For nearly four decades, (click here) Mauri Pelto has been studying the advance and retreat of glaciers around the globe. He has watched them succumb, one-by-one, to rising temperatures. Of 250 glaciers that he has watched, all had retreated (or shortened) except one: Taku Glacier.
Now a new analysis shows that Taku has lost mass and joined the rest of the retreating glaciers. “This is a big deal for me because I had this one glacier I could hold on to,” said Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College. “But not anymore. This makes the score climate change: 250 and alpine glaciers: 0.”
The natural-color images above show the glacier on August 20, 2014, and August 9, 2019. The images were acquired by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8. Though subtle, the changes are most visible at the boundaries between the glacier and river....
I was there the summer of 2004. There are reasons the Taku Glacier was the last of the hold outs. I'll get into it in the following entries.
