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The Colorado supplies forty million people with freshwater, including those in the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque. The Colorado River, which is filled primarily with meltwater from the Rocky Mountains, is losing almost ten percent of its flow with every increase of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, creating historic water shortages downstream. Up to 75 percent of the water used by farms and cities in the West comes from snowmelt. Between 19 in North America, snow-covered terrain has diminished by thirty-three hundred square miles per year, and high-elevation snowpacks in the western United States between 19 have decreased by 41 percent-an area the size of South Carolina. More than a million square miles of spring snow cover has vanished from the Northern Hemisphere since the 1970s. Most people living in mid-latitude regions can see it out their back door. You don’t have to travel around the world to see the effect that melting snow and ice have on our lives.
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Two hundred-foot tall ripples of ice flowed from the peaks like rivers, bending around summits and eddying behind ridge lines and arêtes. I walked with seventy-five scientists and students on the dying icefield through what I can only describe as the “frozen oceans of the north,” as Mary Shelley wrote in her cryospheric novel Frankenstein. Today, his legacy continues at the Juneau Icefield Research Project, the second oldest polar research station in the world, which he founded in 1946. In Juneau, Alaska, I discovered the legacy of the now-deceased cryo-visionary, Maynard Malcolm Miller, who invented modern field glaciology and interpreted the first whisperings of climate change in 1946 from Alaska’s shrinking ice sheets. Worldwide, Riedel added, two billion people will soon lose their primary source of drinking water as eight “frozen water towers” clinging to mountain ranges around the world melt out. Since 1959, it has lost more than forty-two billion gallons of annual runoff as ice masses upstream dwindle.
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Standing in Riedel’s house, beneath a glacial scene he’d carved into a threshold, he pointed toward the glacially fed Skagit River-that feeds forests, lakes, salmon populations, ecosystems, and the Skagit County water district. Jon Riedel who created the first glacial mass balance record in the Cascades back in the 1990s-now a vital record of this soon-to-be-gone ancient ice that scientists use as a baseline to predict, among other things, outcomes of future global warming. A week later, after another historic fire ignited in California, I met Dr.
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The journey began in the Pacific Northwest, where I walked through obsidian burned forests with scientists studying how a lack of spring snowpack, and thus nourishing spring and summer runoff, had become a primary driver of the spike in western U.S.
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I wanted to see the snowscapes one last time and document the ensuing cataclysm that the melting cryosphere will trigger. With many of the icy slopes I skied when I was younger nearly gone, or close to it, I embarked last year on a 10,000-mile tour of the Northern Hemisphere’s snow line.
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Large-scale melting was just getting going then now, for the first time in recent history, every glacier in the world is in full retreat. In the Himalayas, we toured for weeks through exotic snowscapes, stopping on the summit of the 16,000-foot headwaters of the Yamunotri River-to witness the first trickles of meltwater that would soon become the Ganges largest tributary. I remember seeing a column of steam shooting up from the Amazon Rainforest on the northeastern flank of a 15,000-foot Bolivian peak that we skied a first descent on. We skied madly in the dark months-there wasn’t much else to do-and I went on to climb and ski icy peaks on five continents over the next two decades. I grew up in ice and snow in northern Maine, where ice fisherman parked their cars on frozen lakes in the winter and you could walk across fjords and bays from Christmas to Easter. To envision just how much ice the planet has lost, and how it is indelibly altering our planet, consider this: melt on the poles in just the past few decades has changed the planet’s rotational axis.