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.

The Milankovitch Cycles Drove the Ice Ages for Millions of Years, Long Before Humans Arrived

            Welcome back, readers!

            The Milankovitch Cycles are named after Milutin Milankovitch, who correctly calculated the collective (and varying) amounts of solar insolation reaching the mid-latitudes (30-60 degrees) attributed to three specific orbital cycles. Rather than whirl around like a stationary seat on a merry-go-round, Earth actually wobbles like a top as it orbits the sun, sometimes more steeply tilted on its axis, and sometimes making more of an oval-shaped orbit instead of a perfectly circular orbit. These cycles are referred to as precession, obliquity, and eccentricity, respectively.

We humans cannot feel these astronomical movements because they take a long time to unfold. The shape of Earth’s orbit (eccentricity) becomes more ovular or more circular over the course of 100,000 years. This is because Jupiter and Saturn, the largest gaseous planets in the solar system, have a strong enough gravitational pull to warp our Earthly orbit. “When Earth’s orbit is at its most elliptic, about 23% more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our planet’s closest approach to the Sun each year than does at its farthest departure from the Sun. Currently, Earth’s eccentricity is near its least elliptic (most circular) and is very slowly decreasing.” (https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/).

Meanwhile, Earth’s axial tilt (obliquity) ranges from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees every 41,000 years, which doesn’t sound like a lot to us, but makes a HUGE difference at the poles. When the Earth is less tilted (closer to 22.1 degrees), the sun’s rays hit the poles at a low, indirect angle. This promotes glaciation, i.e. the growth of continental ice sheets via the reduction of summer melt such that snow and ice can chronically accumulate. Twenty- to ten-thousand years ago, continental ice sheets covered North America down to New York and Washington state! In contrast, when Earth is tilted at 24.5 degrees, more direct sunlight can hit the polar regions, which contributes to summer melt such that it outpaces snow and ice accumulation, i.e. deglaciation. “Earth’s axis is currently tilted 23.4 degrees, or about half way between its extremes, and this angle is very slowly decreasing.” (Ibid.)

Finally, Earth wobbles like a top over the span of 26,000 years. This has several effects. First, seasons become more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other. The northern hemisphere has more land mass for continental ice sheets to grow upon. Therefore, the amount of solar radiation reaching the northern hemisphere specifically drives the glaciation/deglaciation cycles. Milder seasons in the northern hemisphere promote ice growth. Second, axial precession also changes the timing of the seasons, causing them to begin earlier over time. Hey, our Gregorian calendar is just a social construct, after all! Third, precession causes us to point to new North Stars. Currently they are Polaris and Polaris Australis, but several thousand years ago, they were Kochab and Pherkad. (Ibid).

Don’t panic! The Milankovitch Cycles were easily the most difficult concept for me to grasp as an undergraduate. The main takeaway is that humans have absolutely no ability to influence our orbital movements, and these orbital movements drove the advance and retreat of the ice ages for millions of years before we even arrived on scene. What humans most assuredly DO have the ability to influence is atmospheric chemistry. We alter the carbon cycle every day on a massive scale. This is why we have extraordinarily fast warming, light-speed geologically speaking. We should be entering a gradual cooling period, slipping into the next ice age, but instead we are sky-rocketing in the opposite direction, with global CO2 and temperature increasing exponentially. We know precisely why.

On an unrelated note, I checked the Climate Prediction Center again. It looks like we have equal chances (50:50) forecasted for a normal precipitation year! Let’s hope we receive some of the La Niña moisture expected for the Pacific Northwest. We are technically part of the Cascades, overlying the subduction zone between the Juan de Fuca and North American tectonic plates. Did you know Lassen Peak is the southernmost Cascade volcano? I will continue to hope for plentiful precipitation this winter, ideally in the form of snow.

Be well in the meantime.