In one year, Alberta’s iconic Saskatchewan Glacier in Banff National Park melted down by a whopping ten metres.
The famous glacier that winds down from the Columbia Icefields lost the equivalent of a telephone pole’s worth of ice thickness at its terminus between 2020 and 2021.
The fact that our glaciers are rapidly melting is not surprising as summers get hotter and winter snowpacks get thinner.
What is surprising is the role massive forest fires, intensified by a warming global climate, play.
Research scientist John Pomeroy monitors snow, ice, and water in Jasper and Banff national parks, and Kananaskis Country.
While visiting the Bow Glacier this past summer he noticed it was darker than ever.
“The glacier was barely distinguishable from the surrounding rock and dirt,” Pomeroy told The Rockies Life.
It’s an eyesore, no doubt, but it’s a much bigger problem than simply wrecking pretty postcard pictures.
Analysis of stuff scraped from the surface of these glaciers reveals a toxic cocktail of soot from forest fires, mixed with a whole bunch of industrial pollutants from diesel and other things floating around in the air.
When ice melts, these pollutants are carried away into creeks and streams.
The real doozy is that ash on a glacier changes the albedo effect, or the ability of a surface to reflect the sun’s energy.
World’s Worst Sunscreen
A light surface, like freshly fallen snow, reflects up to 90 percent of the sun’s energy. Dirty melting snow reflects half or less.
A dark glacier, like the Bow Glacier this summer, absorbs most of the sun’s energy. That’s bad news. The result is an even faster rate of ice melt, and that’s not what our glaciers need.
Wildfires are a double whammy for climate change. Though fire is a natural part of a forest’s life cycle, wildfires are growing in intensity and size as the landscape dries out from multi-year droughts.
The more fires that burn, the more carbon that is released and added to planet-warming greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.
As we are seeing with glaciers like the Bow Glacier, ash and soot from forest fires are sending glaciers to the brink quicker than ever.
That’s a fact that we need to pay attention to.
Melting glacier ice contributes between less than one percent and three percent to the annual flow of rivers like the Bow River. Snowpack and rain deliver the rest.
However, water from glaciers comes during the hottest months of the year when rivers need it the most.
When glaciers are gone, it will have a big impact on downstream water use.
If global temperatures continue to rise, researchers predict that glaciers like the Saskatchewan Glacier will almost completely disappear by the end of the century.
Glaciers will not be the only casualty if we don’t get a handle on our climate crisis. Our people, our wildlife, and our landscape will all pay the price.
