year hundreds of thousands of people visit coastal Alaska to catch a glimpse of a glacier's might. Some take helicopter or floatplane tours over the ice fields; others strap on steel-studded shoes to follow experienced hikers onto stable regions of the glacier itself. But the best views of a calving tidewater glacier can be had from a ringside scat on a cruise ship. As the ice crashes down, harbor seals lounge on tufted rafts of ice that bob and swirl next to the ship. Nearby, families of humpback whales surface in elegant formation, then dive to the bottom as one, offering slow-motion fluke salutes.
Repeat visitors to Alaska have begun to notice something else: An estimated 95 percent of the state's glaciers, like most around the world, are receding. Where a few decades ago there were blankets of icc, now hundreds of feet or even miles of bare rock are exposed.
In some places the shrinkage is particularly striking, even to first timers. The Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center, which opened in 1963 close to Juneau's backyard glacier, is now a mile or more from its frozen face. Inside the center, a picture window offers views of Mendenhall in the distance, and films and museum exhibits compare the decline to deficit spending by a frequent shopper. When the snow laid down throughout the year is not enough to offset the amount of ice lost to calving and melting, a glacier dwindles and, in this case, recedes.
The Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau, Alaska, is retreating 100 to 150 feet a year.
In 1932, Boulder Glacier in Glacier National Park covered about 90 acres; now fewer than 10 acres of that remain.
Meanwhile, in the lower 48, smaller rivers of ice 7,000 years in the making are vanishing as well. "You mean Glacierless National Park?" says Ed DesRosier, the owner of a northwest-ern Montana tour company, when asked about his region's startling meltdown. A member of the Blackfeet Nation, DesRosier grew up near the park. He and his ancestors have watched the glaciers — monumental forces of nature that have carved out sacred valleys and pyramidal peaks over the course of millennia—decrease in size and in number, from 15o in the mid-19th century to 37 named glaciers in 1968, on down to 27 today.
You can still hike to Sperry and Grinnell glaciers, and you can spot Jackson from the highway. Glacier National Park remains a wilderness wonderland of granite peaks, wild-flower meadows, and gushing waterfalls. It is home to grizzlies, bighorn sheep, and snow grouse known as ptarmigan. Glacier will always be worth a visit, even after the ice is gone. Still, the loss is transformative. Already there's evidence of the park's tree line advancing up the mountains and invading the alpine meadows. Fish habitats are also changing as runoff pat-terns shift in glacier-fed creeks.
Average overall temperatures in the area, particularly at night and in winter, have risen about 2 degrees over the past 50 years. As warming continues, Glacier National Park will likely lose the last of its namesake ice formations in just 25 or 30 years, according to Dan Fagre, a local researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey.
More and more, visitors to Montana, like passengers on ships cruising in Alaska, have the same worried questions:
Are the world's melting glaciers a sign of global warming?
Are humans to blame for the warming? In part, yes, especially in the last few decades. Data from varied sources suggests that smokestacks, car tailpipes, and burning forests have accelerated the warming trend.
Is it too late to turn down the heat? No, but climate experts say we're already stuck with some warming; the oceans are great reservoirs of accumulated heat that will continue to shape the climate for years.
Cooling it while you travel
Hotel air-conditioning, heated swimming pools, and even your sleek jet contribute to global warming. You can do more than worry—you can use these earth-friendly travel tips. No trips planned? Visit www.climatecrisis.org for ways to help the planet at home.
"Tread Softly Transportation accounts for a shocking 30 percent of our country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Just one round-trip flight between San Francisco and New York emits a ton of CO2 per passenger. Instead of hopping on a plane every three-day weekend, plan one longer annual vacation, and for short getaways consider carpooling with friends or taking the train.
Tune up your car
Replacing a clogged air filter can
improve mileage by as much as ro percent and inflating tires to the proper
pressure gains more than 3 percent. For more ways to save gas, go to aaa.com
— click on Your Car, then on Ga! Watcher's Guide—or
to www.fueleconomy.gov.
Sleep green
At www.greenhotels.com you'll
find a list of hotels that use energy-saving, waste-reducing tactics like solar
power and efficient air-conditioning.
Sightsee in style
Why rent a gas-guzzler when you can tour in a biodiesel ( www.bio-beetle.com
) or
hybrid car? (Check www.hertz.com in California and www.evrental.com
in
California, Arizona, and Nevada.) For short excursions you can catch ecofriendly
public transit, such as hybrid buses in Portland and hydrogen fuel cell buses in Berkeley, Calif.
Eat
like a native
Locally farmed food tastes good and doesn't have to
take a cross-country ride on an 18-wheeler. For info on farmers' markets, go to http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/; for organic restaurants, visit www.localharvest.org.
Cancel your carbon
Calculate your greenhouse gas emissions, then pay to offset the damage on
websites
such as www.my-climate.com, www.b-e-f.org, and
www.carbonfund.org.
Your contribution goes to planting trees and funding alternative energy.
VIA is the bimonthly travel magazine of the California State Automobile Association, sent to AAA members in Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, southern Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. It offers practical, budget, and fun travel tips on where to go, what to see, and what to do in the West and the world.
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