‘‘Twenty or 30 years ago, we thought about climate change and everybody said ‘oh, you’re silly’. But now we have it, it’s right here.’’
New Zealanders born today will live to see their country’s great glaciers shrink into extinction. explains the alarming retreat of Franz Josef and Fox glaciers.
On the gentle, stony path that weaves through rain forest at the base of the Southern Alps, a red arrow on a large sign points to the ground and says: ‘‘Here is where it used to be’’. There are more signs along the path. Once, it was here, and then it was here. This is a historical timeline, beginning hundreds of years ago and moving into the recent past, through podocarp rainforest and ra¯ta¯ trees that blaze in the summer, trees that get younger and younger until you reach the viewing platform where the timeline ends with a grey and distant glacier, recoiling up a valley. There are hundreds of thousands of glaciers in the world, but Franz Josef is special, largely because of the path that leads to it. The glacier starts high in the Southern Alps with a heavy, inaccessible snowfield, but drops steeply into a valley a few hundred metres above sea-level, ending with a braided river flowing beside rain forest to the ocean. Glaciers usually reside in the hostile places where people are not, like Greenland and Antarctica. Franz Josef is just a short walk from a sprawling car park, minutes from the comfort of a tourist village.
Like glaciers all over the world, the modern story of Franz Josef is one of decline. During the last ice age, it surged many kilometres further in a glistening wall of ice. By the time it was found and named by colonial settlers in the mid19th century, it reached where the first viewing platform is today. Now, it is several kilometres further back, high up a valley, its tongue decapitated. The irony is that although Franz Josef glacier is likely the smallest it has been for many thousands of years, it has never been in higher demand. Tourism has boomed to an unprecedented level, largely through a buoyant Chinese tourism industry - in the summer months, the entire town is booked out. The township must grow to meet that demand. It risks, quite literally, building onto thin ice. The glacier will continue to shrink, likely at a rapid pace as the world gets warmer. Even if the world stopped polluting the climate today, the retreat would not stop, although it would probably slow. There will come a time where Franz Josef will no longer be spectacular, at least from ground level, and visitors will stop coming. It’s a long-term threat to those who live and work in Glacier Country, the engine room of the West Coast economy which has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry, employing hundreds of people. But for now, business is booming. The ice remains.
A few days earlier, ex-tropical cyclone Fehi had landed on the West Coast, destroying roads and flattening buildings in Glacier Country. But nevertheless, the path to Franz Josef glacier is packed. The car park is straining with rented campervans and tour buses, their colourful slogans popping in the grey valley. After a 15-minute walk through the forest, the glacier first comes into view with a viewing platform hanging over the riverplain below. There are young families and tour groups and grandparents with their grandchildren, some from China, others from Germany, Australia, and the US. Two hundred years ago, they would have been standing on the glacier but now it is a speck on the horizon, partly covered by a patch of low, dark cloud, unspooling down the ice.
An older German couple, Edeltraud and Wolfgang Mueller, have perched in a spot among the crowd. Wolfgang was last here as a young man 48 years ago, he says, when the glacier roared down the valley, near where he is standing now.
It is much smaller now. ‘‘It looks completely different,’’ he says. ‘‘I expected that.’’
Edeltraud, visiting for the first time, does not mind how the glacier has withered, but sees it as a warning.
‘‘Twenty or 30 years ago, we thought about climate change and everybody said ‘oh, you’re silly’,’’ she says. ‘‘But now we have it, it’s right here.’’
We know climate change influences massive storms and rising seas, acidifies the oceans and kills forests; we know it can increase the range of diseases, while reducing the range of rare species. But when we see those things, they can seem one step removed from the process of warming. A glacier is useful because it is simple. The way it sheds ice in chunks and leaks meltwater through its tongue, how it slowly retracts into the mountains, taps into a basic truth that everyone knows: Ice melts in heat.
‘‘I think they’re the most valuable measure of climate change,’’ says Dr Trevor Chinn, a glaciologist.
‘‘Every single item to do with climate is fed into them.’’
New Zealand’s best-known glaciers are steep, accessible, and warm, due to the maritime climate of a land surrounded by ocean, which makes them susceptible to minor temperature changes.
Even among the world’s many glaciers, Franz Josef and Fox are extraordinary, because of how closely they follow the climate. All glaciers have a ‘‘response time’’, which is how long it takes for the glacier to respond to temperature changes. For many large glaciers, it’s a couple of decades; larger glaciers can have response times as long as a century. These glaciers are still in the climate of the past, slowly catching up with the polluted climate of the present.
Franz’s response time is only three or four years, and Fox’s is five or six years, which means we can see how they’re being affected by today’s climate. ‘‘The ice in the glacier is only just below zero degrees, so if you think about that, you don’t have to change temperature very much to bring it up to melting,’’ says Dr Heather Purdie, a glaciologist at the University of Canterbury. ‘‘And [glaciers] are not just measuring temperature, they’re measuring precipitation, snow, cloudiness - all these other general climate parameters are homogenised into the glacier, and it’s providing an average picture of regional climate for the area that it’s in. By following the shifts in the glacier, we can see what the slow burning climate signals are unable to tell us: What we are doing right now is transforming the natural world, which is changing right in front of us.
At the centre of Franz Josef glacier is a round, exposed rock face known as the ‘‘black hole’’. It first appeared as a small, black mark in the early 2000s after heavy rain, and has grown to become a glaring blot on the glacier. When the ice flow reaches the black hole, it splits into two streams, cascading down each side before rejoining as one to flow down the tongue. Its name has a fitting quality for a retreating glacier; the ice retracts further up the valley, as if being sucked into the black hole. Within the next few decades, it is likely the glacier will end somewhere around the black hole, which is above where most of the glacier walks are done today. Projections for the glacier’s retreat in the future differ, and largely depend on the extent of warming, but it’s expected much of Franz Josef’s tongue will be gone by the end of the century.
By then, the glacier will be all but unrecognisable.
The first photograph of Franz Josef, taken around 1870, shows an enormous, jagged wall of ice thundering down the valley, nearly as tall as the surrounding mountains. Stand in the same spot today, and you see very little; the ice has thinned by many hundreds of metres and curled around a corner. Franz Josef retreated drastically throughout the 20th century, as temperatures slowly started to warm. It lost about 3km of its length in total, exposing the gorge and the river flowing beneath for the first time in many centuries.
While the retreat in the 20th century was significant, it hit a higher gear around 2008. In just a decade, it has lost another 1.4km of its length, the fastest rate of retreat ever recorded at the glacier. The result is that the glacier is likely the smallest it has been in a very long time. There is preliminary work which shows that very little of the rock at the front of the glacier has been exposed to the atmosphere before, meaning those studying it are the first humans to set foot there, on land that for millennia was buried deep in the ice.
From a ledge high above Franz Josef, Dr Brian Anderson, a glaciologist at Victoria University, looks down at the steep, ice-carved valley below.
Until recently, the gorge had been covered in ice, concealing everything beneath. Plants are now starting to grow where the glacier once filled the valley, which have left a shadow along the walls, marking where the glacier used to be. ‘‘I’d never seen this gorge until the last decade, so I never knew what was under here,’’ Anderson says. When he was growing up on the West Coast, Anderson spent a lot of time in the mountains. For much of his life, the glaciers were advancing, growing in response to a localised cooling period that lasted throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a period of growth that was both spectacular and unique. When he started studying Franz Josef as a glaciologist, he visited every month for 12 years to measure stakes he had drilled into the ice, to see how far the glacier had moved. It was an old-school style of glaciology, he says, similar to how the glacier was measured earlier in the century - on one trip, whilst scrambling around the forest, he found several of the stakes used to measure the glacier many decades earlier, which had since been forgotten in the forest that grew in the glacier’s wake. When Anderson wrote his thesis about Franz Josef in the early 2000s, he projected a sharp retreat in the coming years, in response to the warming climate. When the retreat began in earnest in 2008, even he was surprised at how quickly the glacier started disappearing. ‘‘It’s faster than I thought it could possibly retreat, to be honest, and it’s the fastest in the historic record,’’ he says.
He has started using more modern tools to chronicle the glacier’s movements. He has a network of nine strategically placed cameras taking photos every hour, which he stitches together into timelapses. They are in obscure spots off the beaten track so they won’t be disturbed, and lodged in boxes, mostly to protect them from kea. He has lost two cameras to lightning strikes, but the rest have survived, feeding a collection of what is now 100,000 photos. One of his time lapses shows a year of retreat at Fox Glacier in 2012, in which a large chunk of its tongue collapsed. It went viral, because it was a stark illustration of how dramatically a glacier can change in a remarkably small period of time. ‘‘I could see all these things that I didn’t really realise were changing,’’ he says. ‘‘Basically, everything’s moving, everything’s coming downhill, there are little rockfalls everywhere, it’ll rain a lot and it’ll flood and masses of ice will fall off the glacier, just all these things you wouldn’t necessarily notice just by visiting.’’
His latest findings show something quite extraordinary: Franz Josef is advancing. Since the end of 2016, it has crept forward by about 80m, which would make it one of the few glaciers in the world that is growing, not shrinking. It’s not much, Anderson says – an 80m advance after a 1400m retreat is one step forward after 18 steps backwards - and he has no doubt it will retreat again. Already, after a historically warm summer, the glacier appears to be leaking, with a large hole spurting water that wasn’t there last year. But it’s a rare glimmer of hope in a field that may one day become redundant, once the glaciers are all but gone. ‘‘How many advancing glaciers are there in the world that you can go and visit?’’ he says. ‘‘It’s probably only a handful.’’
He pauses as a helicopter passes overhead, the deafening sound of its rotors filling the empty space of the gorge, dropping off another load of tourists onto the ice, tiny black dots against the sprawling white ice. Anderson is not hopeful that emissions can be curbed to keep the glacier looking like it does now; more retreat is inevitable. It has already happened so quickly he can see the retreat through his own children. He walked onto the glacier with his first child, but not with his second. By then it was too late. But right now, for a brief moment, the glacier is growing, and it still looks spectacular. ‘‘It’s really special that the glacier’s advancing at the moment,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s probably not going to do it for very long, just because it’s so warm. But even though the big picture is one of retreat and a really obvious human cause for that, I think we also have to appreciate what we have, which is still really special.’’
In Franz Josef village, climate change has a sound and a smell. It is the sound of heavy machinery passing overhead, rotor blades slicing the air. It is the smell of aviation fuel swirling in the village. Franz Josef only has 330 ratepayers, but it now boasts 15 helipads from which aircraft lurch into the sky, over Lake Wombat and into the Waiho valley, ferrying visitors back and forth from the glacier. As soon as the noise of one helicopter dissipates, another arrives to fill the empty space; sometimes they seem to move in pairs.
Glacier Country is not only one of the busiest air spaces in New Zealand, it’s likely one of the busiest in the world. Every year, there are 30,000 helicopter landings in the Westland Tai Poutini National Park, where the glaciers are located. That does not include the return flights, which arrive from outside the park, or the scenic tours that hover high above the ice. During peak times, there can be as many as one flight per minute at Franz Josef. At nearby Fox Glacier, there are competing resource consent applications for a new heliport: One would have 15 heli-pads and capacity for 400 flights a day.
The constant drone of helicopters has given the once silent valleys a loud thrum similar to that of living by a motorway. ‘‘There’s a smell of Avgas in the town all day,’’ says Jan Finlayson of the Federated Mountain Clubs. ‘‘It’s that Apocalypse Now feeling.’’
The helicopters were a direct response to two separate issues. In 2012, the front of Franz Josef glacier collapsed, shedding about 70m of ice from its terminus. Foot access became dangerous, so it was banned, ending more than a century of guided walks directly onto the glacier. A year later, foot access to Fox Glacier was also cut off when the glacier’s rapid retreat made the ice too unstable, changing the course of the river beneath. For the first time, the famously accessible glaciers could not be reached by foot which happened sooner than expected. Local guides knew the days of walking onto the glaciers would end, but not when it did.
‘‘When it receded and collapsed – a year ago we thought this is going to happen in the next six months, and it basically happened in the next six