The Weekend Wonk: Glacier Retreat Basics with Mauri Pelto
April 27, 2019
Stumbled across this 2012 interview with Glaciologist Mauri Pelto, at Easton Glacier, Cascades range, in Washington State.
Really fascinating visualization of how a glacier made it’s mark, where it was, and where it is now.
This was my first crowd funded field initiative, predating Dark Snow Project by a year.
Below, a view from Easton Glacier over neighboring Deming Glacier.
April 28, 2019 at 5:23 pm
My thumbnail here is 18 km due NE of you on the ridge at SR542 on 2010-08-14 at 9 pm on the snow. Gorgeous place, I’ve been alone there at midnight in ice & snow (wearing lycra shorts & a T shirt) on my bicycle. I’ve bicycled there 23 times. I suppose that’s all going now. The snow melt stream where I cooled my swollen feet each year was bone dry 2015-08-02 in the El Nino for the first time I ever knew it dry. Did you know the NE side has the world’s snow fall record, 95 feet in 1998/99. I just put my dry Mt Baker stream bed that goes with your dry glacier bed at https://youtu.be/B1dzWr2nkrg
April 29, 2019 at 9:20 am
Ho-hum—-another boring post on glacier loss—-since we don’t have many glaciers in the USA why should we worry?
Of course, large numbers of people in south and east Asia DO need to worry about the fresh water they get from glaciers at the Third Pole—a couple of billion people actually, and in three countries that are armed with nuclear weapons and have fought each other in the past. Things are looking grim there, and the instability of the monsoon is also becoming worrisome (see “Unruly:)
I’ll mention some books again:
UNRULY PLANET: HOW RAINS, RIVERS, COASTS, AND SEAS HAVE SHAPED ASIA’S HISTORY, Sunil Amrath, Basic Books, 2018
FIRE AND ICE, Jonathan Mingle, St. Martins, 2015
A WORLD WITHOUT ICE, Henry Pollack, Avery/Penguin, 2009