Not satisfied with the winter that didn't want to stop giving us snow right into April, one of the key points on our little spring family holiday was seeing more snow - a whole glacier's worth.
Invited up to Edmonton for a cousin's graduation celebration, we decided to make a trip out of it and show our kids the mountains for the first time. A big highlight was going on the Columbia Icefield Glacier Adventure. Our kids were going to go on a glacier, the Athabasca Glacier.
This was not the first time for my wife and I. We first went there in 2000, before we had kids. It was a thrill then, and is still a thrill now. The difference is these days I spend time thinking about global warming and glaciers.
For some reason, wherever you go in Banff and Jasper National Parks, you find Australians working there. Thus we had an Aussie with a thick Down Under drawl driving the mother of all tour busses, a monster truck with seating for dozens.
It was with great interest I listened to him explain how in the 1844, the glacier used to reach all the way to the parking lot at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre. Look at how much it has retreated since then, he pointed out, very broadly indicating this was clearly global warming at work.
Once we were back in that parking lot, I took a good look at the valley now devoid of a good chunk of glacier. Indeed it did retreat, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of the great big Ford SUV I was piling my kids into.
When it began its several-kilometre retreat, the world had roughly 1.5 billion people, and none of them drove cars. Electrical power generation was still a dream. The light bulb wasn't invented for another 35 years. It would be roughly 20 years before Standard Oil was even founded. The first oil well wasn't drilled until 1859, and it would take many decades before oil production amounted to anything, let alone global impacts. Yet the glacier was already retreating.
In the mid-1840s, only a handful of coal-burning steamships had been built in the entire world. Surely their greenhouse gas emissions didn't start the glacial retreat. Coal was burned, but in homes, not in power plants.
Looking upon the now-empty valley I realized that its volume was pretty close to that of the one, singular mountain to the north, Mount Snowdome. Well, it would be, if the valley had been full to the brim. So let's imagine we took that volume of ice, an ice cube the size of a mountain, mind you, and dropped it into the ocean. A drop in the bucket would have been much larger, proportionately speaking. Oh, and it took 170 years for that ice cube to melt by half.
The glaciers I think more of are the ones that covered nearly all of Canada for about 80,000 of the past 100,000 years, and were more than a kilometre thick. Their volume and size had a tremendous impact on the entire planet. They also didn't melt because of my SUV.
It was natural processes that caused these glaciers to retreat.
Now CNN is reporting, "New research shows a major section of west Antarctica's ice sheet will completely melt in coming centuries and probably raise sea levels higher than previously predicted, revealing another impact from the world's changing climate.
"According to a study released (May 12), warm ocean currents and geographic peculiarities have helped kick off a chain reaction at the Amundsen Sea-area glaciers, melting them faster than previously realized and pushing them 'past the point of no return,' NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot told reporters."
The question is, is man really to blame for this, or is this simply part of the natural cycle that has been going on for millennia, and we're simply blaming ourselves for it?
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
