When my mom and I recently cruised in Alaska, she was remembering the way the same landscape looked 25 years ago. She kept saying, "Where are the chunks of ice in the ocean, where is the calving of the glaciers?" The answer is that they're gone.
Alaska is on pace to break their record for warmest year. Alaska's glaciers account for far less than 1 percent of the world's land ice, but their melt contributes 7% of the water that is raising the world's sea levels. The local impact is great. Glacial melt affects salmon-spawning streams and harms marine fish and animal habitats. It is creating new lakes where ice used to be, and outburst floods from those lakes are happening more frequently.
Changes in the glaciers and the ecosystems they feed has been so fast that they are hard to track. Glacier after glacier is melting at record levels, pouring waters into rising global seas. Just an example of the drastic melting is Kenai Fjords National Park. There, Bear Glacier, a popular tourist spot, retreated by nearly a kilometer in just 11 months!!! Hopefully the new bill passed by congress to address climate change will get us back on the right track. Let's hope it's not too late.
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