At the research site - go to the Real Time Data
Set the number of days to display to 1100 or so
you’ll see a repeating wave. Advances then recedes annually.
Nothing different going on here - move along.
Set the time displayed to 365 days. You will easily see that one year ago the glacier was at 610, and it is now at 520- 90 feet more advanced. However, it has advanced only 20 feet in the last 30 days.
If you look two years ago, you see that it was at 540, but then rapidly “advanced” to 450 about two months later but then “calved” back to 540 or so.
That is as far back as the data lets us go this way. However, it appears that by mid-July each year, it is quite safe to say the glacier will be receding.
When advancing, though, looking at the topography, I suspect that as the glacier advances, the river erodes it back ever more strongly- scouring it, in addition to stressing it and possibly encouraging calving.
In order to close the gap, I believe it is going to require much more powerful advance than the current year. If, for example, the glacier were advancing at a rate of 7ft per day at this time of the year, instead of less than 1ft/d (and this weren’t due to calving as 2 yrs ago), I can see that may be a sufficiently powerful advance to close the gap. If that occurred, losing the “scouring” could arguably change the whole character of the system so as to allow it to remain closed. That won’t happen this year.
However, this would be interesting to remember to check out on an annual basis in April or so.