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When Mauri Pelto and his crew hiked up Mount Hinman in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area last month, as he has for 40 years straight, he wasn’t expecting good news.
What he found though was a landscape so transformed by the warming climate that he’s calling it a “collapse” of King County’s last big network of glaciers.
“There’s barely any snow on the glaciers up there this summer at all,” Pelto says. “We’ve never seen that before, in 40 years of doing this.”
Pelto just finished a 17-day audit of glaciers in the North Cascades, a job he’s done every summer since 1984. An environmental scientist, he volunteered when the National Academy of Sciences put out a call for someone to monitor glacial change.
Little did he know the job would become a bit like that of a coroner.
This year he’s reporting that the last cluster of glaciers in King County, which have lived on the Cascade crest only 50 miles from downtown Seattle for thousands of years, are losing their final struggles with global warming.
The largest one, the Hinman Glacier, died last year. By “died,” it means it melted away to the point that it’s no longer a thick river of ice that moves and flows. It thinned so much it disintegrated into fragments. The smaller Foss Glacier, on the northeast side of Mount Hinman, “will cease to be a glacier probably later this summer,” Pelto said.
In all, the cluster that totaled five distinct glaciers, covering about 1.5 square miles back in 1984, has shrunk down to patches of ice less than one-third of a square mile. Nearby Overcoat Glacier, also in King County, is in the same throes.
“Only Lynch Glacier remains an active glacier,” he said. “That one still has a chance to sustain itself for a time. It’s effectively the last functional glacier left in King County, flowing west toward Puget Sound.”
That last part is crucial. The Skykomish River below these peaks is already on a federal watch list for higher-than-healthy water temperatures.
“The loss of the ice up there is causing issues that extend all the way to the Sound,” he said.
When Pelto started this quixotic gig, he was just out of college. Now 61, he works as a glaciologist and provost at Nichols College in Massachusetts. He’s also now the U.S. representative for the World Glacier Monitoring Service. He made a commitment back during the Reagan administration to monitor 10 Cascade glaciers for 50 consecutive years, so every August he’s back out here hiking and probing the ice.
He’s turned into a witness. In all he’s now seen the death of a dozen named glaciers, and nearly 50 unnamed smaller ones.
“This summer is the most change I’ve ever witnessed up there,” he said.
Pelto is not modeling the future; all of this is backward-looking. He said a series of heavy snow years could bolster some of these glaciers again — even theoretically resuscitate some dead ones. It would be fleeting if current warming trends hold.
Glaciers are maybe cold, remote objects to care about. They’re no Tokitae; you don’t often see tearful ceremonies held for wilting patches of ice. Plus everyone knows the glaciers are melting, so what’s another story about that?
If nothing else, though, think about the span of time we’re talking about here. King County has likely had glaciers, on these same peaks, since after the last ice age — which ended some 14,000 years ago. But with a complete melt-off, starting at these lower elevation peaks, we’re now seeing something truly ancient vanish on our watch. It’s geologic time playing out in real time — now forced in part by us and our global warming activities, most scientists say.
“I do stand there on the ice and think about the passage of those thousands of years,” Pelto said. “How there’s been glaciers ranging at these spots through human history. How I’m there watching them come to an end. My head is definitely exploding in those moments.”
End of an era, goes the cliché. This one merits a name that captures more of the real sweep of what’s happening: end of an epoch.
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