Highline is privileged to have Dr. Shawn Marshall, a glaciologist and Canada Research Chair in climate change at the University of Calgary, blogging for the site! In this update, he shares his thoughts on glacial recession and how summer 2011 is looking so far. – Highline
June 27. Just down from a visit to Haig Glacier where I was poking in the snow, patching up weather instruments that the wind and snow had their way with this past winter. I’ve been working up there since 2000, trying to understand the weather systems, the snowfall and melt processes, the vagaries of glacier retreat in our corner of the world. I’ve yet to see a year where the glaciers in the Rockies gained mass – where snowfall outstrips summer melt – though I hear this has been known to happen now and again.
Peyto Glacier research station. Photo Meghan Ward.
Peyto Glacier, an outlet of the Wapta Icefield, is the best-studied glacier in the Rockies, with a federal government monitoring program in place for 45 years now. Peyto has seen a snow surplus five times since 1965. It is tempting to draw comparisons with federal government budgets (See Julie Cruikshank’s wonderful cultural anthology, Do Glaciers Listen?), but glacier retreat is playing out in all of the world’s mountains, so there is something bigger going on here.
It’s been a rough couple of decades if you are a chunk of ice in these parts. Alberta has lost more than 25 percent of its glacier area since the mid-80s, and glaciers are thinning even more than they are withdrawing from the landscape. The Haig has lost about 10 metres of elevation since I started working there. Needless to say, the high-altitude training benefits for the national ski team, which populates the glacier in the summer months, aren’t what they used to be.
Canmore’s Jackie Randell mining for glacier ice on Haig Glacier, May 14, 2011. Photo courtesy Shawn Marshall.
But not to get ahead by a century. The glaciers are still with us, not quite yet entered into the realm of mountain folklore. And they are rallying – I have high hopes that this might be the year for the local glaciers to break out of their slump. It is the best winter snowpack that I have seen here, approaching five metres on the continental divide at the Haig (see the snowpit photo). And it feels like a reticent start to the summer: mushroom weather, cool and wet, just the way the glaciers like it.
But that said, this is pretty much a normal start to summer in the Rockies. And as much as the local peaks keep being refreshed with snow, precipitation has actually been below normal: Banff is on track for 48mm in June, versus an average (1950-2010) of 65mm. Even the average June temperature shaped up to be a very normal 11°C.
This is likely to surprise a lot of locals, as we whine about the weather; we forget what spring is like in these parts from year to year. But the glaciers faithfully record this, and I was surprised to see how much snow the Haig lost in June: at least one metre since we were up there in mid-May. The skiers still have three metres to work with, so it will be a good summer for the groomers and athletes up there! But now that the sunny skies and warm temperatures have arrived (they have, haven’t they?), I am not so sure about a positive mass balance any more.
Maybe that is too much to hope for these days, and we will have to be content to celebrate less thinning in the glaciers than usual.
Got a question for Shawn? Send us an email at info[at]highlineonline.ca!
