Ice Appreciation Get to Know Glaciers
Be sure to utilize all fifive to fully appreciate Alaska’s glaciers.
“Have a taste,” my guide on Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier says, handing me a canteen cup he’s just filled at a tumbling freshet on the slope we’re were climbing.“It’s climbing. It s pretty good.” good.
The frigid, aquamarine water is indeed quite good — as cold as water can get, highly oxygenated by bouncing down the ice, tinged with minerals from the heights above through which it has passed as snow, ice, then glacier-melt. Located just 20 minutes outside downtown Juneau, the Mendenhall is among dozens of coastal glaciers that Alaska travelers encounter on journeys in the Great Land’s southeast and south-central regions, from Ketchikan to Anchorage. One nickname for America’s 49th state is “The Great Land,” and glaciers are among the greatest of its facets.
A research study years ago determined that seeing glaciers is among the top three objectives for visitors — whales and bears are the other two — and unlike those two, glaciers are basically guaranteed. It’s impossible to sail the Gulf of Alaska coastline and not see glaciers; they are as intrinsic to the landscape as the mountains that birth them. Most famous are those in Glacier Bay, the national park that draws about 1 million visitors a year aboard vessels ranging from day-tour boats to larger ships. Hubbard Glacier near Yakutat and Tracy Arm near Petersburg are also common destinations to see tidewater glaciers; locales with glaciers on land and sea, popular for off- boat excursions, include Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau, Whittier, and Seward.
They’re massive
Tidewater glaciers tower over the sea hundreds of feet high, and are the terminuses of ice rivers that may stretch more than 50 miles. The Hubbard is an exceptionally immense glacier, 75 miles long, 6 miles wide at its end, 400 feet high (that’s about 40 stories). Even the biggest cruise ships look like toys next to the Hubbard, which they approach within a quarter-mile.
Over all, Alaska’s 27,000 glaciers, and the massive high-elevation ice fields from which they flow, cover about 25,000 square kilometers that equals approximately 25,000 gigatons of ice, in some places many thousands of feet thick. The U.S. Geological Survey conducts infrared measurements using high-latitude satellites, and thus has highly accurate data.
They’re popular
The Mendenhall draws up to a half- million visitors a year, which means it is likely the most-visited single glacier on the planet. Throughout Alaska, residents and visitors alike come to glaciers to hike on, ski on, snowshoe on, bike on, picnic on, camp on, and even swim on them. (Yes, swim — I’ve done it.)
Cold isn’t their genesis — snowfall is
Alaska’s coastal ranges receive dozens of feet of snow each winter, and that’s what makes glaciers as the snow piles up and compresses. By comparison, Arctic mountains such as the Brooks Range farther north are in much colder climates but have very few glaciers.
They’re disappearing
Alaska’s total ice volume has been declining at a rate of 77 gigatons a year. Of the 27,000 glaciers, all but a tiny handful are receding, according to satellite measurements.
They’re the past
It takes decades — or even centuries, depending on the glacier — for the snow that falls in mountain heights to pile up, compress into ice, and start the relentless downhill journey caused by gravity and simple pressure. The water I sampled on the lower Mendenhall may have fallen as snow in the Juneau Icefield 250 years ago, well before a baker’s dozen colonies in the New World declared independence from Great Britain.
One glacier near the Alaska coast, in the southwest corner of Canada’s Yukon, in 1999 yielded up the frozen remains of an ancient hunter who came to be known as Ice Man. Carbon dating placed the ice mummy at 300 years old — and DNA testing revealed a direct link between the ancient hunter and present-day Athabaskan inhabitants of the area just inland from the coast.
Glaciers make their own weather
Take the 2-mile stroll up to the Exit Glacier, just outside Seward in Kenai Fjords National Park, and you’ll be greeted by a cold downslope breeze below and beside the glacier. This is a katabatic wind — mountain air chilled by all the ice and funneled downward.
Most of all, they’re magic to behold
The hour-long hike to Mendenhall’s foot takes us through the landscape zones left by retreating glaciers; the Mendenhall has lost more than a mile in the past 35 years. From young spruce forest to alder thickets to willow brush jungle to bare rock, the tale of the recent past goes by and the temperature drops.
At the glacier’s edge, we strap crampons on our shoes and boots and easily climb up on the granular ice atop the Mendenhall. Here, everything is different. The sounds of water are omnipresent, and the sounds of ice (cracks, groans, rumbles) add a percussive rhythm to the aquatic oratorio. Scents include the ice, the water, the dust of ground rock, the tang of chilled air. Daylight bends and bounces kaleidoscopically. The water tastes like platinum and has the sharp feel of stainless steel — the metal the guide alludes to when he points out the blue ice that represents the underlying glacier. The blue hue is ethereal, and the ice is unyielding; Crampons do not grab this dense material that was pressed from snowflakes far above, decades ago, into its crystalline form.
“Perplexing” is the term glacier scientist Shad O’Neel, of USGS in Anchorage, uses to describe the intellectual riddle of standing on something so hard, massive, and dense, and trying to realize that it is actually flowing. Slowly, yes, but moving nonetheless.
“If you smack a piece of ice on your forehead, it’s a solid,” says O’Neel. “So it’s hard to stretch our imaginations to realize that this ‘solid’ is actually moving.”
Add to that the riddle presented by climate change: Glaciers are flowing downhill at a rate that ranges from inches to feet per year — but they are retreating. That’s because, however fast they flow downhill, they are melting back faster still.
Atop the glaciers, that melt gathers in crevices and hollows to form what are known as “blue pools,” and this is where hardy guides and their most wildly adventurous guests plunge in. I recommend a sunny summer day — it can be 70 degrees on a glacier’s face — and ready hands above to help haul you back out.
Just remember, it’s all historic: Your visit, the water, the glacier, and its place in the landscape. There’s nothing else on Earth like it.