Glacier melt in B.C. at 'shocking' levels

imagine a plunge like this in a glacier-fed lake on a hot summer's day feces glaciers are a fool treat but now scientists are tallying up the cost of this most recent dry hot summer and for Western Canada's glaciers the impact is nothing short of disastrous we've noticed that in particular the southernmost glaciers in British Columbia have been truly punished by not only a warm summer but also a winter a previous winter that was much drier than average we're with Bryan meninas from the University of northern BC he's one of this country's top glaciers scientists and we're going on a helicopter trip it's a cloudy drizzly day near McBride two hours east of Prince George but there's just enough visibility to get us to our destination the Castle Creek glacier in the caribou mountains typically at the end of the summer we tried to visit the glacier and most of Canada's glaciers are in the Arctic around Ellesmere Island those in BC and Alberta are smaller but they're far more accessible they're included in some of the most iconic images of this country and they're also extremely vulnerable to a warming climate what kind of an emotional impact do they have on you British Columbia forever that many of those small glaciers will disappear by the end of the century Castle Creek has been studied intensely for the past 30 years here you can see the snow is highlighting a lot of these annual points or late lines where the glacier used this bad on the ground we meet up with other members of Meninas team who arrived earlier including researcher Matthew Beadle he knows practically every contour of this place we first came here and the glacier terminus was right here it was right here at the edge of this lake and now it's nearly 200 metres back over those ten years and was that surprising for you I mean you got into this business knowing that they were gonna be getting smaller but just to see it you're in and you're out and to really see the ice deflate and to see it from a personal level is shocking to come up every year and see that change is dramatic the photos beetle has taken over the last few summers tell the story from standing in a cave of ice to no cave at all at Castle Creek the freezing and melting process each year leaves ridges on the ground called Maureen's so they're these annual ridges the glacier has pushed these up and the difference the distance between this one and the next one that's how much the glacier receded in one year so we've had it averages about 1415 meters per year and the last two years have been 25 to 30 meters each how indicative is this glacier of others in Western Canada it's demonstrating what predominant pretty much all glaciers are doing in Western Canada they're receding dramatically similarly to what we see here at castle but on a hot sunny day you can get the surface going down from 10 centimeters in other words over the last two summers the glacier has shrunk at twice the rate of even a few years ago these time-lapse photos were taken of two other BC glaciers the Conrad and Nordic leisure is further to the south and the loss of ice this summer is striking here the team is preparing to get some exact measurements they've drilled holes in the ice to measure how much the surface lowers from year to year so our hole here is roughly seven meters or so this is about seven and a half meters tall we plop it down in the ice this time of year and then we come back next summer a certain amount of this pole is going to be exposed okay see you next year you ready to let go I got a drop it from here a team of researchers from BC universities made this dramatic graphic to show where things are headed in the glacier rich Garibaldi area around Whistler by the end of the century the expectation is all of these rivers of ice will be gone part of the reason why this summer in particular was so punishing maybe what's going on more than 2,000 kilometers away oh I could see the ocean itself was record-breaking warmth so the ocean temperatures whereas warm as anyone has ever seen him Ferran anslo is a climate scientist at the University of Victoria lately he's been focused on a large patch of warmer than usual water nicknamed the blob this blob that we saw this summer was record-breaking but there's been instances of the blob back into the 90s and 80s as well so there have been other blobs but this is the biggest baddest blob we've seen the blob is about three degrees warmer than the rest of the North Pacific Ocean its relationship with climate change is still being explored but scientists do know it's affecting everything from salmon migration to heating up the wind's blowing onshore basically you have all this this energy out in the Pacific that's available to the atmosphere and it you know it blows over those warm ocean waters and brings those heightened which is right on land resulting in a lot of milk what's not known is how long this convection oven like effect will continue scientists say global warming started the big glacial melt and some believe the blob gave it a turbocharged boost why does it matter if glaciers melt like this it's incredibly important number one it's for us in Western Canada its water resources without glaciers many towns and cities would lose a lot of their drinking water hydro generation would be affected in some rivers in late summer glaciers account for 30 percent of the water flow and without cool glacier water spawning salmon would surely die in streams and rivers when it gets hot melting glaciers can also alter the geography of the land in some cases with disastrous results the Pemberton area north of Whistler has seen melting glaciers trigger landslides in the past and just a few weeks ago one may have played a role in the destruction that swept into Rob Elliott's life this beautiful handmade rocking horse and me a neighbor made for my son that's this is his property in Birken at the end of August a landslide tore down the mountain in front of him underneath all of this rock is his home and farmland everything his family owned was buried under six meters of debris the glacier was there it's not there any longer we had the material underneath that glacier is what came down here Elliot is a geographer by training he's mapped all the terrain around here including the small bowl like glacier that was almost 2,000 meters above his property it's melting waters fed into a creek the creek clogged up above and it jumped in the other direction towards our property and brought another enormous amount of material down completely burying our house the day of the slide the Pemberton area had been inundated with rain the ground was saturated that's a geotechnical engineers was the primary cause of the big landslide but Elliot says they also told him destabilized ground from that melting glacier was likely a contributing factor we've heard from people that saw chunks of ice and snow coming down in this event so yeah it was definitely here before the event and it's gone now Elliot and his family are now relying on the generosity of friends and strangers to get by there's all sorts of piles that I still want to just dig through little bits and see if something comes up but it's been exhausting insurance won't cover his losses and disaster assistance from the province is minimal well there's no question that this is linked to climate change the glacier disappeared because of the warming conditions and the material under the glacier was destabilized for those who study climate change and warned about the implications of not reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere this past summer was yet another I told you so moment do you have any doubt in your head that that's a preview to the future I don't have much doubt no it looks a lot like what we see with climate change projections for the province BC hasn't resorted to the kind of glacier saving tactics they've been trying in some parts of Europe people have actually put tarps on the ice to try to keep the Sun off and stop the melting Matthews beetle worries it could soon come to that here so most recent work has shown that by and large the glaciers of Western Canada are going to be gone by the end of the century the biggest unknown in that study however is what we do what humans do how we behave in regards to the atmosphere the research here can't prevent glaciers from disappearing but the scientists say they can use their work to sound the alarm over the dire situation and what's at risk of being lost Chris Brown CBC News on B C's Castle Creek glacier

Channel: CBC News: The National

Views: 121,452

Rating: 4.640553 out of 5

Keywords: CBC, the, national, The National, CBC Television, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, glaciers, global warming, melting, British Columbia (Canadian Province), Chris Brown

Id: r3GmC9E6Vz4

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2015