If the region sees more hot summers like it had in 2021, “there’s not going to be much left on Glacier Peak or Mount Baker, for sure,” said Mauri Pelto, a geologist at Nichols College
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — Portland State University professor Andrew Fountain has been researching the dwindling glaciers of the American West since the 1980s. He said for years, he studied their retreat dispassionately — as an interesting phenomenon to try to understand. Then last year, he had an epiphany.
Fountain said glaciers worldwide are getting a kind of double whammy: Less snow in the winter and more melt in the summer. Beyond the fascination they provide for a small community of researchers, glaciers serve as frozen reservoirs.Salmon and people in glacier-fed watersheds rely on nature’s ice chests to keep rivers flowing and cool each summer.“We have to encourage our lawmakers to start enacting legislation to cut greenhouse gases,” Fountain said.
The glaciers of Olympic National Park sit at relatively low elevations, about 5,000 to 6,000 feet , and are shrinking faster than higher-elevation ice fields. Fountain called Olympic glaciers “the canary in the coal mine” for others in the western United States. “It may be too late for the Olympic glaciers, but perhaps not for those elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, particularly on our taller peaks,” Clark said.
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