Glaciers Media Will Never Report

In fact, as reported by Sacramento's CBS affiliate Sunday, glaciers on California's Mount Shasta have grown by 30 percent in the past 50 years (video available here):

JOHN IANDER, CBS 13 REPORTER: Big mountains often create their own weather patterns, and this giant, Mount Shasta, at 14,162 feet seems to have a mind of its own these days. Shasta has seven glaciers. The biggest is this one on the middle, Whitney Glacier. What has surprised scientists about the glacier is that if the theories about global warming are true, it ought to be shrinking, but it's not.

ERIK WHITE, SCIENTIST: It is. Unlike most areas around the world, these glaciers are advancing, they are growing. Thirty percent in the last fifty years.

IANDER: Forest Service scientist Erik White and veteran climbing guide Chris Carr are Shasta experts.

CARR: Oh, certainly. Every year it's a little bit different. But the glacier changes dramatically, year to year.

IANDER: So why are these glaciers the only ice rivers in the world larger today than they were a century or more ago?

WHITE: Mount Shasta is right at the very northern end of areas affected by El Nino and we're at the southern end of areas affected by La Nina. So between the two we get to see the benefits of that which means more snow and rain in this area.

What White said is key, because many skeptical scientists believe shifts between el Ninos and la Ninas are significantly more responsible for the planet's warming and cooling cycles than carbon dioxide emissions.

Icy Bay glaciers get up and go
By Ned Rozell

June 27, 2007
Wednesday

Until this spring, pilot Paul Claus would land a Supercub on a gravel bar in Icy Bay to give people an up-close look at a calving glacier. This year he can't land there because a glacier has rumbled over the gravel bar. The main glaciers in Icy Bay crept forward up to one-third of a mile sometime between August 2006 and June 2007.

"At least three glaciers in the same bay have advanced in one year," said Chris Larsen, a scientist at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studying the ever-changing landscape of the area. "To have them advance right now is kind of weird."

Icy Bay, located just west of Malaspina Glacier on Alaska's dynamic southern coast, is like a smaller version of Glacier Bay. Like Glacier Bay, Icy Bay didn't exist when captain George Vancouver sailed past in the late 1700s. Vancouver's ship artist painted a portrait of an ice wall where the mouth of the bay is currently.

The terminus of Tsaa Glacier in Icy Bay in July 2005.
Photo by Chris Larsen, Geophysical Institute, UAF

With salt-water fingers, Icy Bay reaches about 25 miles deep into southern Alaska today. At the end of those fingers are the glaciers that recently advanced and may still be creeping forward-Guyot, Tsaa, and Yahtze. Larsen is puzzled by the glaciers' advance because all three glaciers moved forward at the same time, possibly because of a high snowfall year in the upper reaches of the glaciers, or rainfall down low that could lubricate the glaciers' sliding surface, the bedrock beneath them.

Larsen admits he is "grasping at straws" as to why the three glaciers are advancing, but he's pretty sure it's not because we entered a new ice age since last August. Tidewater glaciers-glaciers with tongues that dip into salt water-advance and retreat regardless of the warmth, or coolness of the air. Hubbard Glacier, for example, is threatening to bulldoze its way into Gilbert Point, north of Yakutat, as it keeps advancing. At the same time Hubbard and a few other tidewater glaciers are advancing, the vast majority of glaciers that begin and end on land are retreating.

Tidewater glaciers are indifferent to climate warming because of the effects of the ocean, and the shape of the surrounding landscape. These oceanfront glaciers often grow and shrink in a repeating cycle: Snows high in the mountains bulk up a tidewater glacier and force it to advance, the tip of its tongue shoving forward underwater mounds of gravel. The glacier eventually backs off the shoal into deeper water, which makes it calve more and retreat. When a glacier retreats to the head of a fiord and stops calving, another advance can begin.

The terminus of Tsaa Glacier in June 2007 after a recent advance of the glacier. Note the position of the large waterfall. The glacier advanced about one-third of a mile sometime between August 2006 and June 2007.
Photo by Chris Larsen, Geophysical Institute, UAF

The tidewater glaciers on Alaska's southern coast have advanced and retreated for a long time, but weather patterns in the area since the mid-1970s have been warmer, according to Reggie Muskett, who is writing a chapter on Icy Bay as part of his Ph.D. thesis at the International Arctic Research Center at UAF.

Muskett referenced retired USGS glaciologist Wendell Tangborn, who found that temperatures at the nearest Alaska towns, Yakutat and Cordova, have been higher since 1979, and the mean winter temperature at sea level has been above freezing.

"That gives the potential for year-round melting at lower elevations," Muskett said.

The area also has received much more precipitation in winter and late fall, most of it in rain, Muskett said.

"That gives the potential for having more water, which would promote more sliding," Muskett said.

The scientists don't know whether the advance of the Icy Bay glaciers is the beginning of a long-term push, or a blip before the next retreat. For now, they've advised their colleagues flying over the glaciers to take lots of photos this summer to see if the glaciers continue to push deeper into Icy Bay.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute,
University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research
community. Ned Rozell [nrozell@gi.alaska.edu] is a science writer at the institute.

Don’t laugh. There is substance behind those claims. Not in the sense of human beings living there, but there are definitely spiritual persons (fallen angels perhaps) strongly associated with the volcanic regions of the west coast. If they don’t live in the mountains, they, for some reason, strongly associate themselves with those areas, to the point of attracting many new agers into the area, from their spiritual communications.

I’m not saying it’s righteous, merely that there is something more than nothing going on and something more than people making things up falsely. When I hear about such reports, I file them under spiritual manifestations, closer to the deceiving spirit end of the filing drawer than the Bible Study section at the opposite end.

The first response we need to have when exposed to such things is to first priority on belief in God through faith in Christ. One thing I’ve noticed about those wrapped up in those movements, is so very few, if any of them have any doctrinal background in Scripture, but they very well accept the presence of spirits. IMHO, not a good mix.

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