September 2024
Alberta, Canada
The Icefields Parkway, in French Promenade des Glaciers, is a 140-mile long highway running along the crest of the Canadian Rockies. For the past century since the road was built, it’s given visitors a closeup view of icefields and glaciers amidst the towering mountains. Having read about the stunning mountains and icefields of Banff and Jasper National Parks, we made the Parkway the primary destination in our road trip to Canada last month. What we saw was both awesome and worrisome.
I described the mountains and their history in an earlier diary. It’s impossible to overstate the scale of these gigantic peaks and ranges up close, so steep and massive it feels like they might fall on you. To say they did not live up to the all the superlatives in our guidebooks is an understatement. What was a surprise though was the icefields aspect of the route.
Very small Athabasca glacier, as seen from the highway. Notice how shallow it is too.
Granted, this was in late summer and we weren’t expecting snow on the road (hoping not, actually!). The snow has started to fall now, from reports. But we did think there would be snow visible up high, and glaciers, but they were few and small, if visible at all. What happened to the icefields?
Icefields and glaciers
An icefield is a “mass of interconnected valley glaciers (also called mountain glaciers or alpine glaciers) on a mountain mass with protruding rock ridges or summits.” They can be thought of as a reservoir of ice confined by topography, kept topped up by winter snowfalls. Most icefields are in high latitudes though some are kept cold enough by high elevation, as is the case in the Canadian Rockies. Where an icefield “falls” to lower elevation through a valley opening, the moving mass of ice is called a glacier. In the Canadian Rockies, the biggest icefield is the Columbia Icefield, which has six glaciers radiating downward, the largest being the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan. The Icefields Parkway was built to curve around the toe of the Athabasca glacier in 1930 so visitors could step out onto a living glacier from their car.
Pre-road and current views of the Athabasca glacier from the same spot:
Athabasca glacier in 1917 (top) and 2011 (bottom). The Icefields Parkway is visible along the very bottom of the recent photo.
Today the toe of the Athabasca glacier is over a mile away and it is far shallower than it was in the early 20th century. It has lost half its volume in the past 125 years and 18 feet of depth per year. The Athabasca is melting faster than ice can form higher up. To step onto the glacier, visitors have to either pay to take an all-terrain bus, or hike the mile up there. In peak summer tourist season that path has become as crowded as the Hilary Step, the bottleneck on Mt Everest. But many visitors want to see a glacier close up before it’s gone.
Death of a Glacier, North Cascade Glacier Climate Project
Icefields come and go in geologic time but this recent decline is due to anthropogenic climate change. The rate of ice loss is much faster than at any time in history, and began with the Industrial Revolution. And while the loss of mountain icefields is bad enough, this is also happening to the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, where 99% of glacial ice is stored. We’ve read many reports on those shocking changes. But seeing the ice disappearing locally hits home. For example, in my nearby Cascade Mountains, the Whitechuck Glacier has nearly disappeared. See the photos 33 years apart.
By the numbers, Alberta (location of the Icefields Parkway) has lost 25% of its glaciated area from 1985 to 2005 (British Columbia, with its greater precipitation and steep Coast Mountain range has lost “only” 11%). Some glaciers are disappearing faster, like the Peyto glacier that feeds the gorgeous turquoise Peyto lake seen in the title image and the earlier diary. NASA Earth Observatory analysis of the Peyto glacier using satellite data shows a 70% loss over the past 50 years. A slider comparison at that web page shows a drastic change in just 20 years.
Wildfires
Another factor exacerbating icefield loss is wildfire fallout. Soot, and a dark purple algae that feeds on soot, darkens the ice so it absorbs more sunlight, heats up and melts. The massive wildfire in Jasper National Park in late July this year deposited a significant load of soot onto nearby ice including the Columbia Icefield. That fire, the largest in this area in 100 years, burned through half of the town of Jasper as well as 70,000 acres of mountains before rain helped pretty much extinguish it in late August. The Icefields Parkway was closed until then, and as we drove through the burned area a few weeks later we could see vast mountainsides of dead and dying standing trees.
Mountainside, Jasper National Park
Living, dying, burned trees on mountainside
Scorched deciduous trees, probably dead
There is evidence to show that fire suppression measures over the past century made this fire hotter and more destructive than it might otherwise have been. Before roads were built in the early 20th c, the local Métis people routinely burned small area of forest for easier travel and better animal forage (the link has a sliding bar to show before and after view around Jasper townsite). When the Métis were displaced for the establishment of the national park, thick forest with lots of ladder fuel grew up. Between the very hot dry weather this summer and the abundant dry fuel, it wasn’t too surprising that a catastrophic fire burned through the area.
Jasper town, half burned to the ground
Water Supply
Glacier volume change projection, Canadian Rockies
The loss of icefields and glaciers will hit the tourism industry but far more problematic for the region as the ice disappears is the loss of water feeding rivers. For the province of Alberta alone, the decline is projected to reduce water supply from from the 1.1 km3 water-equivalent in the early 2000s to less than 0.1 km3 w.e. by the end of the century. The Peace, Athabasca and Saskatchewan rivers provide water to an otherwise dry province. John Pomeroy, professor and Canada Research Chair in water resources and climate change at the University of Saskatchewan, points to what we’re already seeing in Montana and Idaho now their glaciers have mostly melted: less water available especially in the summer, made worse by lower precipitation in general, stressing agriculture.
Icefields Parkway?
What’s an Icefields Parkway with no icefields? Projections by Alberta Water Portal indicate that with aggressive climate stabilization, glacier loss can be limited to a 40% loss by the end of this century. But if climate change continues on its current trajectory, we can expect 80-90% ice loss from the Icefields Parkway region of the Canadian Rockies. The Canadian national park system will have to rename the road but that will be the least consequential effect of climate change in this area.
Athabasca river flowing away from the Rockies
🏞️
Locally, here in the Pacific Northwest islands, we’re having showery cool weather. Cool temps (50s) and breezy.
What’s up in nature in your neighborhood?
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