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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Oct 2, 2013 - 12:41pm PT
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Today's LA Times interview with Greg Stock:
Yosemite's largest ice mass is melting fast
Lyell Glacier has shrunk 62% over the past century and hasn't moved in years. It's a key source of water in the park, and scientists say it will be gone in 20 years.
By Louis Sahagun
October 1, 2013, 9:12 p.m.
Climate change is taking a visible toll on Yosemite National Park, where the largest ice mass in the park is in a death spiral, geologists say.
During an annual trek to the glacier deep in Yosemite's backcountry last month, Greg Stock, the park's first full-time geologist, found that Lyell Glacier had shrunk visibly since his visit last year, continuing a trend that began more than a century ago.
Lyell has dropped 62% of its mass and lost 120 vertical feet of ice over the last 100 years. "We give it 20 years or so of existence — then it'll vanish, leaving behind rocky debris," Stock said.
The Sierra Nevada Mountains have roughly 100 remaining glaciers, two of them in Yosemite. The shrinkage of glaciers across the Sierra is also occurring around the world. Great ice sheets are dwindling, prompting concerns about what happens next to surrounding ecological systems after perennial rivulets of melted ice disappear.
"We've looked at glaciers in California, Colorado, Wyoming, Washington and elsewhere, and they're all thinning because of warming temperatures and less precipitation," said Andrew Fountain, professor of geology and geography at Portland State University in Oregon. "This is the beginning of the end of these things."
If carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, the earth will eventually become ice-free, according to a study by Ken MacLeod, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Missouri, published in the October issue of the journal Geology.
Research by scientists at NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey and UC Davis suggests that absorption of sunlight in snow by industrial air pollution including soot, or black carbon, is also causing snow and ice to melt faster.
Yosemite's other glacier, Maclure, is also shrinking, but it remains alive and continues to creep at a rate of about an inch a day.
Lyell, however, hasn't budged. It is the second largest glacier in the Sierra Nevada and the headwater of the Tuolumne River watershed, but it no longer fits the definition of a glacier because it has ceased moving.
"Lyell Glacier is stagnant — a clear sign it's dying," Stock said. "Our research indicates it stopped moving about a decade ago."
Of particular concern is the effect on Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows. After two years of drought, many of the streams that nourish the picturesque meadowlands have gone dry. The one exception, however, is the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River, which is sustained by runoff from Lyell and Maclure glaciers.
"When the glaciers are gone, there will be no steady supplies of water in that drainage," Stock said. "We don't know what the impacts of that will be on plants and animals that evolved with these ice flows."
Future research projects will attempt to use climate shifts chronicled in the widths of tree rings in nearby forests to create computer models that will show the shrinkage of Yosemite's glaciers over the last 300 years — and help predict when they will disappear entirely.
Scientists also want to know why Lyell has stopped moving when neighboring Maclure, which is half the size it was a century ago, continues to advance at the same rate it did when naturalist John Muir and his friend Galen Clark hammered wooden stakes into its icy crust in 1872 to prove that glaciers are "living" because they move and alter the landscape as they do so.
"Glaciers tend to flow like honey down a plate, or slide over meltwater beneath them," Stock said. "We suspect Lyell just isn't thick enough anymore to drive a downhill motion."
Overall, "the rate of glacier retreat has accelerated since about 2000," Stock said. "Eventually, there'll be nothing left."
That's already happened at least once in Yosemite, geologists say. Black Mountain Glacier, which Muir discovered, surveyed and declared "living" in 1871, was gone by the mid-1980s.
louis.sahagun@latimes.com
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
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What most amazed me about this article was
"The Sierra Nevada Mountains have roughly 100 remaining glaciers."
During my two weeks on the JMT I was thinking there were about 7 or 8 remaining.
But then my reference is clouded by too many years in Washington and Alaska.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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I agree Bruce. Stock has blown it. And then there is that wretched personality, too.
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TwistedCrank
climber
Bungwater Hollow, Ida-ho
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Maybe it was only just a "snowfield with style" to begin with anyway.
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RyanD
climber
Squamish
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Woah yeah that's not a glacier no more.
What's the largest Sierra glacier? Pallisade glacier?
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Here's a pic of Dana Glacier taken in 1880:
And here's a pic I took last week of Dana Glacier from a mound on the Dana Plateau:
The entire left lobe of the glacier has vanished since the end of the Little Ice Age. Still pretty active though with all those crevasses. Looks a lot healthier than Lyell Glacier does this year.
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gstock
climber
Yosemite Valley
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"There is an obvious solution to this problem.
Fire Greg Stock."
Wait, is that why I'm being furloughed? ;)
To the questions posed:
The Palisade is the largest glacier in the Sierra by area. Lyell Glacier is the second largest. An inventory conducted in the mid-2000's (Basagic and Fountain, 2011) identified about 100 "glaciers" in the Sierra Nevada, though many of these are small, unnamed, probably stagnant ice patches.
The Lyell Glacier was shown to be moving in the 1930's, so its stagnation has occurred since then; based on changes in thickness and area, it has most likely occurred in the past 10 or so years.
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Fire Greg and then hire Chief Chuff
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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People still believe in man made global warming??
And you would think a geologist would know better. But I guess your research is dictated by the funding ;)
Here are local (Eastern Sierra) temp records for the curious:
The LOE has been above the Sierra Crest for 150 years, since we came out of the Little Ice Age- which term was coined to explain the presence of glaciers here in Sierra (where they shouldn't be) in the first place. While inspired here in the Sierra, the Little Ice Age (or Neoglacial) now describes the world wide cold spell of the last 700 or so years...the coldest period of the Holocene. You can see from the records above, in the 60's and 70's temps dipped back down to Neoglacial levels, and are heading that way again.
Enjoy our rapidly fading little warm blip...it's getting colder folks.
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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Here is the available data for precip and snow from Mammoth Mountain:
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TYeary
Social climber
State of decay
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TY
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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so why IS Lyell Glacier disappearing?
Sierra glaciers are remnant from the Little Ice Age... they stopped accumulating at least 150 years ago.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Easy come, easy go? Not really, no.
But we climbed the rock and not the snow.
I hate sun-cups and sloppy slogs.
I'd do just as well on rotten logs.
Likely I'll never go there mo.
It makes real nice water, though.
It was in '85 that Jim and I did this and descended the god-awful sun-cups.
We managed not to drown.This shot is to show you what's below the summit on the southern/eastern side. Fergeddaboutdit. Go around like mice.
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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This same idiotic article appeared in the local paper.
At least they listed the two non-profits that paid to take reporters on this organised junket.
You have the anatomy of the man made global warming scam right there:
Hedge fund funds NGO, NGO generates propaganda, hedge fund makes money on carbon market, high fuel prices, and carbon taxes.
And people wonder why Obama is meeting with Lloyd Blankfein while the government is "shutdown".
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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To be fair, 1983 was a record high snow year, and 2013 was an unusually low one, so comparing the two years is a bit misleading. however, 1983 was also the best of years, since it was the year I met and married my wife.
John
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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//They shot Kennedy too.
DMT//
Your right.
How naive of me to think that corporate or government leaders might be corrupt.
Bankers and Politicians obviously have only our best interest at heart.
//rSin
why is he?//
Apparently blackmail. Just a friendly message from your local Financial Mafia:
Goldman, Bank Of America CEOs Stress Shutdown's Harm in Obama Meeting
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20131002-708836.html
"... if money doesn't flow in then money doesn't flow out," said Goldman Sachs (GS) Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein.
Mr. Blankfein said the executives told Mr. Obama "exactly how bad it would be."
Mr. Moynihan said the group was "just making clear that people understand the seriousness of the situation."
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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It may be conspiracy DMT, but it is real.
Village, boy named Friday, burned to save us from Global Warming:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/africa/in-scramble-for-land-oxfam-says-ugandans-were-pushed-out.html?_r=4&scp=3&sq=uganda&st=cse
“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”
Other villagers described gun-toting soldiers and an 8-year-old child burning to death when his home was set ablaze by security officers.
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.
The company involved, New Forests Company (an Al Gore vehicle), grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
In 2005, the Ugandan government granted New Forests a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests in three districts, and the company has applied to the United Nations to trade under the mechanism. The company expects that it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.
But there was just one problem: people were living on the land where the company wanted to plant trees. Indeed, they had been there a while.
“He was a policeman for King George,” Mr. Bakeshisha said of his father, who served with British forces during World War II in Egypt.
---------
I also did not make up the Yosemite Conservency or the Alpine of the Americas Group - the latter funded solely to generate CAGW alarmism
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 4, 2013 - 08:43pm PT
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Hey, June, enlighten me as to the relevancy of this to the Sierras' glaciers disappearing.
Or are the Illuminati onto everything?
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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"Hey, June, enlighten me as to the relevancy of this to the Sierras' glaciers disappearing."
The LA Times article starting the post is not just about disappearing glaciers, it is loaded with ridiculous propaganda. As was obviously the point of the press junket.
The irony is your post came up in results as I searched for Sierra Glaciers, in order to try distinguishing between existing snow fields and glaciers, and new perennial snow fields from the last few years.
For the curious, here is good resource:
http://glaciers.geos.pdx.edu/index.php?lat=37.22491&lng=-118.75570&scale=50000
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juneclimber
Sport climber
june lake, ca
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"huh???"
The Sierra Crest from Mt. Wood to Mt. Dana is clearly visible from the highway, and there are some apparently new snow fields. I am looking to make sure they are are not on this map:
To get an idea of the relief here in the Eastern Sierra, here is the google street view from my house. The Crest is literally across the street - Lyell is out of view behind the low notch:
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