Westneat: Stop Mount Rainier’s melting

The story is not good. Mount Rainier is melting.

One of the mountain’s 29 glaciers, the south-facing Stevens, has withered away entirely, the review found. Two more, Pyramid and Van Trump glaciers, lost 42 percent of their ice volumes just between 2015 and 2021, when the latest aerial photos were taken.

“That’s a massive amount of ice loss in a short period of time,” Beason said. “It was just alarming to see the rate that those two glaciers have disappeared.”

Another glacier scientist, Mauri Pelto, said in a blog post that more recent satellite imagery taken in the fall of 2022 suggests those two glaciers are now gone, too.

Pelto has been measuring Cascade glaciers every summer now for 40 years. Seven years ago, I profiled him in a column that said that due to rising temperatures, his glacier project had turned him into a sort of “town crier of decline.”

Beason’s paper estimates that Mount Rainier has lost more than half its total ice since about 1900. Twenty-one square miles of glacier is gone, out of about 50. The newer measuring techniques show it has 29 square miles left.

Beason is not a climatologist, so his paper doesn’t tease out how much of the melt was natural, and how much may have been due to an emissions-fueled warming climate. As a geologist, he says he tends to look backward. But others have used these rates of ice loss to model Rainier’s possible future.

“There’s no model I’ve seen that shows zero ice,” he said. “But any glacier below 10,000 feet is really in a lot of trouble. The ones higher than that will still have ice, but they’ll be a lot smaller.”

Pelto added: “This is going to be the fate of all the glaciers unless we take some action.”

But what action?

I asked what could be done to turn this around. To demonstrate how hard it is going to be, Beason said the only proposal he’s responded to was an idea to spread giant tarps over Mount Rainier’s glaciers in the summer months.

“Our answer on that one was pretty easy,” Beason laughed. “It was ‘No. We aren’t putting tarps over the mountain.’ ”

It isn’t as crazy as it sounds. In Switzerland they have a project to save melting glaciers by covering them with tarps or white blankets. Other countries have propped up melting glaciers by adding snow with machines.

A California company called the Arctic Ice Project (it used to be called Ice911 Research) has come up with a longshot idea of spreading tiny glass beads across the ice to deflect some of the sun’s rays.

All these geoengineering solutions theoretically could work. But they also convey the desperation of the moment. This is what we’ve come to — tarps? Glass beads? At best it’d be a Hail Mary to bide time until the world gets around to the root of the issue. At worst it’s what’s been dubbed “disaster capitalism,” a form of techno-denial that we can fix the effects of climate change.

“It’s a very large area of ice to protect up here,” Beason said. “There isn’t going to be a practical way to intervene. We’ve really got to focus on how we emit carbon into the air.”

The scientists say people should also go see the changing glaciers for themselves. Maybe view the immensity of these massive ice rivers, and their visible retreat right outside Seattle, as a signal.

You’re not likely to leave thinking this a problem we can tarp over.