Saying a Sad Farewell to the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers of the Trinity Alps

            On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, I attended the Science on Tap event at the Trinity County Brewing Company. There were three forest service biologists, Justin Garwood, Ken Lindke, and Mike Van Hattem, sharing their personal experiences with and self-described “amateur” scientific study of the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers in the Trinity Alps. These were the last two remaining glaciers in the range, clinging precipitously to the northeast corners of Thompson Peak (Grizzly) and Caesar Cap (Salmon). You can read their published paper here: https://bioone.org/journals/Northwest-Science/volume-94/issue-1/046.094.0104/20th-Century-Retreat-and-Recent-Drought-Accelerated-Extinction-of-Mountain/10.3955/046.094.0104.short or an excerpt here: https://www.michaelkauffmann.net/2020/04/the-last-glacier-in-the-klamath-mountains/.

The day before, when it was eighty degrees Fahrenheit in town, my young neighbor remarked, “It’s hot.” She’s seven, and she’s right: it’s April and we launched into late spring/early summer. This change  isn’t happening in the future, it’s happening now.

            I’m realizing the chronic, lingering feeling in my heart is grief. It’s sad to say goodbye to things, even if they are unliving, like the ice of the now extinct Salmon Glacier and the presumed extinct Grizzly Glacier. There goes our last summer-long melt source. Free water storage, gone. Water provided for at least 72 alpine plant species, transformed to bare, dry rock. Plants have been blossoming earlier this year. I hope the pollinators have been keeping up. It’s such a delicate dance, with precise timing. We live in a beautiful, fragile world.

            The three presenters were very knowledgeable, well-spoken, and honest, directly tying the stark increase in temperatures to anthropogenic activities. Their paper was published in 2020, but the last two winters were an intense addendum to their written conclusions. It was a factual, and unfortunately brutally bleak look at the trends in increasing temperature and decreasing precipitation for our mountains.

I hold out hope we might get respite storms or slightly more precipitous years to reprieve us for a season. We are still close to the ocean, after all. But the entire ecosystem around us will change dramatically in response to the new conditions. We will not see glaciers in the Alps again for a very long time, thousands—perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands—of years from now. That requires us to say goodbye to what was and prepare for what will be, which is a very daunting task.

            The presentation did a great job of driving home the local effects of this global change. The Glenzer and Conger ice shelves in Antarctica collapsed on March 21st (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149640/ice-shelf-collapse-in-east-antarctica). If you remember from my Milkankovitch Cycle article, we should be moving toward glaciation, with the poles receiving less direct sunlight, allowing continental ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice to grow. Now we’ve set in motion a largescale meltdown, with feedback loops hastening and amplifying heating.

If Antarctica melts entirely, sea level will rise by five meters (15 feet) (https://scitechdaily.com/melting-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-could-cause-5-meter-rise-in-sea-levels-by-the-end-of-the-millennium/). We can deny the problem, or we can start to plan. Coastal relocations, desalinization plants, widespread rain catchment, sustainable, hazard-proof homes, buildings, roads, and infrastructure. If we deny the problem and make no plans, we make yet more problems and open ourselves up to desperation, hostility, and chaos. In many ways, we have already done this. If we look ahead to the anticipated changes, we can problem-solve and work our way through to solutions that minimize harm to humans and prevent or remedy damage to the environment. We still have time to do all of this.

At the end of the glacier presentation, I approached all three men and said, with tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, “Thank you. Folks here need to hear it from you. What you say is important. Thank you.” I would have said more, but was embarrassed to be crying in public. All the same, grief is heavy and painful, and it’s always okay to cry.

Trinity County is so scenically gorgeous and full of interesting, strong people with big personalities. I have been very fortunate to meet many great humans, expanding my community ties. We will all make it further if we work together. All hands on deck! The more people we have working to solve problems, the better our quality of life will be, for everyone.

Paleoclimatology and Proxy Records

Greetings to all!

            Paleoclimatology is the study of ancient climates. We obviously don’t have high-resolution data from 10 or 100 million years ago because we didn’t exist! Today we have satellite measurements, meters, gauges, sensors, etc. which give us a very vivid, clear, detailed picture of our reality. But when we look back into deep time, we must gather data through proxy records. Proxy records are “physical, chemical and biological materials preserved within the geologic record” (https://www2.usgs.gov/landresources/lcs/paleoclimate/proxies.asp) and these materials contain pertinent information about events that took millions (or tens of millions) of years to unfold. Today, we will barely scratch the surface.

            We more or less understand tree rings, right? Trees grow outward, year after year. The more rings, the older the tree. The light rings are summer growth, and the dark lines are winter growth. Thicker summer rings indicate favorable growing conditions with sufficient water, light, and nutrients. Thin rings indicate poor growing conditions.

            Now let’s take that a step further. Plants and trees have preferred climatic conditions and they release pollen to reproduce. This pollen wafts on the wind to various destinations and becomes part of the geologic record. Scientists can analyze the relative abundance of certain species over others to determine an approximate temperature and precipitation regime for the area. With error bars, of course as 100% certainty is never guaranteed. Plant macrofossils can also be used in a similar manner to reconstruct past plant assemblages and infer their preferred climate conditions.

Ice cores also offer us glimpses into ancient atmospheres by trapping tiny pockets of air. Glaciers form via the accumulation and compaction of snow, and some ice cores have visible layers much like tree rings. Air trapped in the pore spaces between snowflakes eventually become bubbles trapped in the ice. Scientists use the amount of methane and carbon dioxide to determine a range of likely temperatures based on our observations and understanding of atmospheric chemistry and climate sensitivity. The Vostok ice core contains 400,000 years’ worth of atmospheric data, and it clearly shows how much of an outlier our current CO2 concentration actually is. (http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/ice-cores/ice-core-basics/).

            Then there are sediment records. Scientists can use the texture, color, structure, density, and magnetic properties of sediments to determine where the sediment came from, where it was likely deposited, which direction wind or water was flowing, how much chlorophyll or rust is present (and therefore what the oxygen conditions were like and how much biological activity occurred), and many other helpful bits of information. Now is a good time to brush up on that chemistry refresher article explaining what isotopes are! And might as well review the slow carbon cycle article, too. Their respective links are below. http://www.trinityjournal.com/community/columnists/article_e52b01a4-0529-11ec-bd09-c720e79ed003.html http://www.trinityjournal.com/community/clubs_and_organizations/article_4471c402-102b-11ec-9805-176802389de5.html

Plankton are microscopic organisms in the ocean that form calcium carbonate shells. The oxygen in these shells can either be O16 or O18, meaning it can either contain 8 neutrons, or 10 neutrons, respectively.

(8 protons + 8 neutrons = an atomic weight of 16)

(8 protons + 10 neutrons = an atomic weight of 18)

            O16 is preferentially evaporated, meaning it becomes gaseous before the heavier O18 does. In periods of extensive glaciation when continental ice sheets are at their thickest, we clearly see more O16 in the ice core records and, here’s the kicker, more O18 in the calcium carbonate shells in ocean sediments! More O18 in the ocean means bigger glaciers. More O16 in the ocean means significantly less glaciation. Coral reefs also create calcium carbonate skeletons and they grow outward and form growth layers, also similar to trees. Proxy records can be used for comparison and calibration as we refine our estimates. There are always more data to discover.

            To those with a knack for chemistry, biology, and geology, proxy records provide rich treasure troves of information about the vast, mysterious, magical world that is our home planet.

            Keep exploring and never stop learning, friends!