“Many times we walk up to a stake and you can see it, but there’s a cracked moat 10 to 20 feet wide,” said Ben Pelto, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. “It’s like, well, we’re going to There’s no way to overcome that bet. It affects the amount of research you can do and how safely you can do it.”
The danger has also increased for researchers working above the snow line in the mountains. For Karapetrova, huge swings in temperature can cause rocks to fall or avalanches, making it dangerous for her to move up the mountains near June Lake in California, where she collects snow samples.
Each of the researchers mentioned that because of the longer, warmer summers, they had to move the sampling season earlier, or had to work faster in fewer months. Karapetrova was limited to collecting samples in June and July, whereas previously scientists could collect until August. Jason Geck, an associate professor specializing in glaciology at Alaska Pacific University, has been leading students on a research trip each May for more than a decade to collect on the Eklutna Glacier near Anchorage. samples — but he had to push it back to April because the melting of the glacier happened earlier.
“It’s great to have some students on the glacier for two to three weeks to get hands-on experience,” he said. “Now it’s condensed into one day. From an educational standpoint, the students are suffering.” To increase efficiency and safety, Geck also travels by helicopter, rather than hiking or skiing — of course, the impact of climate change bigger.
As the safety and accessibility of alpine snow and glacier ice decrease, the biggest loss is data consistency. Even just moving the data collection point by a few hundred meters or from one side of the glacier to the other can introduce differences. Certain areas of the glacier are darker, steeper or windier, changing the rate at which snow and ice melt.
And data loss is getting bigger and bigger. A weather station on the Gurkana Glacier in eastern Alaska that has been collecting weather data since the 1960s will be decommissioned within the next three years. As the glacier receded, it left packs of ice that allowed rocks to slide off, making access to the station too difficult and dangerous, ending more than half a century of consistent weather records. A new weather station a few miles above the glacier will replace it, but it will never be exactly the same.
“Any long-term series data is very valuable,” Geck said. His biggest fear was reaching a mass balance pile and seeing it lying on its side, unable to stay upright because the snow had melted too much. “It’s not fun to show up and see your pole on the ground,” he said. Geck estimates that every time a utility pole goes down, it costs about $1,000 in labor, equipment and knowledge. He has started placing time-lapse cameras to record the stakes, so if they do fall, he knows when and can still extract some information.
