Mount Rainier National Park, Washington | The New York Times
There used to be 29. Now at least one is missing, maybe three. The remaining ones are almost half the size they used to be.
Mount Rainier is losing its glaciers. This is all the more impressive because it is the most contiguous glaciercovered mountain in the United States. It is located in Washington state in the western part of the country.
The changes reflect a harsh global reality: Mountain glaciers are disappearing as the burning of fossil fuels warms the Earth’s atmosphere.
According to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, the total area of glaciers has steadily declined over the past half century; Some of the largest declines occurred in the western United States and Canada.
Mount Rainier National Park, a popular tourist destination that receives about 2 million visitors each year, is clearly feeling the impact.
Wildflowers, one of the main attractions of summer, bloom at strange times. The season for climbing the 4,200 meter high peak has shortened.
Douglas firs migrate down mountain slopes to areas where there is less snow than before. Rocks fall from retreating glaciers, destroy ancient forests, change the course of rivers and, most important to the National Park Service, flood roads they are supposed to maintain so tourists can reach and enjoy nature.
A small, southfacing glacier, Stevens, no longer exists and has been removed from the park’s glacier inventory. Two others, known as Pyramid and Van Trump, “are at serious risk,” according to a comprehensive survey released by the Park Service this summer, and could be gone by the time the agency conducts its next survey in a year or two, Scott said R. Beason, a park geologist who led the study.
“The extinction of a glacier is not something I take lightly,” he said. “Losing her is very serious.”
Their study used historical glacier measurements, satellite images and aerial photography to create a threedimensional map of the park’s snow and ice.
The total area covered by glacial ice was found to have declined by 42% between 1896 and 2021 other research conducted in autumn 2022 by glaciologist Mauri Pelto concluded that Pyramid and Van Trump had disappeared.
The face of Mount Rainier is changing, probably forever.
Beason noticed this as he entered the park last week and looked up. The mountain seemed “muted,” he said.
Even in September, there was little winter snow left on Nisqually Glacier, one of the mountain’s largest and most prominent glaciers. Black stones hung from the surface of the glacier. Over the years, the mouth of the Nisqually migrated further and further up the mountain.
“Mount Rainier’s glaciers are at longterm risk of extinction,” the Park Service report warned. “The longterm impacts of this loss will be farreaching, affecting many aspects of the park’s ecosystem.”
Climbers also face new challenges. The glaciers are the roads they take to get to the summit. These passes melt earlier and earlier in the summer. The paths to the summit become longer as climbers have to overcome risky cracks and crevices. The climbing season is getting shorter.
On a foggy August morning, Paul Kennard, a geomorphologist who recently retired after 20 years with the Park Service, left his car in the Paradise parking lot, passing summer visitors who had come to admire the wildflowers , and then set off to climb. to Nisqually.
It is one of the glaciers with the biggest problems. Much of it lies below 3,000 meters and on the south side of the mountain, where the heat is greatest. The mountain’s summit is unlikely to lose snow and ice. In this case, Mount Rainier, an active volcano, would look very different. “Like Darth Vader’s head,” Kennard said.
To the uninitiated visitor it didn’t look like a glacier. Kennard assured us that it was so. He has climbed Nisqually at least 75 times, he said. Today seemed worse than he imagined.
“A glacier that is healthy, or at least stable or progressing, looks different,” he said. “Don’t seem so discouraged.”
Shiny veins of black ice could be seen beneath some rocks. Sometimes you could hear the sound of running water a reminder of the frozen river you were standing by. A loud bang in the distance meant rocks were falling. The large specimens, Kennard said, pointing to some the size of transport trucks, could come loose and collapse at any moment. Depending on their number and speed, they can cause damage.
The worst he can remember was in 2006, when a glacier broke, sending a massive slurry of wet sediment and rocks into a tributary of the Nisqually River. It looked like a freight train. Huge stones rolled down. The socalled debris flow destroyed a Douglas fir grove that was at least a hundred years old. The river overflowed its banks, changed its course and destroyed parts of the 21 km long road on the west side.
This street remains closed to traffic. The skeletons of these Douglas firs line the distant shores. “I see a river gone crazy,” Kennard said.
A few years ago, just before he retired, Kennard came up with a costeffective solution using what the mountain threw up: tall trees and large rocks. To protect the bank from collapse, he built a series of buttresses made of logs wedged between rocks and jutting out into the river.
It was a pilot project aimed at saving one of the park’s most important structures: the main road that motorists use from the south entrance. This road is perilously close to the Nisqually River, which flows freely as the “eternal” glaciers of Mount Rainier disappear. “Less forever now,” Kennard said. “The glaciers are breaking apart.”
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves