A new study says the melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. The snow covered area is now shrinking 4.6 times faster than it was in the 1980s. Tuesday's study finds that it was slowly losing snow since the 18th century, but then that melt rate sped up about 10 years ago.
Melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield accelerates, losing snow nearly 5 times faster than in the 1980s. FILE - A group of people take in the views of the Mendenhall Glacier on June 8, 2023, in Juneau , Alaska. A new study says the melting of Alaska’s Juneau icefield, home to more than 1,000 glaciers, is accelerating. FILE - A group of people take in the views of the Mendenhall Glacier on June 8, 2023, in Juneau , Alaska.
An icefield is a collection of glaciers, while an ice sheet is something continent-wide and only two of those remain, in Greenland and Antarctica. The most famous glacier in the Juneau icefield is thePeople walk on a frozen Mendenhall Lake, with Mendenhall Glacier in the background, Feb. 18, 2024, in Juneau, Alaska.
“In 1981, it wasn’t too hard to get on and off the glaciers. You just hike up and you could you could ski to the bottom or hike right off the end of these glaciers,” Pelto said. But now they’ve got lakes on the edges from melted snow and crevasses opening up that makes it difficult to ski, he said. The shape of Juneau’s icefield, which is rather flat, “makes it vulnerable to particular tipping points” because once the snow line moves up, large areas are suddenly more prone to melt, Davies said.
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