Saying a Sad Farewell to the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers of the Trinity Alps
The last two remaining glaciers in the Trinity Alps have melted. We still have photographs to remind us of the vast ecological diversity that once thrived in our hometown mountains.
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.
Systems Thinking: Unlocking A Complex Earth
Earth is full of complex intricacies, different spheres interacting in nonlinear ways, shaping our lived experience as delicate humans in a planetary-scale system.
July 28th, 2021
Earth is a complex, multi-system wonder! Just as the human body consists of multiple systems that all work in tandem to sustain human life, the Earth System is composed of multiple systems that sustain a vast quantity and variety of life forms. These subsystems are: the lithosphere, also called the geosphere (rocks, soil, molten rock, fossil fuels), the hydrosphere (oceans, rivers, lakes, groundwater, etc.), the atmosphere (tropo-, strato-, meso-, thermo-, magneto-, and exo-sphere), the biosphere (oceanic and terrestrial plants and animals), and some climatological conventions separate out the cryosphere (ice and snow).
To understand how the Earth System operates, we need to understand “systems thinking”. It helps to break Earth down into “stocks” (nouns) and “flows” (verbs). A stock/reservoir is any entity that can be filled or depleted, like a bathtub filling or draining. We just listed the Earth System stocks: the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere. We concern ourselves with how materials and energy flow throughout the system, i.e. how water, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, and other elements of key interest move throughout the different spheres. This means that the flows/fluxes are actions, or processes through which materials can move from one sphere to another.
Most of us confidently understand the hydrological cycle. Evaporation is the flux that moves water from the hydrosphere and lithosphere (in the form of soil moisture) up into the atmosphere. Precipitation is the flux that moves water back down from the atmosphere to the hydrosphere and lithosphere. Condensation is another flux/process in the hydrological cycle, but in this example, it does not transfer water from one sphere to another, but occurs solely within the atmosphere.
Systems Thinking also requires us to understand residence times and time lags, nonlinear relationships, as well as feedback loops. Residence times refer to how long a material remains within a stock. Sticking to our hydrological cycle example, here’s how long a water molecule stays, on average, within a given stock: Oceans/Seas (at a depth of 2,500 m) 4,000 years, Lakes/Reservoirs 10 years, Swamps 1-10 years, Rivers 2 weeks, Soil Moisture 2 weeks-1 year, Groundwater (120 m) 2 weeks-10,000 years, Ice Caps/Glaciers 10-1,000 years, Atmospheric Water 10 days, Biospheric Water 1 week (https://www.spokaneaquifer.org/the-aquifer/what-is-an-aquifer/residence-time-of-groundwater/).
For each of the cycles we’ll cover (rock, carbon, nitrogen, etc.) there will be different residence times for the material of interest. I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to consider the residence time of a given material. For some cycles, the residence time is hundreds of millions of years!
The lag time we experience every day is the diurnal (daily) temperature lag. Noon is when we receive the most sunlight, but peak daytime temperatures occur several hours after noon. That’s because air warms (and cools!) faster than water, dirt, and rock. The earth continues to radiate heat well past noon, maintaining warm temperatures. Another example is seasonal ocean temperatures: northern hemisphere oceans tend to reach their warmest temperature in August and September, 2-3 months after the summer solstice! (https://www.seatemperature.org/atlantic-ocean). This is due to the massive heat capacity of water: it takes 4,184 joules to warm 1 kilogram of water by 1°C (by comparison, it takes 385 joules to warm 1 kilogram of copper 1°C) (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/specific-heat-capacity-and-water?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects). Thus, the ocean continues to warm well beyond the longest day of the year.
Exponential growth is the most crucial nonlinear relationship to understand in the Earth system. Human population is one example: it took about 12,000 years to reach 1 billion people (in the year 1800), and then it only took 120 years to grow to 7.9 billion (https://ugc.berkeley.edu/background-content/population-growth/).
Lastly: feedback loops. Positive feedback loops amplify or increase the effect of a forcing, negative feedback loops dampen or decrease the effect of a forcing. A positive feedback: as sea ice melts, dark ocean water is revealed. Dark ocean water absorbs sunlight (as opposed to reflective white ice and snow), and so absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, on and on and on. Right now, permafrost in the arctic is melting and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more powerful than CO2 but with 1/10th the atmospheric residence time (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.0423).
This heats the planet, which melts more permafrost, which releases more methane, etc. Same with wildfires: combustion moves carbon from the biosphere to the atmosphere, and the train runs away.
Canary in the coal mine? Or arctic tern on the burning permafrost graveyard . . .?
Image sourced from: https://ugc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Human-Pop-Growth-2019.jpg