PHOTOGRAPHY OF W.T. PFEFFER

As Columbia Glacier retreats up its fiord, a new landscape of ocean and steep rock walls is being revealed. The changes are so large in scale – the new landscape now extends inland 8 miles along a fiord 3 miles wide with newly exposed rock up to 1600 feet above sea level - that the changes are hard to comprehend without careful documentation. At the same time, detailed quantitative records don’t always capture the full breadth of the change. Photography fills a gap between the qualitative evaluation of memory and the narrowly focused nature of most modern scientific measurements.

Between 2004 and 2006 I photographed much of Columbia Glacier in an effort to bridge this gap. Our scientific work over the past decade, and the work of USGS scientists over the previous three decades, documented Columbia’s changes, in part through vertical aerial photography, and elucidated (by using that photography along with other measurements) many details of the complex mechanisms through which climate, the glacier, and the ocean interact. However, the experience of seeing the evolution of the landscape and the appearance of the new “Columbia Bay” isn’t very well communicated, nor are a host of changes which may be very important but which were not the subject of those measurements. My photography, which is collected in the book “The Opening of a New Landscape: Columbia Glacier at Mid-Retreat” (American Geophysical Union, 2007) looks a the glacier and its landscape from an intimate but broad perspective and attempts to see the entire picture – ice, rock, water, soil, and life - in a general but detailed fashion. The photographs are a supplement to the focused quantitative work we are already engaged in, and an acknowledgment (and hopefully an inspiration to other researchers) that there is more going on here than the retreat of the glacier alone. The photographs are also an aid to memory, a reminder of what once existed here and a witness to changes which eventually will be obscured in our minds by the new landscape of the future.

Click here to purchase Tad Pfeffer's book, "The Opening of a New Landscape: Columbia Glacier at Mid-Retreat"

	Subglacial outburst flood at Columbia Glacier, June 2004

Meadow in old growth, Heather Island, June 2006

	Weathered ice, Columbia Bay, 15 June 2006. Solar radiation penetrates the top several centimeters of glacier ice and melts ice along the boundaries between individual crystals, weakening the ice and making the surface rough and opaque. Circulating water creates scalloped patterns on iceberg faces, some of which grow into patterns of deep circular pits.

Texture, relict wood, June 2006.

Stagnant “Land Lobe” terminus, view northeast, June 2006. The Great Nunatak is no longer a nunatak (a mountain peak completely surrounded by glacier ice), but prior to Columbia Glacier’s retreat, a lobe of ice extended around the east and south sides of the Great Nunatak and met a side lobe of the main glacier which extended eastward at a low pass on the south side of the Nunatak. Gilbert’s map of 1899 shows the two lobes barely meeting. During the early retreat of the glacier the eastern “land lobe” withdrew to the northeast, and as the Main Branch of the glacier to the north of the Great Nunatak thinned, the surface slope of the ice lobe reversed. Ice which had formerly flowed south around the Great Nunatak to form a secondary terminus now flowed north and became a tributary of the Main Branch, albeit one with no source of accumulation. The southern end of stagnant land lobe, seen here, is slowly wasting away, its melt rate slowed down by the insulating layer of debris accumulating on its surface.

Trace of ice dam boundary, Terentiev Lake, June 2006. Terentiev Lake was a large ice-dammed lake impounded by Columbia Glacier in a valley of the west side of the forebay. The lake was created after the advance of the glacier across the valley mouth in the early 15th century, and drained in mid-1980s as the terminus thinned and receded back to the valley mouth, allowing the lake to drain over a period of several years. Where the lake had been, vegetation was killed by submergence beneath the rising lake waters, leaving the soil unharmed. Following drainage of the lake, vegetation has returned rapidly to the lake bottom, but not to the rock walls where the ice dam connected to the margin. In the center of the photograph a sharp line can be seen dividing alder colonizing the old lake bed on the left from barren rock and morainal debris on the right. Above the high-water mark of the lake, slightly lower in elevation than the glacier trim line, old growth forest is visible.

	Melt pond in moraine, Great Nunatak, June 2006.

Terminus ice cliff, Kadin side, 8 June 2005. The intensely shattered ice at the terminus appears as if it would have no internal cohesion, yet it is still surprisingly strong. Some of the ice appears to have been shattered and then reformed. New cracks caused by stresses at the terminus propagate across old cracks and weaknesses, at shallow angles. Frequently, especially near the margins where shear deformation is particularly intense, a cascade of small ice debris will fall into the ocean like a waterfall.

	Iceberg, Columbia Bay

Confluence of Main and West Branches at Juncture, June 2005. The trimline and stranded lateral moraine is clearly visible at the top of the slope, 400 m above the 2005 ice surface. Much of the slope is mantled in morainal debris, but large patches of bedrock can be seen on the right-hand side of the picture. Runnels in the debris cover are visible to the left of the confluence centerline, indicating that the morainal debris on the slope is unstable. If this slope is steep enough that all moraine and other granular materials on the bedrock are carried to the bottom of the slope by the action of water and gravity, will it be possible to re-establish soil and vegetation?

	Stranded Iceberg, Heather Island, Columbia Bay.

Iceberg, Columbia Bay

Rounded alluvium, Great Nunatak, June 2006. Water has transported these rocks, tumbling them against one another and producing very rounded, smooth shapes. This alluvium is left along the traces of subglacial water channels, where water at the bed of the glacier was able to move fast enough to transport rocks as large as 30 or 40 cm. Only 3 m away from this site, the surface is covered by a more typical layer of angular morainal debris, where shear between ice and rock at the bed of the glacier crush the morainal material in fragments ranging in size from boulders to sand and clay. Both surfaces were exposed by the retreating terminus less than 10 years ago.

Iceberg, Columbia Bay