When Cliff Goodwin first came to Franz Josef (click here) he didn’t know what a glacier was. It was 2001, and Goodwin had been travelling down the length of New Zealand from his hometown Taranaki, doing odd jobs: fruit picking, housekeeping. “I worked until I had $1,000, then I travelled until I had $100,” he says.
Goodwin had been intending to top up his bank account, then go. But soon after arriving in Franz Josef – on the West Coast of the South Island, at the foot of the Southern Alps – he went to see the town’s biggest draw for himself.
A short drive into the valley, Goodwin was confronted by the bright white face of the glacier: a thick seam of ice churning its way down from the mountains and into the stony riverbed below. The sight of snow was almost startling, so close to the ocean – the glacier terminates only 20km from the Tasman Sea – and so close up.
But Goodwin was not content just to look. “I did what most young boys did: jumped over the barriers, went and walked on the ice, and had a great old time,” he says. “It was awesome. I didn’t have any shoes on, either.”
Soon afterwards, Goodwin got a job as a glacier guide – and one season turned into many. Now he and his wife Tash run their own company, taking nature walking tours through the glacier valley.
What drew Goodwin in was the local history – stories of the glacier’s storming advances, sometimes so fast that snow would swallow shoes left at its base within a day; and the subsequent periods of retreat, revealing gear and paths from the past.
On the computer in his office, Goodwin has collected thousands of photos of the glacier, dating back to the late 19th century and its early days as a tourist destination.
“I fell in love with the glacier a long time ago – I think just because it’s moving, it’s living, it’s changing,” he says. “You can try and understand it, predict it, know what it’s going to do next.”
By nature, glaciers go through phases of advance and retreat. But lately these immense bodies of ice – so vast and ancient as to have carved the surface of the Earth – have been losing ground in a warming world.
Over 40 years, annual aerial surveys of the Southern Alps have shown the altitude at which snow persists throughout the year is climbing higher, and the overall volume of ice reducing – with flow-on effects for the glaciers.
Analysis by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) revealed that from 1977 to 2014, a third of the permanent snow and ice was lost from the Southern Alps – a dramatic decline that began accelerating rapidly in the last 15 years.
More recent surveys have been even more sobering. The summer of 2017-2018 – which saw January temperatures of nearly 3C warmer than average – was the worst on record, scientists said. Some glaciers had shrunk so much, they were hard to see; many would be gone within decades.
A new analysis of more than 200,000 global glaciers found that those in New Zealand showed record thinning of 1.5m a year from 2015-2019 – a nearly sevenfold increase compared to 2000-2004....
Goodwin had been intending to top up his bank account, then go. But soon after arriving in Franz Josef – on the West Coast of the South Island, at the foot of the Southern Alps – he went to see the town’s biggest draw for himself.
A short drive into the valley, Goodwin was confronted by the bright white face of the glacier: a thick seam of ice churning its way down from the mountains and into the stony riverbed below. The sight of snow was almost startling, so close to the ocean – the glacier terminates only 20km from the Tasman Sea – and so close up.
But Goodwin was not content just to look. “I did what most young boys did: jumped over the barriers, went and walked on the ice, and had a great old time,” he says. “It was awesome. I didn’t have any shoes on, either.”
Soon afterwards, Goodwin got a job as a glacier guide – and one season turned into many. Now he and his wife Tash run their own company, taking nature walking tours through the glacier valley.
What drew Goodwin in was the local history – stories of the glacier’s storming advances, sometimes so fast that snow would swallow shoes left at its base within a day; and the subsequent periods of retreat, revealing gear and paths from the past.
On the computer in his office, Goodwin has collected thousands of photos of the glacier, dating back to the late 19th century and its early days as a tourist destination.
“I fell in love with the glacier a long time ago – I think just because it’s moving, it’s living, it’s changing,” he says. “You can try and understand it, predict it, know what it’s going to do next.”
By nature, glaciers go through phases of advance and retreat. But lately these immense bodies of ice – so vast and ancient as to have carved the surface of the Earth – have been losing ground in a warming world.
Over 40 years, annual aerial surveys of the Southern Alps have shown the altitude at which snow persists throughout the year is climbing higher, and the overall volume of ice reducing – with flow-on effects for the glaciers.
Analysis by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) revealed that from 1977 to 2014, a third of the permanent snow and ice was lost from the Southern Alps – a dramatic decline that began accelerating rapidly in the last 15 years.
More recent surveys have been even more sobering. The summer of 2017-2018 – which saw January temperatures of nearly 3C warmer than average – was the worst on record, scientists said. Some glaciers had shrunk so much, they were hard to see; many would be gone within decades.
A new analysis of more than 200,000 global glaciers found that those in New Zealand showed record thinning of 1.5m a year from 2015-2019 – a nearly sevenfold increase compared to 2000-2004....
