Columbia Glacier, Alaska, Cliff Camera
Columbia Glacier, Alaska, Cliff Camera
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May 2007
James Balog
Internationally acclaimed photographer James Balog is the founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey. A former mountain guide with a graduate degree in geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps. James lives on a Rocky Mountain ridge top high above Boulder, Colorado with his wife Suzanne, and daughters Simone and Emily.
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| Tad Pfeffer and I really paid our dues bolting this camera to the side of a cliff one miserable day in May 2007. Cold rain, air temp maybe 35 degrees the whole time. Even with industrial-weight fishing slickers on you get drenched to the skin. You can’t wear gloves when you’re trying to handle wires and nuts and bolts, so your hands turn into beet-red blobs of freezing hamburger meat. But what a perspective, what a story this camera is giving us! It’s in the right place, at the right time, at a decisive moment in the history of Columbia Glacier. |
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June 2008
Tad Pfeffer
Dr. Pfeffer is a glaciologist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research areas include the mechanics and dynamics of glaciers and heat and mass transfer in snow. He has worked on glaciers for 30 years and has done fieldwork on Alaska’s Columbia Glacier for two decades. Tad is also active in photography and photogrammetry of glaciers and landscapes, using imagery for both description and analysis of glacier changes.
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| So much of what we know about the vital transitional zone where the world’s glaciers meet the sea, we learned here first. From the first written account of icebergs calving into Columbia Bay by Joseph Whidbey more than 200 years ago to the U.S. Geological Survey’s epic study of Columbia’s retreat begun 30 years ago and continued today by our research group, Columbia Glacier has yielded more data and a better understanding of glacier dynamics than any other site on Earth.
It was here that an earlier generation of glaciologists tested the idea that glaciers like Columbia could enter unstable dynamic states, which would cause them to dump vast amounts of ice into the ocean. Now that tidewater glaciers in Greenland appear to be entering a similar state of instability, those decades of experience at Columbia provide a clue as to just how fast we may see the Greenland ice retreat.
Just 22 years ago, Columbia Glacier was 1,300 feet higher than it is today. To put that in perspective, the glacier has lost the equivalent in height of the Empire State Building and has retreated 10 miles since 1984.
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