Researching climate change and its effects on our mountain environment
By Steve Couche
[originally published in the December 2006 Mazama Bulletin]
This article is a brief synopsis of a research conference I attended in September at Timberline Lodge called MtnClim 2006 sponsored by the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains (CIRMOUNT). It was wonderful and thought provoking. There was indeed a lot of science, with talks of modeling and many graphs, trends and charts. Through it all, though, it was easy to see the big picture: the mountain landscape is changing and the culprit is global warming.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a short piece for the Bulletin titled “The New Face of Climbing.” In that piece I talked about a monthly column of the global warming task force. I shouldn’t have been so audacious. I didn’t foresee buying and moving into a new house, nor that summer was in full bloom, that vacations happen, and that nice weather would take over.
Andrew Fountain, a professor at Portland State University, talked about the responses of glaciers to climate change here in the West. Bottom line: glaciers in the American west, exclusive of Alaska, have been retreating since observations started at the beginning of the 20th century. Initially the retreat was fast as we came out of the Little Ice Age, then slowed between the 1950s and 1970s, then accelerated again in the late ’70s, and continues to accelerate. Most at risk are the maritime glaciers here in the Pacific Northwest as we continue to see a decline in winter snows due to warmer winter temperatures and a snowline that is moving up the mountains. Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist from Nichols College in Massachusetts, has been doing field work on eight glaciers in the North Cascades for over twenty years. In that time two of the glaciers have disappeared. The remaining glaciers have shrunk considerably. Check out his Web site for some excellent photos showing just how much. Pelto’s glacial research includes the Cascade glacier, glaciers on Mount Baker and elsewhere in the North Cascades. For climbers, he thinks his Web site will be quite useful because he gives a good written description of what he finds on the glaciers he visits every year with good pictures at www.nichols.edu/departments/glacier/index.html.
Anne Nolin, from the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University talked about the changing snow pack in western mountains with some predictions on the impacts to western ski areas. Bottom line: things don’t look too good! A Google search of Nolin will turn up some excellent articles she has published. Several authors talked about the changes that they were seeing to vegetation and animal species in western mountains. Specifically animal populations are shifting, moving up mountains and in some cases just disappearing. What was particularly interesting to me was how global warming could have a much more sweeping impact on species dependent on a particular plant. For instance, with less snow cover, and thus less insulation from the hard freezes of high elevations, flowers freeze, causing seeds not to develop, affecting the seed collectors and the pollinators (threatening them with starvation). Tree lines are in some cases moving up mountains, or they are seeing a shift in species composition. Researchers are seeing major insect infestations that they directly blame on warming temperatures. They even found that one bark beetle is now breeding and laying eggs twice in a year, and the milder winters made for higher species survival. The results are larger and more frequent forest fires as more trees are dying from the bugs. It is clear that the mountain environment is changing fast.
In “The New Face of Climbing,” I asked climbers to share the changes they are seeing. There was the report of climbers on the Reid Glacier of Mount Hood “not recognizing the hour glass” because it had changed so much in three years. And a member of our conservation committee reported a large moulin (large hole into which surface runoff collects and disappears into the depths of the glacier) on the Blue Glacier on Mt. Olympus in the Olympics. This is the same type of feature described in the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth that is accelerating the shrinking of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. The impact of global warming is dramatic. Plant and animal species are being displaced or are dying as the glaciers recede (or disappear) and the mountain environments change. For those who would like to learn more about CIRMOUNT visit its Web site at www.fs.fed.us/psw /cirmount, and locate past workshops with numerous relevant papers on the impacts of climate change on western alpine environments, and even a Web cast of the MtnClim 2006 meeting.