“It’s very easy to see the glacier is much, much smaller,” Krimmel
says later, back at his office at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Seated
at a computer, he looks at the side-by-side images—a photo taken in
1928 and another 60 years later. “In the last century, it’s retreated
about 1.2 miles,” says Krimmel, a research hydrologist and the glacier’s
leading researcher. “Right now, it’s about 1.5 miles long. It’s lost about
half of its length and half its volume.”
South Cascade Glacier has become the poster child for global cli-
mate change in the Pacific Northwest, contends Jon Riedel, glacier
researcher for North Cascades National Park. It is thinning so much,
Riedel points out, that between 1953 and 2000 it lost the equivalent of
72 feet of water in thickness off its surface. That is about as tall as
seven basketball hoops stacked on top of each other.
Call it the case of the incredible shrinking glacier. In this icy high
country, forty-six of the forty-seven Cascade glaciers observed by
Nichols College researcher Mauri Pelto were found to be retreating.
Riedel, meanwhile, personally backpacks several miles to monitor four
glaciers; he notices the lower-elevation, smaller glaciers on the west
side of the Cascades are shrinking, a pattern also found farther south.
This melting promises to change the very image of the Pacific
Northwest. Montana’s Glacier National Park in 30 years may need to be
renamed “the park formerly known as Glacier,” as Seattle-based writer
John C. Ryan puts it. A hundred of its 150 glaciers have vanished, and
the pace is hastening. Or take Washington’s white-capped Mount
Rainier, that looming symbol of the Northwest depicted on
Washington license plates and the label of a venerable local beer. The
vast majority of Rainier’s glaciers are receding, says Andrew Fountain,
researcher and Portland State University geology professor.
“They don’t recede because they’re getting colder, you know what
I’m saying?” Fountain says. Whatever the ultimate cause, he contin-
ues: “That’s global climate change—right there.”
In scene after scene played out around the Pacific Northwest,
researchers are uncovering surprises that appear linked to the past
century’s average 1.5°F rise in temperature and, on the basis of what
has happened so far, they predict serious problems to surface in the
142 Sally Deneen