Building a 30 year glacier mass balance time series

Here's a short blog post from some other part of the cryosphere, dedicated to the hard work that scientists are putting into gathering data. These are not think tank folks in suits devising strategies for steering public opinion or keeping it in place. These are hard-working people who go out there to assess situations, make measurements, build up collections of data. Even though we rarely hear about them, there are thousands of honest people doing this, tens of thousands, now, yesterday, tomorrow.

From glaciologist Mauri Pelto's blog From a Glacier's Perspective:

 

The above video looks at the effort behind a long term field study, looking at images from 11 of the 30 years of our research. Long term monitoring programs have until recently been unattractive for federal grantmakers, since they are not directly advancing the frontiers of science. However, many long duration time series from monitoring programs do advance science eventually as the response to changes in environmental or climate conditions are documented. In 1984, I responded to a request from the US National Academy of Sciences, “to monitor glaciers across an ice clad mountain range”, something that was not being done anywhere in Norther America. Thirty years later we are still pursuing this project. We have developed a 30 years time series of glacier mass balance on glaciers across the North Cascades of Washington. To ensure that the program could be sustained, we did not pursue any federal funding for the project. The data we, collect is submitted to the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) each year, the regional time series built in the North Cascade is just part of the contribution to the global glacier mass balance time series at WGMS. The cumulative North Cascades glacier mass balance record is in fact quite similar to the cumulative global mass balance time series. For the globe there have been 22 consecutive years of negative mass balance, that is the reality of the impact of global warming on mountain glaciers around the globe. The impact on the glaciers of Mount Baker was recently published: Pelto and Brown (2012).

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Peter Sinclair also has a new video out for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, with more of those hard-working people discussing the implications of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet instability for sea level rise:

 

Comments

[Colorado Bob]

Notice in the Peter Sinclair video where Dr. Alley is speaking outside, and the entire mountain side behind him is dead pine trees.

[Susan Anderson]

Great videos. I am particularly entranced by the record of the slow accumulation of data on a hard honest route created by the Mauri Pelto team. People don't realize science doesn't just whizzbang; it relies on patience and accuracy by the careful route.

[Wal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8RyNSzQDaU&t=9m50s
BBC Global Dimming Documentary About Geoengineering & Global Warming
posted by GlobalClimateNews

Another example of the value of long term data gathering.

[wili]

Wal, I was struck by the same thing in that video--all those people doing the same, mundane measurements all over the world for years and years. Quite amazing and impressive.

[Colorado Bob]

Dec. 6, 2013 — A new NASA-led study has discovered an intriguing link between sea ice conditions and the melting rate of Totten Glacier, the glacier in East Antarctica that discharges the most ice into the ocean. The discovery, involving cold, extra salty water -- brine -- that forms within openings in sea ice, adds to our understanding of how ice sheets interact with the ocean, and may improve our ability to forecast and prepare for future sea level rise...................

Satellite observations from NASA's ICESat-1, which measures how much ice surfaces are rising or falling over time, revealed that Totten Glacier was thinning rapidly. It currently discharges enough ice into the surrounding ocean to fill Lake Erie in just over a week. The nearby Moscow University Glacier and its floating ice shelf were showing little change. Why the difference? "We were convinced that the answer must be in the ocean," Khazendar said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131206143614.htm