Amid Alaskan Glaciers, a Possible ‘Death Spiral’

Since the late 1700s, the Juneau Ice Field, interconnected glaciers that stretch across 1,500 square miles of Alaska and British Columbia, has lost about a quarter of its volume. But it’s an “incredibly worrying” phenomenon that took place between 2010 and 2020 that has scientists especially concerned: The remote swath, which features the famous Mendenhall Glacier, dropped 1.4 cubic miles of ice annually during that decade-long period, double the rate of ice melt before 2010, reports the New York Times. In their study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers add that rates of “area shrinkage” were five times faster from 2015 to 2019 than they were from 1979 to 1990.

The team led by Newcastle University glaciologist Bethan Davies pulled together decades of glacial measurements using aerial views, surveys, maps, and satellite imagery, supplementing that with in-the-field verification and research into tree rings and peat to try to figure out previous environments in the ice field. What they found was that every single one of the area’s 1,050 glaciers receded between 1770 and 2019, with 108 glaciers vanishing altogether; dozens of new lakes formed as a result. Scientists say the melt is affected by tourism; soot from wildfires that lands on the ice and expedites melting; and the wide, flat surface of thinning ice that further exposes it to warming air, among other factors.

Just because Alaska is a far-flung spot for most of the planet’s inhabitants, the glacial melt there matters “tremendously,” per the Times, which notes that “in no other region of the planet are melting glaciers predicted to contribute more to global sea-level rise this century.” Plus, scientists fear that ice fields elsewhere, including in Greenland, Norway, and other Arctic-adjacent locations, could meet the same fate, per Reuters. Global warming will likely continue to further exacerbate the situation, with one climatologist warning of a possible “death spiral” for the glaciers, per the AP. “If we reduce carbon, then we have more hope of retaining these wonderful ice masses,” Davies tells the Times. “The more carbon we put in, the more we risk irreversible, complete removal of them.” (More glacial melt stories.)