Wonderfully well written and interesting article about Tom Yeager's personal obsservations of an Alaskan glacier.
If he were 1,000 years old he could have reported that the glacier was once much smaller than it is now but grew dramatically during the Little Ice Age before beginning its current shrinking phase about 150 years ago. He then could have concluded that all of those changes were due to natural forces.
Brian Adams
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Getty Images for Newsweek
On Thin Ice: The glacier has retreated more than a mile
MY TURN
Marking Time With a Glacier
As our family grew larger, climate change caused the massive wall of ice to grow smaller.
From the magazine issue dated May 12, 2008
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It is a bit disconcerting to be old enough to have witnessed changes that were once thought to take longer than a human lifetime. As a youngster, I learned that geologic changes to our planet (with the exception of volcanic eruptions) take place slowly over unfathomably long periods of time. But after living in Alaska for three decades, I have come to realize that volcanic eruptions are not the only geologic processes that can be observed within the span of a person's life. The dramatic melting of nearby Portage Glacier, once a majestic behemoth, has kept pace with the story of our family in Alaska.
When my wife, Lenore, and I moved to Alaska in the mid-1970s, the awe-inspiring face of Portage Glacier spanned the entire width of Portage Valley. Even the small portion of it that could be seen from ground level was one mile wide. The glacier's sheer vertical face, flanked on both sides by the valley's steep cliffs and punctuated by yawning crevasses and gravity-defying ice pinnacles, towered majestically above the surface of Portage Lake. Back then the glacier could be approached during winter by skiing across the frozen surface of the lake. Oblivious to the several hundred feet of frigid water below our skis, we would glide across the snow-covered ice, through a fairyland of frozen in-place icebergs, to the imposing face of the glacier.
One of those early ski trips remains particularly memorable. Since I was still a cheechako (that's Alaskan lingo for greenhorn), I had failed to realize that the sporadic forward movement of the glacier could, like a colossal bulldozer, push against the frozen surface of the lake with unimaginable force.
I had stopped a respectful distance from the towering face of the glacier for a lunch break with our family's first dog, Grindel. She was still a puppy at the time, and her potpourri of bloodlines (which included husky, St. Bernard and German shepherd) made her the quintessential Alaskan mutt. Before we could break out the dog biscuits and gorp, there was a sudden release of the tremendous compressed energy that the forward movement of the glacier had exerted on the lake ice. With a deep-throated sound that was felt as much as heard, the massive slab of ice upon which we rested was thrust forward by the glacier, causing it to ride up and over the ice behind us. Pressure ridges that marked the fractured boundaries of the ice slabs suddenly began to grow upward like miniature mountain ranges. Needless to say, Grindel and I recrossed those pressure ridges with great care on our return trip to terra firma.
Each summer the glacier would calve off icebergs the size of two-car garages that would drift across the lake and become beached against the near shore. With the onset of winter, and locked in place by lake ice, the icebergs became fancifully shaped play structures, complete with eerie ice-blue caves, secret hiding places and incredibly slippery slides.
Through the 1990s, as our children, Adam and Elyse, then teenagers, became busy with other things, my most reliable companion on excursions to Portage Glacier became, once again, the canine component of our family. Dena'ina, another Alaskan mutt, took particular joy in these trips, her tail wagging feverishly in the frigid air.
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